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What's a bigger slap in the face?
- The long-term implications of climate change
- The short-term impact of New York City building owners paying for "audits to determine which renovations would make them more energy efficient"?
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg recently chose option 2.
As reported by Mireya Navarro for the New York Times, Bloomberg dropped the "most far-reaching initiative of his plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions" because building owners said it was too costly.
Habitat loss, animal and plant extinctions, impacted food supplies, drought, disappearing bees, and more. No word from the Times as to whether Big Apple building owners said any of these are too costly.
Bloomberg, it seems, is leaving it up to those same building owners whether to undertake the changes called for by those audits. Okay, all together now:
YEAH, RIGHT...
The initiative, says Navarro, would have put New York "far ahead of other cities in the green-buildings movement," since it's usually only newly constructed buildings that are required to be energy efficient. Nearly half the square footage in New York City (roughly 22,000 buildings) would have been affected.
The weaker version of the bill was met with boilerplate responses from the usual suspects:
- Representing Big Green was Ashok Gupta, director of energy policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York. "Even though the bill is not as strong, it's still ahead of the rest of the country," Gupta said.
- In the corner to my right was Stuart Saft, chairman of the Council of New York Cooperatives and Condominiums. He chimed in: "It's another unfunded mandate, and this is just not the time for it. Come back in five years when we're past this recession. At this point it's just a slap in the face."
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How Much Time Does Our Society Think We Have?
It's long overdue for the human citizens of this besieged planet to appreciate the urgency of our collective situation and start providing some figurative face slaps for those who choose to believe that this is "just not the time" for serious eco-change.
We can pay now or we can pay later...
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