(photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)
Mayor de Blasio plans to travel nationally to discuss the ideas in his recent State of the City speech, but if he does, he won't be talking about climate change, because his speech didn't deal with it. He mentioned divesting $5 billion from fossil fuel stocks, but he never uttered the words "climate change" and said nothing about how New York City is progressing toward key goals for reducing its own climate impacts.
The omission speaks volumes. De Blasio previously pledged the city would cut overall greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2050 (including cutting city fleet emissions 80% by 2035), and to stop 90% of our waste from going to landfills by 2030. He should be held accountable. Both goals are crucial for fighting climate change, and New York should lead the country and the world in implementing them. Instead, we're lagging. Of 27 megacities worldwide, New York uses the most energy and generates by far the most solid waste.
How we handle our waste affects our emissions. Thirty percent of our waste stream is organic waste, 2 million tons of which rot in landfills each year, emitting more than 60,000 tons of methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. To prevent that, in 2013 de Blasio pledged a mandatory organic waste collection program within five years. It hasn’t materialized. We’re stuck with a limited, voluntary program that the Sanitation Department recently delayed expanding.
This pulls a big punch in the fight against climate change, because our organic waste stream -- including the 1.2 million tons of food waste we generate annually and municipal wastewater from our 14 treatment plants -- is not only a source of climate pollution; it’s also a massive renewable energy resource. Methane from decomposing organics can be captured and refined into ultra-low-carbon renewable natural gas (RNG).
As a transportation fuel, over its lifecycle RNG is net carbon-negative, meaning it prevents more GHG from getting into the atmosphere than it emits. Producing it captures more greenhouse gases that would otherwise escape, and using it to power buses and trucks displaces more carbon-intensive fossil fuels.
Sacramento, Portland, Toronto, and other cities collect their organic waste and process its gases into RNG, which fuels their municipal vehicle fleets. Nationwide about 30,000 buses and trucks run on RNG.
New York’s should, too. Getting city trucks and buses off diesel and onto RNG would vault us toward the mayor’s goals of cutting city fleet emissions 80% by 2035, and making New York’s air the cleanest of any major U.S. city by 2030.
Diesel exhaust aggravates our sky-high asthma rates, afflicting over 13% of our youth – more in low-income neighborhoods where truck and bus depots are located. Natural gas buses and trucks with “near zero” engines running on RNG would cut health-damaging nitrogen oxide and particulate pollution to almost nothing.
RNG is available in New York City via pipeline, and we could also tap our organic waste to produce it locally. Using it would save the city money over the service life of vehicles compared with "renewable diesel" or other alternatives.
So what’s stopping us? New York City fleet agencies are resisting change and sticking with diesel. Rather than buying natural gas trucks and buses and fueling them with RNG, they’re buying diesel vehicles and experimenting with "renewable diesel," which has climate and air quality properties inferior to RNG’s. They argue RNG trucks are slow to refuel and can’t plow snow, or that it would be better to migrate to electric vehicles.
Those are excuses. RNG trucks are plenty powerful. Stations carrying RNG stand ready to fuel city vehicles now. Heavy-duty electric vehicles are years from service-ready and prohibitively expensive, and their emissions are only as good as the energy source charging the batteries -- mostly fossil fuels.
The real obstacles to adopting RNG in New York are the same ones that kept the State of the City speech weak on climate change: lack of focused leadership and a preference for symbolic gestures over accountability for achieving concrete goals.
The climate can’t afford that. The city already has over 1,000 natural gas vehicles, including buses, trucks, and vans, that could start running on RNG tomorrow, simply by taking out a new fuel procurement contract. That would be a welcome first step toward fleet sustainability. The logical destination is to stop buying dirty, outmoded diesel vehicles.
Last year, concerned City Council members sent letters urging the mayor and the MTA’s New York City Transit to show environmental leadership by adopting RNG. If they don’t, the Council has power through legislative and budget processes to make city agencies to get started. It’s time to use it.
***
Joanna D. Underwood is the founder and a director of the NGO Energy Vision, which researches, and promotes technologies and strategies for a sustainable energy and transportation future. On Twitter @energy_vision.
***
Have an op-ed idea or submission for Gotham Gazette? Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
(photo: The Release Aging People in Prison Campaign)
For years, advocates, community members, and New York State lawmakers have worked to change our state’s unfair, biased, and harmful criminal legal system. We came together as supporters of common sense, cost-saving reforms that would benefit all New Yorkers. But our efforts were stymied by a political landscape that prevented us from making these important changes.
Now that landscape is different and the power dynamics in the state Legislature have shifted, it is time for New York to promote justice and safety once and for all. Reforming our parole system is an important component of this agenda.
While New York has recently seen a steady decline in the overall prison population, the number of older people in prison and those serving lengthy prison sentences has skyrocketed. New York now holds more than 10,000 older people in prison and has the fifth highest population of those serving life sentences in the country. People are dying at great moral and financial costs to all of us. Families and entire communities of those aging and despairing behind bars throughout our state have pushed for needed changes for decades. We must side with justice and place ourselves on the right side of history.
As the Chairs of the Senate Committee on Crime Victims, Crime and Correction, and Assembly Committee on Correction, we will push for critical parole reforms this legislative session.
We will begin by working to fully staff the State Parole Board with Parole Commissioners who believe in the concept of rehabilitation and come from professional backgrounds that allow them to thoroughly evaluate incarcerated peoples’ current risk to public safety and readiness for release. The Board is currently understaffed, with seven vacancies, and does not afford Commissioners and incarcerated people alike the time and process they deserve during parole interviews. Our state should allocate the resources necessary to fully staff the Board, embark on a transparent and thorough appointment and confirmation process, and onboard Commissioners who believe in rehabilitation and will be independent actors of fairness and justice.
Legislatively, we will prioritize changes to the state executive law that make parole a forward-looking process and ensure that release determinations are not exclusively based on the nature of someone’s crime but instead on who they are today. To that end, we will push for “fair and timely parole,” which would ensure that parole release is based on rehabilitation and current risk to public safety. Our parole laws should center the values of redemption and transformation, not retribution and vengeance.
Finally, we must tackle the crisis of aging in prison by passing elder parole. Decades of research from across the country and around the world shows that peoples’ risk to public safety significantly decreases as they age, and that prison sentences that amount to death do nothing to keep us safer or deter crime. Based on this evidence, elder parole would allow for a consideration of parole release for incarcerated people aged 55 and older who have served 15 years in prison. Passing this bill in a fair and inclusive way would allow our state to restore mercy and compassion, while saving taxpayers dollars that could be re-invested in communities throughout New York.
Taken together, these three measures would make significant progress towards ending mass incarceration, promoting public safety, and re-connecting families and communities. We call on our colleagues in the Legislature and Governor Cuomo to join us in these worthy efforts. The lives and well being of countless New Yorkers depend on us.
***
Senator Luis Sepulveda represents the 32nd Senate District in the Bronx and is the Chair of the Senate Committee on Crime Victims, Crime and Corrections. Assembly Member David Weprin represents the 24th Assembly District in Queens and is the Chair of the Assembly Correction Committee. On Twitter @LuisSepulvedaNY & @DavidWeprin.
***
Have an op-ed idea or submission for Gotham Gazette? Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
(photo: The Governor's Office)
The annual Albany showdown over school aid started early this year. Even before Governor Cuomo’s State of the State speech, new State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins called for a permanent cap on local property tax increases to fund schools, signaling agreement with the governor’s long-held position.
So where’s the dispute?
Other legislators, particularly the Assembly’s powerful New York City delegation led by Speaker Carl Heastie, will likely oppose the measure. Taking their cue from teacher unions and other advocates for increased education spending, city pols have no need to worry over the cap.
The controversy is less between Democrats and Republicans (Cuomo and both legislative majorities are Democrats) and more between city and suburban voters. Under New York’s school finance laws, big cities, including New York, fund their schools from general revenues, supplemented by state and federal aid. Suburban and rural districts, though, fund their local burden by dedicated property taxes, so the cap is enormously consequential to those residents’ bottom line while far from obvious to city voters.
When was the last time a city legislator was criticized – let alone lost an election – for failing to bring home the state aid bacon? Never. It’s a non-issue because we don’t see the dollar for dollar trade-off between local property taxes and state school support. But that is often the biggest issue upstate and on Long Island. Every penny from the state offsets identifiable local school taxes. And property taxes are a particularly painful drain on suburban homeowners since, unlike paychecks, property values are not easily liquidated to pay the taxman.
But there’s a solution to the city/suburban school aid impasse. Foundation Aid to the rescue!
Foundation Aid is based on a complex formula for distributing state money to local school districts. If property taxes are capped, then Foundation Aid can pick up the increased burden if it is based on far more progressive state income taxes.
Moving school funding from dependence on local revenues to state sources makes all kinds of sense and can be done without further burdening middle-class taxpayers who need relief, not replacement of one tax burden for another.
An incremental increase in marginal income tax rates on high-wealth individuals to meet the needs of kids and overburdened middle class residents of the state’s highest-need districts makes sense. Those with high net-worth just got a bonanza from the federal tax cut, far in excess and disproportionate to lower earners. Taking a slice from that inequity to support middle class adults and better educate over 3 million New York children seems a fair solution to the Albany impasse.
In addition, an increase in Foundation Aid would allow the state to make needed tweaks to the formula itself, promoting Cuomo’s promise to divert resources from better financed districts and schools to those more in need. The Educational Conference Board, a statewide coalition of district administrators and parents, recommends reweighting categories of Foundation Aid more efficiently, basing assistance on student poverty, disability, enrollment growth, English proficiency, and population density.
Sometimes, legislative compromise can yield better solutions than opponents’ original, polarized stands. This year, state school finance reform presents such an opportunity for reducing local taxpayer burdens while improving education. Legislators and the governor should seize the moment.
***
David C. Bloomfield is Professor of Education Leadership, Law, and Policy at Brooklyn College and The CUNY Graduate Center. On Twitter @BloomfieldDavid.
***
Have an op-ed idea or submission for Gotham Gazette? Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.