The Big (Green) Apple

As flat as a pool table and barely a mile wide at its narrowest, the Rockaway Peninsula — a tongue of land that sticks into the Atlantic Ocean at New York City’s southeastern corner — is already vulnerable to storm surges and floods. Global warming, with its rising seas and harder rain, will only intensify those threats. That’s what has Vincent Sapienza, the city’s assistant commissioner for wastewater treatment, so worried. The Rockaway Wastewater Treatment Plant, which processes 25 million gal. (95,000 cu m) of sewage a day, sits next to the beach, and its pumps are below sea level. In a major flood, parts of the plant could be submerged, shutting down sewage treatment. “If you lose these pumps, you’re done,” says Sapienza, standing in the plant’s churning basement. “This is a really vulnerable place.”

To prepare for climate change — and growth — the city is spending $30 million to raise the pumps and other electrical equipment at the Rockaway plant well above sea level. The overhaul is just one part of New York’s groundbreaking PlaNYC — a long-term blueprint to grow the U.S.’s biggest city green in the age of global warming. “This is about making the city more sustainable,” says Sapienza. (See pictures of New York going green.)

Though it’s caricatured as a concrete jungle, New York is already surprisingly eco-friendly. Thanks to its density and public transit, the city has a per capita carbon footprint 71% smaller than the U.S. as a whole. With more than 8.2 million people calling New York home, surpassing a historical high set in the 1950s, the city’s infrastructure — its crowded subways, traffic-choked streets, aging water mains — is being pushed past its limits. City planners realize that New York is on track to gain an additional 900,000 people by 2030. If that growth isn’t managed properly, the result will be an environmental and economic mess. “New York is growing, and we have to think more effectively,” says Rohit Agarwalla, director of the city’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability. “We can’t just build more power plants. We can’t just grow on the edges.”

The answer to the question of where the city will put nearly a million extra people is PlaNYC. Unveiled by Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Earth Day 2007 — and pushed since then with all his considerable political capital — PlaNYC includes more than 120 green initiatives that range from planting a million trees to cleaning up every square mile of contaminated land in the city.

Ultimately PlaNYC attempts to chart New York’s growth by vastly improving energy efficiency in the city’s 950,000 buildings, beefing up public transit and adapting to the impact of global warming. Though PlaNYC is as green as a new fairway — the city is carving out bike lanes and pedestrian plazas and expanding its parks — the deeper motivation is economic. If New York wants to stay on top, it needs to grow sustainably and efficiently, getting more out of less while improving quality of life. PlaNYC could be a model for megacities from Tehran to Tokyo. “If we can solve these challenges here, we can solve them anywhere,” says Ashok Gupta, the air- and energy-program director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

When Bloomberg introduced PlaNYC in 2007, one goal stood out: New York would reduce greenhouse-gas emissions 30% by 2030. Although the city is experimenting with clean-energy sources such as offshore wind turbines and solar panels, improving the energy efficiency of New York’s buildings is essential. It won’t be easy. Electricity use grew 23% over the past decade, twice as fast as the population, and much of the city’s aging building stock leaks heat and energy like a sieve.

The city started by focusing on what it could control directly. Bloomberg launched a $2.3 billion plan last July to reduce carbon emissions from city-owned properties 30% by 2017 by retrofitting buildings with more-efficient lights and better insulation. The payoff is that the city expects to begin saving money through reduced energy bills as early as 2015. On the streets, 15% of the city’s 13,000 taxis are hybrids, with more on the way. “The city has made progress on improving what it can control,” says Jonathan Rose, a New York architect and sustainable-design expert. “The place where work is really needed is greening all the other buildings in New York.”

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One area where Bloomberg’s green vision has clashed with political realities is mass transit. The subway system is controlled not by the city but by New York State’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority. So while PlaNYC includes a call for the subways to be brought up to a state of good repair (a visit to any subway station will indicate they’re not there yet), the city doesn’t have the power to enforce it. Similarly, the plan pushes new projects like the long-awaited Second Avenue subway line on Manhattan’s far East Side. Those multibillion-dollar improvements were to be paid for in part by implementing congestion pricing in Manhattan — charging drivers to enter the most crowded part of the city. As an added benefit, congestion pricing would have helped unclog New York’s sclerotic traffic, which now costs the city $13 billion a year in lost economic productivity and dirties New York’s air, which is more polluted than that of any other city in the country besides Los Angeles. “It’s an essential idea,” says Steven Cohen, executive director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute. (See the top 10 green ideas of 2008.)

And one the state wouldn’t approve, which cost the city a one-time federal grant worth $354 million. Combined with sharp budget cutbacks, that leaves the transit authority with a $1.2 billion deficit. Without a healthy subway system, New York will be hard-pressed to grow, green or otherwise. “We have to assume that [transit] will eventually be funded,” says Agarwalla. “Otherwise we’d have to plan for citywide shrinkage.”

New York’s transit struggles are a reminder that even the biggest city in the U.S. can’t fully control its environmental destiny. That’s true for climate change too; even if New York meets its laudable CO2-reduction goals, that alone will do little to stop global warming. But the city is ensuring that it will be ready for a warmer world. The Bloomberg administration began by creating a homegrown version of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Those scientists reported that by the end of the century, annual mean temperatures in New York City could increase 7.5ºF (13.6ºC), with sea levels rising as much as 55 in. (140 cm), depending on how fast polar ice melts. “Coastal floods will be very powerful and very damaging,” says Cynthia Rosenzweig, a NASA researcher and co-chair of the New York climate panel.

The panel’s predictions will fuel the work of New York’s Climate Change Adaptation Task Force — a group of city, state and federal agencies that control vulnerable infrastructure. Though the adaptation plans are in their early stages, the mayor’s office is already beginning to prepare the most vulnerable neighborhoods. That puts New York well ahead of any other major metropolis — and certainly the Federal Government — in taking a dead reckoning of the risks of global warming. “They’ve been quite brave in putting this out there,” says Marcia Bystryn, president of the New York League of Conservation Voters. “This is a model plan.”

Bloomberg, the green billionaire, won’t be mayor forever. (Presumably.) That means PlaNYC, which runs to 2030, will have to remain relevant long after its political patron is gone. But PlaNYC is built to last, even during a recession, because it encompasses far more than just feel-good greenery. Agarwalla, who has studied why Philadelphia declined compared with New York in the 20th century, believes sustainability will be the key to urban success in the 21st century. “We didn’t develop this plan out of a desire to be green,” he says. “This is crucial for its economic and environmental future.”

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