Like many U.S. farmers, Ulster County dairyman Tom Hutson is a businessman first and a romantic second. In New York City recently to accept a $10,000 Steward of the Land award from the American Farmland Trust, Hutson made a point of pulling a plastic bag of dirt out of his pocket and delivering a brief comment on its contents.
“I’m a farmer, so you just have to understand one thing,” said Hutson, holding up a sample of bottomland soil scooped that morning on his family’s 380-acre River Haven farm in DeLancey, N.Y. “This is gold to me.”
But the contents of Hutson’s little bag has significance for New York City residents as well. Hutson’s farm is within the Catskills/Delaware watershed, the city’s primary source of drinking water. What he does on his land has a direct impact on the purity of the water coming out of New York City’s taps – and on how much the city must spend to keep that water clean.
Hutson is a member of the Watershed Agricultural Council, a city- and state-sponsored organization designed to reduce organic pollution within the Catskills/Delaware watershed. He earned his award by letting his farm serve as a laboratory for testing the council’s land management recommendations. Starting in 1994, Hutson has retained “buffer strips” -- wide swaths of vegetation alongside streams – intended to protect the waterways on his farm from direct fertilizer runoff and bank erosion. He has built manure containment systems and implemented a rotational grazing program to minimize and distribute the impact his 108-animal herd has on the farm’s 100 acres of pasture. Hutson also adopted the Watershed Area Council’s forest management plan, limiting cutting and development on the 57 acres of woodland within his farm boundaries.
“Nobody cares more about protecting the land than a farmer,” says Hutson. “But when you’re developing a whole farm plan, there’s a real learning curve involved. Farming’s tough enough as it is.”
To help Hutson make the adjustment, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection kicked in $100,000. The money is part of a $100 million effort to protect New York City’s drinking water at its source. The program has two goals, according to Barry Beckhardt, program director for the Department of Environmental Protection’s Watershed Agricultural & Forestry Program. It wants to encourage upstate farm managers to do the right thing environmentally and it hopes keep those farms in business instead of succumbing to development pressures.
“Instead of supporting farms through subsidies, we’re proposing that farmers be supported by the way they protect the land,” says Beckhardt.
Development in the city’s second major water source, the Croton Watershed, is already forcing the city to build a plant to filter runoff before the water. The plant, to be constructed in Van Cortlandt Park, is currently estimated to cost at least $1.3 billion. And to make room for it, the city is devoting a 10-acre portion of Van Cortlandt Park to the plant’s construction. Building a similar filtration plant for the Catskills water supply would cost an easy $4 billion, Beckhardt estimates.
In light of that, the $100 million being spent by Watershed Area Council makes economic sense. “This is clearly a more cost effective approach,” Beckhardt says.
The Watershed Agricultural Council owes its existence to a 1992 deal between the city and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In exchange for preserving wild acreage and reducing runoff from the 300 farms in the Catskills/Delaware watershed, the city has been able to avoid the need to filter water from that region. Working through the council, "the city has paid to return 15,000 acres of farmland to uncultivated wilderness, and by 1995 had gotten at least 85 percent of the affected farms to sign up for a pollution prevention program. In return, the Watershed Agricultural Council doled out subsidies to cover the cost of wastewater diversion ditches, barnyard drainage systems and other pollution reduction strategies. The council also helped participating farms draw attention to their products under the “Pure Catskills” brand name.
“The goal is to strengthen the linkages between the producers upstate and the consumers in New York,” says Beckhardt. “It doesn’t make sense to do all this and have the farmers go out of business.”
“Pure Catskills” has helped farmers looking for a local edge in the commodity foods marketplace. Still, as Hutson notes, many farms have a hard time taking advantage of the program. The cultivated acreage on River Haven is devoted mainly to hay and other surplus forage crops that the farm sells to neighboring dairies. As for the milk, most of that is pooled and sold through regional cooperatives and routed to New York City via bulk distributors. Elmhurst Dairy, a Queens-based distributor that bills its milk as “New York’s Own” but not “Pure Catskills,” handles Hutson’s milk.
“Milk is such a perishable commodity,” Hutson says. “You’ve gotta move it every day, and that makes it hard to market as locally produced.”
While direct marketing of “Pure Catskills” milk may not yet make economic sense, the New York City greenmarket system has provided support to the upstate farm economy. According to the Council on the Environment for New York City, an organization that provides information on greenmarket produce and schedules, the city’s 51 markets have helped sustain 11,000 acres of cultivated farmland and keep 27,000-plus acres total out of development.
“The good news is that New York City boasts the best greenmarket system in the country,” says Jeremiah Cosgrove, northeast regional director for American Farmland Trust. “The only thing missing right now is the consumer education component. We’re trying to make it so food buyers in the city recognize that the few cents extra they pay on local dairy products or local produce is actually a cost savings when you compare it to the amount they save on their taxes if the city has to build a new filtration plant.”
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Though they are little-known, hard to find, often harder to get to, there are at least a dozen “natural sand beaches” in New York City -- along the Hudson River, the East River and the Harlem River . That was the discovery of a group of walkers, boaters and especially kayakers who have started mapping them. These are not generally, and may never be, good swimming beaches; river currents and pollution would make swimming off most of them impractical. But the kayakers in particular see them as potentially wonderful landings.
There are ambitious plans for some of them. For others, their strongest advocates would prefer for them to remain obscure.
One stretch of sand -- the only one in Lower Manhattan -- lies under the Brooklyn Bridge in Manhattan. Debris covers much of the beach -- twisted metal from wrecked pier pilings, lumber, concrete. But at low tide, water laps a sandy shoreline some 200 feel long and 20 feet wide. A fence along the walkway/bike path under the FDR Drive blocks access, but there's quite a view with the shoreline below and the bridge rearing up overhead.
In May, at the Waterfront Committee meeting of Community Board 1, a proposal to make the beach more accessible met resistance. Rob Buchanan, an avid kayaker and magazine writer about the outdoors, was among a group proposing a boat landing and access to the walkway. There are so few places for boaters to launch and land, and the place under the bridge has the advantage of being on the lee side of the river in calm water, he said.
The plan includes access from the walkway. Board and audience members worried that easy access would lead to children wandering in and drowning. They tabled the proposal. Four years ago, they also reacted negatively to Lower Manhattan Development Corporation plans for access to the water as part of the development of the area.
After the meeting last month, the chair of the Waterfront Committee made her distaste for the project clear to Downtown Express, “I’m not a proponent of the beach, quite frankly. I do worry about children and drownings.”
Others say that there is little danger of this, pointing to a just a handful of incidents in the past. Gary Fagin, who has lived near the South Street Seaport for 20 years, remembers just one accidental drowning in the area.
Maggie Greenfield of the Bronx River Alliance, an organization that is working on developing greenways in the Bronx, says that more public access to the water will actually enhance safety. "We'll have more eyes down there," she says.
The other beach-like areas on the rivers are generally treated with benign neglect. But one proposal is likely to gain purchase. That is for a beach that may include swimming on the Hudson River west of the Meatpacking District. It's a long-term proposition, however. First sanitation trucks have to be relocated, and that won't happen until 2012, says Chris Martin of the Hudson River Park Trust.
David Snetman, bicycle campaign coordinator of Transportation Alternatives can think of only one area where water laps the Hudson shoreline in Manhattan. It is north of Riverbank State Park at 145th St. and continuing up past the George Washington Bridge. Along that stretch, cyclists and walkers stretch out on a grassy bank that slopes into rocky shoreline. That area provides the longest, most civilized and good-looking shoreline access in the city.
At either end of Dyckman Street in Upper Manhattan New York Harbor Beaches show places to get to the water. On the east, on the Harlem River, a muddy beach by New York Restoration Project's restored wetlands. On the West end of Dyckman Street, there is a parks department sign for a kayak launch site. That doesn't make the place easily accessible. "It's official, even though you have to crawl through a hole in the fence," says the caption to the picture of the lovely-looking natural area.
On the East River, Stuyvesant Cove (around 23rd St.) provides a view of water lapping a rocky outcropping.
In other spots along the river it takes some ingenuity to stick a toe in the water or park a boat. The New York Harbor Beaches Web site shows an aerial view of little beach areas in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Hallets Cove and Queens near Socrates Sculpture Park. In DUMBO, there are a few areas along the river with rocks, sand, and grass. One is right under the Manhattan Bridge. Another is in Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park.
Greenfield of the Bronx River Alliance says the greenway will open up water access in several places in the long-neglected and closed-off area of the South Bronx. An old concrete plant is being remade into a park that will have access to the shore. Now, residents can get to the water along Soundview Park, West Farms around East Tremont Avenue and the Bronx River Forest.
Not everyone wants to remake bits of the shoreline into official parks. Gary Fagin, who leads the Seaport Community Coalition, which is involved in historic preservation and quality of life for the neighborhood around the South Street Seaport, says that cleaning up the debris to make the beach under the Brooklyn Bridge more conventionally attractive would be useless. The tides would just bring back more detritus. "I scratch my head when I think of other ways for it to be of use," he says. He'd like to see it just left alone with the remnants of the old pier that once went out to the base of the bridge. "You can see water lapping against the beach. It's an evocative vista." He worries that attention to the scruffy spot could lead to some kind of reconstruction that would obliterate the little shoreline. For him, no news is good news. "The further under the radar, the better for the area," he says.
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In 2002, when a severe decline in winter snow and spring rainfall forced the city to declare a drought emergency, gardeners throughout New York City faced a new twist on an age-old dilemma.
Unable to tap city fire hydrants -- the traditional irrigation source for community gardens -- garden managers looked to the skies for respite. Taking a cue from early farmers, they gathered as many jars, barrels and cisterns as they could find and set them out to capture and store a portion of every summer downpour that passed over the city. By the end of the year, at least seven gardens had created elaborate rainwater harvesting systems channeling water from neighboring rooftops and downspouts to 55-gallon drums and underground cisterns.
Four years later, the pressure to capture each precious drop of water may not be as high, but the rainwater harvesting continues. A loose-knit coalition of environmental groups calling itself Water Resources Group has helped community gardeners install water retention systems in 25 local gardens. The group has even secured a $45,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to finance systems in at least four community gardens, starting with the Bedford Avenue Block Association Garden in Brooklyn near the corner of Bedford and De Kalb avenues.
Some of the larger sites use 1,000 gallon tanks, says project coordinator Lenny Librizzi of the Council on the Environment of New York City, a group member. But others use 55-gallon olive barrels donated by a Queens olive distributor.
As assistant director of the Council on the Environment’s open space greening project, Librizzi sees rainwater collection as an easy way to fulfill that project’s agenda to expand and enhance comunity gardens. For now, most community gardens rely on free city water from fire hydrants. This makes the gardens beholden to the whims of a city government that, for at least the last 10 years, has taken note of the value of the land underlying most community gardens and considered putting the acreage to more financially profitable use. For security's sake, many of the green spaces would prefer to have their own back-up water supply, free of city control.
But there are additional environmental benefits. Last year’s grant from the Environmental Protection Agency, for example, came about because the group was able to show that recycling rainwater reduces demand on the city’s storm sewers and so can help cut water pollution. Although the city is overhauling its aging combined sewer overflow system, many neighborhoods still send storm water runoff and household waste into the same sewers. Catching rainwater reduces the demand on the sewers, giving city pumps in these neighborhoods more time to work before the sewers reach the overflow stage and send untreated sewage into local waterways.
“It’s a win-win for the environment and for gardeners,” says Robin Simmen, manager of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s GreenBridge horticulture program. “First of all, rainwater is better for plants than chlorinated tap water so you’ll get bigger, healthier plants. Also, by harvesting rainwater, we reduce the amount of storm water that we are currently flooding into our sewer system.”
Or as Librizzi puts it, “In collecting rainwater, we’re not only making the city greener, we’re making it bluer.”
Granted, it takes more than a few dozen community gardens to put a dent in the city’s storm water runoff problem. The Water Resources Group estimates that its 25-garden network currently captures a little more than 250,000 gallons of rainwater annually. Compare that to the average family’s use of an estimated 100,000 gallons a year and it’s hard to resist the punning drop-in-a-bucket metaphor.
But rainwater harvesting can also produce a change in the way New Yorkers think about water. Once New Yorkers stop seeing water as something they can take for granted, they start appreciating what it truly is: a fickle resource that takes time to capture.
“We happen to be kind of lucky in that we just turn on the tap and have all the fresh water we want, but that may not always be the case,” Librizzi says. “The educational aspect is a big part of this.”
Just as community gardens have taken the lead in bringing nationwide issues such as open space preservation and solid waste composting into the five boroughs, so too has the movement played a leadership role in a city where many residents already grasp the common-sense value of rainwater recycling but don’t see how to make it work in a heavily urbanized environment.
“In a way we’re reinventing the wheel,” Simmen says. “Many of the immigrant cultures in our city come from places where rainwater harvesting is a way of life. People who come from the Caribbean -- there’s no groundwater supply there, every drop of water you use for irrigation comes from the sky, and people know to catch and store the water when it rains.”
To further that education, numerous websites offer set up and safe storage tips to the aspiring rainfall harvester. For example, the site for Tree People, a Los Angeles tree-planting group, offers an interactive application to help calculate proper cistern size depending on the size of the collecting rooftop and the expected rate of rainfall. A University of Florida Extension site, meanwhile, provides a how-to guide for anyone looking to hook up a simple, self-containing 55-gallon rain barrel system to an existing gutter or downspout.
Designing a self-contained system is important. Not only does rainwater evaporate when left uncovered, it also can be a magnet for mosquitoes, rodents and other disease-bearing pests. Finally, there are the issues of drowning risk and potability. Like a backyard pool, a good rainwater collection source should we well marked and well-guarded, and it should be abundantly clear to passersby that the water that just flowed in off somebody’s rooftop is for plant use only.
“Rainwater is generally free of harmful materials and in most cases chemicals, but can be adversely affected by air pollutants and/or contaminated by animals in the catchment area,” warns the rainwater harvesting website Harvest H20.
There are various methods to prevent contamination. Jonah Braverman, an urban agricultural coordinator with East New York Farms, says his group uses a “first flush” system. This involves a plugged, 10-gallon PVC downspout directly adjacent to the collection source - the gutters of a nearby house. Once the downspout fills completely, remaining water is automatically diverted to the main downspout, which flows directly to a 500-gallon tank. After the rainstorm, garden volunteers, remove the plug and dispose of the first few gallons of water, and with it, whatever early sediment came washing in off the rooftop. Most research has found that filtering the first 10 gallons – as the first flush system does – is enough “to protect yourself from bird excrement and other pollutants,” Braverman says.
The collection system also includes a direct line to the city sewer, so that volunteers can shut off and drain the system during the winter when freezing might shatter the permanently filled water lines. So far, the only lingering concern with the three year-old irrigation system is water pressure. To address that, the group is planning to purchase a solar-powered pump. “We will also be hooking the system up to a second roof,” he says.
Looking down the road, rainwater collection enthusiasts sees opportunities to expand the Water Resources Group’s efforts to private lots and facilities other than community gardens. In early June members of the Water Resources Group along with members of the City Council’s Committee on Environmental Protection will visit Philadelphia where Philadelphia Green, a project funded by the Philadelphia Horticultural Society, has been working on pilot projects involving permeable paving materials, including asphalt. Such projects, if successful, could dramatically increase the percentage of rainwater captured and minimize storm runoff from parking lots and streets. The newly permeable surfaces can then be planted with trees and other plants, making them cooler and more attractive – without consuming additional drinking water.
In a sense such projects hark back to an earlier era. Simmen notes that that the lots of many Brooklyn brownstones still contain the buried backyard cisterns local residents once used to store rainwater during the dry months. “Since the early 20th century, New York has one of the few cities that doesn’t exist next to or on top of its water supply,“ Simmen says. As a result, many of us haven’t learned the importance of protecting the local waterways from pollution, something we might have learned growing up in another city. It’s something that we had here and it’s something that we’ve lost.”
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With gasoline prices in the city well above $3 and heading ever upward, New York motorists gnash their teeth and grumble whenever they refill their tanks.
But government feels the effects of rising gas prices as well. "Our expenses are going up when the cost of heating oil, the cost of diesel fuel, when the cost of gasoline goes up," Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said. "There's not a lot that this city or this state can do about it."
Many aspects of the energy situation certainly remain outside the mayor's control, but there are some steps he and the City Council could take that would not only lower costs but also address New York's serious air pollution problem.
With gasoline prices on the rise, drivers are looking for ways to save. Sales of hybrid cars -- powered by electricity, as well as gasoline -- have risen sharply in recent months, with Ford Motor Company telling the Washington Post that sales of its two hybrids had doubled in the past month and Toyota reporting that it cannot produce enough of its Prius hybrid to meet the demand. Sales of Honda's natural gas powered car, the Civic GX, have reportedly increased as well.
While consumers may be choosing these vehicles to save money, they are also helping the environment. Automobile exhaust is a key component of smog and soot, and a contributor to the greenhouse gases that cause global warming. The hybrids and cars powered by natural gas cause less of this pollution than conventional gasoline-burning cars.
Anyone who lives in New York breathes auto exhaust. But most New Yorkers -- living in a densely developed city with a good mass transit system -- do not suffer from rising gasoline prices as much as residents of rural areas who may have to drive 30 miles for a gallon of milk. As taxpayers, though, we all pay at least indirectly for the costs of another fuel -- diesel.
Diesel powers most trucks and buses, including city-owned garbage trucks and city-funded school buses. Like gasoline, it is a petroleum product, subject to the vagaries of the oil market -- but even more expensive than gasoline. The city could save money and improve public health by cutting down its use of diesel -- and a good place to start would be with its garbage trucks.
Even if diesel cost only pennies a gallon, it would still extract a high cost. Thanks largely to diesel exhaust, Manhattan air is the most dangerous in the nation. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's National-Scale Air Toxics Assessment, residents of the borough bear the greatest risk in the U.S. of getting cancer simply from breathing. The soot contained in diesel emissions is also a significant reason why children in New York City are hospitalized for asthma at twice the national average.
Cities around the country recognize that diesel exhaust poses a threat to public health and are doing something about it. They are switching their truck and bus fleets from diesel to cleaner fuels and technologies. New York has already taken some steps as well. Last spring, the City Council passed, and the mayor signed, bills that would require the city to purchase cleaner vehicles, mandate that city diesel-powered vehicles use low-sulfur diesel, and control emissions on trucks, transit buses and sight-seeing buses. But the city could do more -- one important step would be switching its garbage trucks from diesel to a cleaner fuel.
There are a number of commercially viable alternatives to diesel.
Biodiesel is a domestic, renewable fuel made from vegetable oils. Despite news stories about cars that fill their tanks on leftover restaurant vegetable oil, vegetable oil must go through a chemical process to remove certain components before it be used as a fuel.
The use of biodiesel to replace diesel in trucks and buses does not significantly reduce fuel costs or pollution because it is typically blended with 80 percent regular diesel to form B20. B20 can power diesel vehicles without modifying their engines.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, running an engine on B20 results in a 12 percent reduction in soot and carbon monoxide and a 20 percent reduction in hydrocarbons, which are associated with increased cancer rates as well as global warming. However, emissions from an engine running on B20 contain a slightly higher number of pollutants thatlead to smog.
Biodiesel can be used in its pure form, B100, which does not contain a drop of regular diesel. According to the EPA, burning pure biodiesel in an engine reduces hydrocarbon emissions, soot and carbon monoxide by far greater amounts than B20 does. But manufacturers' warranties do not cover engines that run on B100, and the fuel can damage some rubber hoses and gaskets in older truck engines. In addition, biodiesel would do nothing to ease the burden of high diesel fuel prices on the city budget, since it costs more than conventional diesel.
Hybrid-electric vehicles run on a fossil fuel, such as diesel or gasoline, and electric energy generated during braking. When drivers of a conventional car or truck hit their brakes, that energy is lost. However, in a hybrid-electric vehicle, that energy is captured and stored in a battery, which can then power the vehicle under certain driving conditions. When a hybrid vehicle runs on the stored electric power, it does not spew harmful pollutants into the air or burn fossil fuel. And because they do not use gasoline or diesel oil when running on the battery, hybrids save money.
Not all hybrids are created equal. Some have a better fuel economy than others. The extent to which hybrids displace diesel, generate pollution and produce cost savings also depends on whether they use diesel, gasoline, or natural gas.
Unlike biodiesel and hybrid-electric vehicles, natural gas vehicles can fully displace diesel powered ones. Natural gas is domestically produced and burns cleaner than any form of diesel. Running an engine on natural gas, compared to conventional diesel, produces 32 to 73 percent fewer pollutants that lead to smog, and 69 to 83 percent fewer hydrocarbons. And while natural gas prices have gone up in recent years, it still costs less than diesel. In September 2005, diesel cost (in pdf format) an average of $2.81 a gallon, while the equivalent amount of natural gas cost $2.12.
Some private companies have already switched their trucks to natural gas. Last year, for example, Manhattan Beer Distributorsopened a natural gas refueling station in Brooklyn and retrofitted an additional 15 of its trucks to run with the cleaner fuel. Because natural gas is a gaseous fuel, regular filling stations cannot handle it, which is why Manhattan Beer Distributors had to build its own station. A lack of such stations represents a major impediment to increased use of natural gas vehicles. But of all of the commercially viable alternatives, natural gas vehicles can do the most to help people breathe easier.
Per mile, refuse trucks consume the most fuel of any vehicle on the road, burning one gallon of diesel fuel every 2.8 miles. Partly because they are among the oldest vehicles on the road (nationally, 41 percent of them have been in use for more than 10 years), garbage trucks are among the most polluting vehicles. As trucks age, their pollution controls deteriorate, allowing higher levels of pollutants to escape into the air. A recent report by INFORM (in pdf format) calculated that the 3,607 diesel-fueled refuse trucks operated by private garbage haulers in the city collectively generate as much as 9,500 tons of soot and pollutants per year. Thousands more tons spew from the Department of Sanitation's 2,500 diesel-powered refuse trucks.
The city's refuse truck fleet -- mostly diesel powered -- travels 6,300 miles each day. So, at $2.81 for a gallon of diesel, the city spends more than $2.3 million a year on diesel fuel for garbage trucks. If the city's fleet ran entirely on natural gas, New York's taxpayers could save more than half a million dollars a year a year in fuel costs.
Natural gas trucks do cost $40,000 to $50,000 more than conventional diesel trucks. However, state and federal government grants are available to help pay for natural gas trucks and refueling equipment.
And the gap in costs is narrowing. The EPA's tighter emissions standards for 2010 could spur the price of a diesel powered truck to increase by as much as $10,000 to $12,000. A study conducted by TIAX, an independent research firm, estimates that the pollution controls needed to meet the new emissions standards will soon erase any cost advantage that diesel refuse trucks have over natural gas trucks.
If every one of the public and private diesel refuse trucks in the city ran on natural gas, it would save 54 million gallons of diesel fuel a year, sharply reducing noxious emissions. (This is based on figures in another INFORM report, Greening GarbageTrucks.)
Of course there are other things the city can do as well. When awarding contracts, it can give preferenceto private companies that use cleaner fueled vehicles. City government can also offer incentives such as tax credits to private companies that switch to alternative vehicles.
Many New Yorkers are not familiar with natural gas, biodiesel and hybrid-electric vehicles. But these technologies, which can save money and help address the public health problems, are not some kind of futuristic fantasy. They are available right here, right now, if we choose to use them.
Stephanie Mandell is with the Sustainable Transportation Program at INFORM, an independent research organization that examines the effects of business practices on the environment and on human health.
Those attending an event known as the Green Trading Summit in midtown this month had two unshakeable convictions, one backed by science, the other by finance: Global warming is doing damage to the environment, and efforts to reduce its severity have proven lucrative; green, they say, is gold.
Michael Liebreich of a financial information company called New Energy Finance who traveled from London to give a presentation at the conference, calls it the "Kyoto Effect.' After most of the world's nations signed the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 agreement calling upon industrial nations to reduce the emission of harmful 'greenhouse' gases such as carbon dioxide and methane, there was a surge in European investment in technology companies working to help reduce consumption of the fossil fuels that produce these gases, or, failing that, to boost fuel efficiency.
The United States did not sign the Kyoto Treaty, and, Liebreich pointed out, it shows: There has been a 68 percent drop-off in investment in clean energy on this side of the Atlantic.
Had the Senate chosen to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, U.S. manufacturers and utilities would face the same pressure as their European counterparts to switch to low emissions energy sources such as solar, wind, and nuclear power. As things currently stand, however, American companies have a free pass from Congress and the courts to dump as much carbon dioxide as they wish into the atmosphere, leaving the investment in clean energy to a handful of risk-tolerant companies.
In a global marketplace where businesses and industries often flock to the friendliest stock exchanges, that spells bad news for New York City. However, there was optimism at the conference. Citing a 50 percent surge in registrations for this year's conference, Green Trading Summit organizer Peter Fusaro credited post-Katrina anxiety over bad weather and high energy prices for forcing a mood change on Wall Street. Throw in the success of European investment markets and you had the sentiment that, ratification or no ratification, the world's money is already voting in favor of Kyoto compliance.
"Everybody and his brother knows the U.S. will have a greenhouse gas regime sooner rather than later," Fusaro said, meaning he believes the federal goverment is certain to create a policy that attempts to limit greenhouse gas emissions. "And when that happens, New York will be the center of financial trading.'
Of primary interest at the conference was the proven success of the European Emissions Trading Scheme, a direct outgrowth of the Kyoto Protocol. Since January 1, 2005, the European utilities and manufacturers that invest in clean energy have been able to recoup the costs through the sale of 'credits' to their dirtier peers. In other words, for every ton a European company falls under its government-imposed emissions target, that company can sell a credit that knocks a ton off the total net emissions target that another company is required to meet.
Similar to the 'cap and trade' programs used to curb acid rain pollution here since the 1980s, the European trading scheme focuses primarily on carbon dioxide, the chief byproduct of fossil fuel combustion. For decades, scientists have seen a linkage between rising global temperatures and rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. While agreement on carbon dioxide's role in climate change may not be unanimous, European nations have been enthusiastic supporters of reduced carbon dioxide emissions and have passed strict regulations.
As a result, the price for each ton of carbon dioxide eliminated at the smokestack has risen from $10 last year to $34 now. Last year's market participants bought and sold more than 360 million tons of carbon dioxide credits, giving the market a conservative value of $3.6 billion.
So far, the only place where U.S. traders enjoy a home field advantage is in Chicago, where the Chicago Climate Exchange has been offering U.S. utilities a chance to recoup their own clean air investments. Unlike the European system, however, the Chicago Climate Exchange is voluntary. To qualify, companies need only reduce their emissions by four percent between now and 2012, a little more than half the seven percent target requested by Kyoto. As a result, Chicago's activity, 6 million tons, is less than two percent of European volume. The average price per ton of carbon traded is less than one-tenth the European price.
'The bottom line is carbon trades for $3 in Chicago and $30 in Europe,' says Fusaro. 'That's what's known in the business as an arbitrage opportunity and companies are already moving to take advantage of it.'
So are state governments. Noting federal inaction on Kyoto, New York's Governor George Pataki in 2003 issued a challenge to fellow governors to set up a regional cap and trade system for carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Last December, Pataki joined six counterparts in signing the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI.
Pronounced 'Reggie' by market participants, the initiative applies only to utility companies but aims for the Kyoto-worthy target of a 10 percent greenhouse gas reduction between 2009 and 2019. New York's 2002 State Energy Plan already calls for similar reductions, so the initiative is in many ways an attempt to broaden state policy to the entire region and give local businesses a head start on credit trading should Fusaro's prediction of a federal greenhouse emissions policy prove correct. Under the terms of the now eight-state agreement, utilities who do business in New York must cap their carbon dioxide output at a collective 64 million short tons (roughly 58 metric tons) in 2009 and reduce that output at a rate of 640,000 tons each year thereafter. Overall, the regional program covers roughly 121 million tons, which means that New York utilities who invest in alternative fuel sources and clean air technologies now would conceivably control half of all trades in the marketplace once trading starts. That type of situation would give Con Edison and other local companies the chance to set the market price for carbon credits and would give brokers working with Con Edison a distinct early advantage.
Charles Fox, New York's deputy secretary for energy and the environment and an attendee of the Green Trading Summit, said the governor's office has yet to decide on where that trading will happen. Noting that the Chicago Climate Exchange recently opened a New York subsidiary, the New York Climage Exchange, Fox hesitated to say anything that might indicate favor for that exchange or the New York Mercantile Exchange, the city's 132 year-old hub for commodities trading. He did, however, affirm the governor's commitment to make New York City the regional center for new energy trading, if not the world center.
'We want to see these trades being made by people who are sitting at desks in Lower Manhattan,' Fox says. 'New York City is the world's financial capital, and this is a financial market that's growing. It's important that the city not miss the boat.'
What if the city decided to put a stadium in the middle of your local park?
Don’t worry, though. The city would rebuild most of the displaced athletic facilities in several other places. Your old park is dilapidated, and the new one would have a sparkling new running track and state-of-the-art fields.
But instead of being set inside a large, green space surrounded by hundreds of mature trees, the fields would be scattered on separate parcels, including the tops of parking garages. The new recreational spaces would be closer to the highway and train tracks and an additional five-minute to half-hour walk from where people live. Most of the trees would be cut down. The new stadium would go smack in the middle of the community’s current park, next to a residential area.
That’s the parkland trade the city agreed to in the South Bronx, allowing the New York Yankees plan to build their long-desired new stadium in Macombs Dam Park. If this were to happen on the Upper East Side of Manhattan or in a middle-income neighborhood of Queens, there would be a howl of protest louder than when the Red Sox beat the Yankees in 2004.
New York State common law requires that when parkland is taken away from the public’s use, it must be replaced by new parkland nearby of equal or greater value. The parks department says that in return for losing Macombs Dam Park and part of John Mullaly Park, residents would end up with more acres of parkland and far superior playing fields. Residents say they would be shortchanged.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion, and state legislators have fast-tracked the plan, which includes a stadium with fewer seats but with luxury boxes and wider concourses, as well as four new garages to hold about 5,000 cars. In June of 2005, the state legislature swiftly passed the necessary approval to take the park, before most residents were aware it was happening. Last month, the City Planning Commission, whose members are appointed by the mayor, voted unanimously in favor of the plan. The plan will be final if the City Council approves it in April.
Opposing the plan are park advocates, fiscal watchdogs, and mass transit supporters, as well as residents of the neighborhood and nearby South Bronx communities, who were not consulted when the Yankees and the city worked out the deal. The local community board voted two to one against the plan in November of 2005, but the board has only an advisory role. Tony Costa, a long-time resident and member of Save Our Parks, one of the groups fighting the stadium, said, “The Yankees made the plan and then said, â€Come on, why don’t you love it?’”
The taking of parkland for the stadium and parking garages raises a number of public health and environmental justice concerns. The area’s residents are mostly black and Hispanic, including many recent immigrants from Africa and Central America. It has some of the highest rates of asthma and obesity in the city, yet the lowest ratios of parkland to 1,000 residents. With public funding for four new parking garages -- but not for a stop on the Metro North line that goes right through the area -- the plan seems guaranteed to increase traffic and pollution.
There are other problematic aspects to the plan, including the taxpayers’ contribution to its financing and overblown projections of economic returns to the city and neighborhood, which are addressed in a recent report by Good Jobs New York and Tom Angotti’s Gotham Gazette article, Yankee Stadium Without Tears. But let’s leave those issues aside and look more closely at the parkland exchange.
Macombs Dam Park and a third of the adjacent Mullaly Park. The stadium and a VIP parking garage would go in the middle of a long rectangle of recreational space that residents consider their Central Park. Nearly 400 mature trees, which beautify the neighborhood and filter pollutants, would have to be chopped down. The apartment buildings across the street, which were designed to be opposite the park, would face directly onto massive stadium walls to be built right up to the sidewalk.
The part of Macombs Dam Park that now wraps around the existing stadium would be replaced with parking garages, decked over to allow athletic facilities on top. The garages would be built on land that slopes down, so the playing fields would be level with the adjacent land.
The park space slated to be taken contains four baseball diamonds, one soccer field, 32 handball courts, two basketball courts, and 16 tennis courts. One of the most popular features is the Joseph Yancey Track and Field, used by school teams for practice and meets and by residents of all ages for exercise.
The plan pushes the recreational space away from the community and toward the waterfront, the Metro-North tracks, and the Major Deegan Expressway. The tennis courts, which also draw people from Manhattan and other parts of the Bronx, would be on the waterfront and a greater distance from the subway stop.
Macombs Dam Park is a community park where residents come to toss a football, take a stroll, and just enjoy the grass and trees. Families often gather on weekends to picnic while watching the men play soccer in the middle of the track.
During the three- to five-year construction period, residents would lose the use of most of the athletic fields. The parks department says it would try to minimize the disruption by phasing in construction and creating interim fields and by helping teams find other places they can play, giving youth teams priority for the easier-to-reach fields. According to the Environmental Impact Statement, a temporary running course in one location or another would be available throughout construction for walking, jogging and recreational running, but would not be suitable for competitive track meets.
The current version of the project, called the “Alternate Plan” in the Environmental Impact Statement, provides 27.5 acres of replacement recreational space to the south of the existing parkland. It would include three ball fields on the current Yankee Stadium site and a track, a soccer field, and basketball courts on the roofs of parking garages. The rest would be in bits and pieces, including tennis courts about a half mile away on the waterfront and two tiny pocket parks, including one next to the spot where the subway emerges from the tunnel.
The swap provides a few additional acres of open space with pretty much the same recreational uses as the existing park. The details would be adjusted to meet the needs of the community when a final design is created, said Joshua Laird, assistant commissioner of planning at the parks department. He said the department is also considering building a special “destination” playground, the kind of place around which parents would plan a weekend outing with their kids. The department also hopes to bring more maintenance to the area through the community benefits agreement being negotiated with the Yankees.
Residents are particularly unhappy with the garage-top facilities. With the high rates of childhood asthma in the area, one concern is exposure to exhaust. Laird said that there will be no stacks or grilles in the park and that exhaust will be vented so as not to affect people using the space.
Residents also don’t like the replacement of natural fields with artificial ones. Synthetic turf is more durable than grass, which is quickly worn to dirt with the hard use city ball fields get, and the parks department is installing the artificial stuff in fields all over the city. But because synthetic turf is much hotter than grass, the rooftop fields, which would lack the trees of the existing park, would likely get steaming in the summer. Laird said that trees would be planted between playing fields in pockets where the soil could be deeper, although it’s hard to believe anything could grow successfully except small ornamental trees. There is also a possibility that security concerns would make these spaces off limits on the team’s 80-plus game days.
The tennis courts would be moved to the Harlem River waterfront. At present, that is a 30-minute walk through a run-down, deserted area, across a scary covered pedestrian bridge over the Metro North tracks and then underneath the elevated expressway. (The Yankees rejected this area for the stadium because of its limited public access.) The area immediately surrounding the courts would be landscaped and include a pedestrian esplanade, but it would remain isolated along an industrial stretch. There is a construction demolition debris plant a pier away on one side; stadium parking would go on the other.
According to Laird, however, plans are in the works to transform the area. “Part of the reason people have been skeptical about the waterfront is that they have in their minds’ eye the conditions today,” he said. The parks department would replace the pedestrian bridge and make it handicapped-accessible. The city is backing a developer’s proposal to replace the nearby Bronx Terminal Market with a million-square-foot mall of big-box stores, a large project whose environmental impacts have not been considered in conjunction with the Yankee Stadium plan.
As for the trees, there really is no way to give the neighborhood back what would be destroyed. The environmental impact statement said the city would mitigate the loss of the 40-year-old trees by planting “from between 8,356 trees of a 3½ inch caliper to 29,248 trees of a 2-inch caliper within the replacement recreational facilities and along streets.” Laird said that the department figures on planting between 8,000 and 12,000 street and park trees, but many would have to go outside the area that would suffer the loss. Some would even be planted outside the neighborhood. In addition, newly planted street trees have a very low survival rate due to the city’s hot, dry conditions and to errant trucks and automobiles.
The main benefit for the community to the parks swap is that it will replace the old track, fields, and courts, which are in poor condition because the parks department hasn’t had the maintenance funding to care for them properly or capital funds allocated to replace them. Given enough money, the parks department can undoubtedly design beautiful new recreational facilities.
But a park is more than the sum of its fields and courts. It is the breeze under the spreading arms of a tree, the fresh smell in the air after a rain, the feeling of being in the middle of a green space apart from brick and concrete. It is a place close by where neighbors come together and community is formed. It makes city life a little easier when you can see a bit of green and sky across the street or down the block. Are these luxuries only for people in affluent neighborhoods?
Even opponents of the plan want the Yankees to stay in the Bronx and to get a modern stadium. But especially in a neighborhood that is already short on green space and long on health problems worsened by the lack of exercise and fresh air, taking a tree-lined community park and replacing it with artificial playing fields farther from where people live should be the last resort, used only for something that has a clear public good.
It is a dangerous precedent to take land held in the public trust for the benefit of a private corporation. Supporters say the new stadium will bring jobs to an economically stressed community. If a few hundred new minimum-wage and temporary construction jobs (that may or may not go to local workers) justifies giving away parkland to baseball’s wealthiest team, then why not let businesses build in every park?
In the rush to get approval, the city and the Yankees have dismissed alternatives that would let the team have its stadium and at the same time allow the community to keep its park. Elected officials need to subject the plan to greater scrutiny and to negotiate a better deal for the neighborhood and the city. To paraphrase Yogi Berra, going forward with the current plan would be making a wrong mistake.
How The South Bronx Lost Its Parks To Yanks (Metro, 3/14/06)
Two Stadiums. No Waiting. Yanks and Mets plans leave little room for public debate (Village Voice, 3/14/06)
Yanks Get City Bonds (Metro, 3/15,06)
Bloomberg Boots Yankee Stats City's own figures show that the new Bronx stadium would be a money pit (Village Voice, 1/13/06)
Anne Schwartz, in charge of the parks topic page since its inception in 1999, is a journalist who specializes in environmental issues.Â
The Statue of Liberty, our nation’s 119-year-old national symbol of freedom, will soon become a symbol of something else as well – wind power.
Last month, the General Services Administration, the U.S. government agency that oversees management of federal buildings and federal monuments, announced that it will be purchasing 100 percent of the electricity needed to light up and power the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and 22 other federal buildings -- a yearly electricity demand of roughly 27 million kilowatt hours --- from so-called windmill farms located in western New York, Pennsylvania and three other states.
While the source of this power will be largely invisible to city dwellers, the deal fills a major symbolic void at a time when city and state officials, and even President George W. Bush, are singing the virtues of alternative energy sources.
Only a short while ago, there promised to be a far more visible symbol of wind power in New York – Freedom Tower at the site of the World Trade Center. Architect David Childs, in a modification of Daniel Libeskind’s high concept plan for a 1776 foot tall Freedom Tower, unveiled a design that would embed a series of 30 vertical windmills at the top. More than just eye candy, the windmills would provide much-needed local electricity in a city that, only four months earlier, had experienced a major blackout.
Child’s attempt to harness the wind has been forgotten. A May 2005 redesign, while primarily responding to New York Police Department security concerns, quietly jettisoned the windmill stack in an attempt to give something a little closer to the original World Trade Centers 1 and 2 profile. (The new design still has some environmentally-friendly elements, such as clear glass to allow more natural sunlight into the building, and a system to collect rainwater, probably for use in the restrooms and the fire sprinklers.)
The General Services Adminstration power purchase, while lacking in the showpiece visibility of the 2003 Freedom Tower design, more closely reflects the reality of the current wind power marketplace. Despite state and federal tax credits for suppliers and purchasers alike, wind energy requires exploitation on a large scale in order to be cost competitive with coal-burning and other, traditional electricity generation methods. The kind of windmill often used to generate electricity (a 750-kilowatt turbine) costs roughly $800,000 yet generates only $80,000 to $100,000 in salable electricity per year.
Wind companies have learned to locate dozens of turbines on “wind farms” -- remote facilities that take advantage of steady predictable wind currents, low land-leasing costs and an additional helping of subsidies from the U.S. Department of Agriculture which currently encourages farmers to exploit this secondary revenue source. Added together the resulting cost savings have brought wind-powered electricity generation down to the market-critical four to six cents per kilowatt-hour, the same wholesale cost range for electricity that comes from burning coal.
“Essentially a wind farm operates like any other power plant,” says Paul Copleman, spokesman for Community Energy Inc., a Wayne, Pennsylvania company whose wind farms in the mid-Atlantic region are supplying the electricity that will eventually power the Statue of Liberty’s lantern. “When businesses or homeowners are choosing to purchase wind energy, they’re not taking the step of putting a windmill on their home. It’s just as easy as purchasing any grid-connected power source.”
Still, in New York, a city that has added six natural gas-burning power plants over the last half-decade, some are looking to make wind power more visible to the local energy consumer.
Currently the most ambitious plan of this type is the Fresh Kills Landfill redevelopment plan. At the urging of Staten Island Borough President James Molinaro, BQ Energy, a Pawling, N.Y. company which has a cost-sharing agreement with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), is investigating the feasibility of installing at least five windmill towers atop the closed landfill’s tallest mound.
According to the Staten Island Advance, BQ Energy engineers already believe the winds that buffet the former landfill could sustain up to five large turbines, generating enough electricity for 5,000 nearby homes. The process must first clear FAA regulatory hurdles to make sure the windmills don’t interfere with the Newark Liberty International Airport flight path. It will also most likely face a challenge from environmental groups who want to protect the migratory waterfowl that currently use the recovering Fresh Kills waterway and could be threatened by the spinning turbine blades. Finally, there is the risk that Staten Island residents near the facility, much like their counterparts in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, will balk at losing their rapidly-improving view to a series of industrial windmills.
Despite such challenges, Molinaro sees the turbines as a chance to make Staten Island the “renewable energy capital of New York City” while at the same time deflecting complaints over the New York Power Authority’s new natural gas-burning power plant on the northeastern corner of the island.
“Our plan to erect a wind energy facility at the Fresh Kills landfill will tackle tomorrow’s energy challenges today, right here on Staten Island,” Molinaro said in a statement issued immediately after the president’s State of the Union address.
Meanwhile, with the passing of the Freedom Tower wind turbine design, the struggle to marry wind turbine efficiency and aesthetic design moves west to Chicago, where Mayor Richard Daley is an enthusiastic supporter of green building design, especially those designs that take advantage of Chicago’s “windy city” reputation. In January, city officials announced plans to integrate two wind turbines into the structure of the Richard J. Daley Center in The Loop and eight turbines into the still-unbuilt Ford Calumet Environmental Center on the north side. Unlike the propeller-shaped windmills that had been proposed for the Freedom Tower, these newer windmills, developed by University of Illinois at Chicago professor William Becker, will employ a tube-shaped corkscrew design. As Becker noted in an interview last year with the trade magazine Building Design and Construction, the design is intended both to minimize the industrial look of turbine fans and increase turbine efficiency.
While New York City has yet to match that creativity, Dr. Reid Strieby, a professor at the Bronx Community College Center for Sustainable Energy, has been working with local teachers to get students thinking more about the next generation of turbine design. Strieby’s program, which is in partnership with a small nationwide non-profit called the Kidwind Project, is part of an effort to give high school and middle school teachers (mostly earth science and environmental science teachers) the lesson plans and wind turbine kits to explore wind energy as a concept.
The next Bronx installment of the Kidwind Project will be in the fall. Strieby sees this as more than just a lesson; to him it’s a mission. With so little apparent enthusiasm currently for wind energy among governments and public utilities, he hopes to help create a new generation of energy consumers who will see things differently: “One of the ways to get the word out is to tell the teachers," he says, "and the teachers can tell the kids, and the kids can become advocates.”
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For New Yorkers, shopping online means less travel time and, on occasion, lower costs. It also means more trash to put out at the curbside. Because most online retailers rely on major private carriers such as UPS and FedEx to deliver their goods, this holiday season saw not only a sharp rise in local deliveries but a similar rise in the amount of paper, cardboard and plastic pushed into the city waste stream.
According to the Department of Sanitation, New Yorkers left more than 8,300 tons of cardboard and mixed paper at the curbside in the first full collection week after the Christmas holiday, a 21 percent jump over the same period last year.
This year’s post-holiday numbers were inflated somewhat. Sanitation spokesman Matthew Lipani notes that an awkward alignment of Monday holidays that forced many residents to hold onto their recyclables an extra week. Still, immediate pre-Christmas tonnage -- 7,258 tons this year vs. 6,033 tons last year -- showed a 20 percent increase in paper recyclables and paralleled a national 25 percent surge in holiday online sales according to the Internet research firm comScore.
Such numbers indicate a cultural sea change not only in how New Yorkers are shopping but also in how much trash and recyclables the city will have to process in the years to come. Given the lack of studies on the overall online shopping “life cycle” -- the total net effect on the environment once products have made their way from raw material all the way to consumer’s wastebasket -- environmentalists, for the moment, see only a collection of positives and negatives adding up to a giant question mark.
“There is no guarantee that the Internet’s net environmental impact will be positive,” writes Nevin Cohen, a professor of environmental science at The New School. “For decades, technology watchers predicted that the personal computer would result in the â€paperless office,’ but U.S. shipments of office paper actually jumped 33 percent between 1986 and 1997. E-commerce could have similarly negative effects.”
From a short-term perspective, the cultural shift away from brick and mortar retail seems to offer a net boost to the city’s recycling program. Of the city’s two major recycling contracts, the cardboard and mixed paper contract with Visy Paper is the one that actually pays the city for what it recycles (in pdf format), roughly $7 a ton according to the city’s Bureau of Waste Prevention, Reuse & Recyling.
Because the Department of Sanitation also tends to divide per-route costs by the number of tons collected, extra cardboard at the curb in December and January means a better bottom line for the overall recycling program over the long term.
Balancing out such benefits, however, are several concerns. Cohen notes that the biggest benefit associated with online retail is the reduced number of vehicle miles as shoppers take fewer trips to the local mall or department store. As December’s transit strike demonstrated, however, many New Yorkers rely on mass transit (not cars) to do their Christmas shopping. “In New York, there might not be an environmental savings,” says Cohen. “In fact, the net might even be negative once you figure in the additional vehicle miles needed to deliver packages.”
A second concern is the amount of new, non-recyclable or hard-to- recycle materials that come with products ordered online. Many retailers and shippers, in order to protect their goods, load up on plastic cushioning materials such as foam rubber, bubble wrap, and expanded polystyrene -- a material many know by the Dow Chemical trade name Styrofoam. So far, the city does not collect these materials nor does it have many private company suitors begging to take these materials off the city’s hands.
The reason, says Betsy Steiner, executive director for the Alliance of Foam Packaging Recyclers, boils down to the materials’ very nature. Bulky, light and easy to produce in virgin form, foam and bubble wrap are a tough fit for a recycling industry that makes its profit on a per-ton basis.
“Basically, you’re collecting and shipping air,” Steiner says. “So for a program to work, it has to be localized and in very, very large quantities to be economically viable.”
Shipping air is cheap, of course, but not as convenient as simply dropping things off at the curb. Steiner says her organization gladly accepts mailed packages that include the molded foam packaging used to shield iPods and other modern electronic products. Those looking to recycle foam peanuts, a product her organization doesn’t accept, can visit the nearest UPS Store or visit the Plastic Loose Fill Council’s “Find a Collection Center” , enter a zip code and get the address of the closest business that collects loose fill foam.
The day when New Yorkers can simply leave such materials in the blue can at the curbside is still a long way off, however. In the meantime, organizations such as INFORM, a Wall Street-based non- profit firm organization promoting “strategies for a better environment” advocates a European-style system that shifts the responsibility for the waste processing of worn-out products and packaging away from municipalities and consumers and back onto the producers themselves.
“It’s kind of like a welfare system that we’ve generated for manufacturers here in the U.S.,” says Lloyd Hicks, director of INFORM’s solid waste prevention program.
Hicks holds up Germany as the most obvious counterexample. In 1991, the government mandated that manufacturers and distributors take back all transport packaging, including expanded foam and blister wrap. Manufacturers that don’t wish to process such materials can opt out via the Green Dot program, a non-profit program which finances packaging material recycling. To gain membership in the program, companies pay a scaled fee depending on the amount of material recycled. Once in, they earn the right to put the Green Dot logo on their packages, making their products more desirable to distributors who might otherwise bear the recycling responsibility.
“They’ve found a way to deliver the same products with less packaging,” says Hicks. “That’s one reason we believe there should be a way to provide a similar system in the U.S.”
The Alliance of Foam Packaging Recyler’s Steiner says her organization doesn’t endorse producer responsibility legislation. She says the real issue isn’t who pays for recycling so much as who is willing to buy the recycled materials once they’ve been processed.
“I think on the surface it looks like, oh, it’s getting paid for, but the bottom line is they’re still encountering problems on the end use market,” Steiner says. “That’s been the problem with plastics recycling globally. The raw material is so cheap you just get into the chicken or the egg thing.”
Cohen, the environmental science professor, shares Steiner’s sentiment somewhat. Like Steiner, he sees the Green Dot program as a top down solution to a bottom up problem -- i.e. individual consumers shifting their shopping patterns as a way to minimize both stress and seasonal costs. Unlike Steiner, however, he sees a chance to phase out polystyrene and phase in packaging technologies that deliver, at worst, a net neutral effect on the environment.
“The long term goal should be to develop two-way packaging that eliminates the waste,” Cohen says, pointing to NetFlix, a movie rental company which ships its DVDs in reusable envelopes, as a pioneering example. “It would be great if Amazon.com and other companies developed a similar method for shipping their products.”
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If you’re like most New York City homeowners, the recent combination of early winter snow and record high fuel prices already has you griping as you await the first monster Keyspan bill of the season.
If you’re a researcher or entrepreneur specializing in environmentally-friendlier alternative fuels, on the other hand, it has been a time to celebrate.
“People are jazzed,” says John Nettleton, and by people, he means people like his colleagues at the Cornell Cooperative Extension, a Cornell University research group. “They see it as a real opportunity.”
Nettleton’s group has two projects under way within the city involving “bio-fuel,” specifically bio-diesel. Bio-diesel is a mixture of refined vegetable oil and ordinary petroleum diesel. By promoting the use of such fuels, environmentalists hope to reduce petroleum emissions while at the same time providing an additional market for local farmers and recyclers.
Earlier this year, Nettleton’s group conducted a survey of New York restaurants and put the total amount of waste vegetable oil available to recyclers more than a million gallons in Brooklyn alone. (Almost 90 percent of that total is currently recycled, Nettleton says, but most of that recycled product goes toward the production of cosmetics, soaps and other organic derivatives. ) Part of the beauty of bio-diesel is that the “bio” part can include a wide range of oils, everything from used sesame oil to animal fat and grease.
“There’s a huge potential supply of restaurants and food service establishments in New York City, I think 26,000 restaurants by the last count,” says James Quigley, director of the Center for Sustainable Energy at Bronx Community College.
Percentages vary, but the most common bio-diesel blend, 20 percent vegetable oil, 80 percent petroleum -- often referred to as B20 -- is already price-competitive when compared to regular diesel and gasoline. According to a U.S. Department of Energy report on alternative fuel prices, the average Sept. 2005 price of B20 was $2.91 compared to $2.81 for ordinary diesel and $2.74 for regular gasoline.
The cost will become even more competitive because of a recent federal tax credit giving heating oil producers a dollar back for every gallon of virgin soybean oil they use to produce bio-diesel.
Not only is bio-diesel cleaner-burning than heating oil but it also delivers better efficiency, thus reducing stress on aging boilers. Add in the fact that a recent executive mandate from Governor George Pataki earmarks a five percent minimum of the state’s fuel consumption portfolio for bio-diesel and you have all the requirements for a fast-growing marketplace.
How fast is the market growing for bio-diesel? Environmental Fuel Alternatives, a Brooklyn startup with production facilities In Newark, claims to have sold two million gallons of bio-diesel in less than two years’ time.
“If I could get the production up and everything I wanted, it would be double,” says Bob Lindenbaum, the company’s chief operating officer.
Other heating fuel suppliers are following suit. Mark Schildwachter, an executive at the Bronx heating oil wholesaler Fred M. Schildwachter & Sons, Inc., says his company is currently in the process of switching over its equipment to accommodate B20. The company already offers bio-diesel to customers who wish to order it but expects to ramp up production to all its customer within the coming year.
James Quigley of the Center for Sustainable Energy personally drives a 20 year-old Volkswagen that can switch over to bio-diesel as a fuel source once the engine has been properly warmed up. Quigley permitted bio- diesel vehicles to be shown off alongside hybrid and fuel cell models in the Center’s “Clean Car Fair” held on Earth Day earlier this year.
As noted in many environmental journals, bio-diesel is, at heart, an imperfect energy solution. Even if you raise the blend ratio to 100 percent refined vegetable oil, you still face the continued problem of turning long-chain carbon molecules into airborne carbon gases such as carbon monoxide, a poison, and carbon dioxide, a heat- trapping chemical considered by many scientists to be a root cause of rising global temperatures.
According to a 1998 U.S. Department of Energy study, mixing vegetable oil with diesel reduces sulfur emissions but actually raises nitrogen oxide emissions, a key contributor to urban smog. Maybe that’s why those looking to clean up local skies and reduce U.S. dependence on fossil fuel see bio-diesel and other carbon-based biofuels as the economic equivalent of methadone maintenance -- i.e. a compromise solution for a society too addicted to quit petroleum cold turkey.
“You could say bio-diesel is a transitional fuel like natural gas,” says Quigley of the Center for Sustainable Energy. “It gives us a sustainable resource, and it allows us to put people to work in sustainable jobs while at the same time reducing the export of dollars in exchange for exhaustible fossil fuels that pollute our atmosphere and contribute to global warming.”
Quigley’s program owes its existence to a $2 million Department of Energy appropriation secured by local Congressman JosĂ© Serrano in 2003 to help combat historic air quality problems in the Bronx. As director of the program, Quigley would love to see a bigger local emphasis on technologies that get rid of the emissions issue altogether, technologies such as fuel cells, photovoltaic systems and wind turbines. As a realist, however, Quigley recognizes that bio-fuels are an important first step -- one that could, in time, tilt the free market to these other energy alternatives.
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Tar Beach, those black tarred rooftops where regular New Yorkers got their summer tans, is celebrated in song, in movies like “On The Waterfront” and in a well-known quilt and children’s book by Faith Ringgold. But if they evoke the same kind of nostalgia as stoop ball and stick ball, those roofs turn out to be bad for the environment.
The asphalt and concrete trap sunlight and heat and contribute to what scientists call the “urban heat island” effect that makes the city as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the suburbs. The difference in temperature translates into some $100 million in additional energy costs per year.
That is why a movement is growing to replace New York City’s iconic rooftops with something cooler, literally.
A cool roof, or “white roof” -- as simple as a basic coating of light-colored water sealant – is the roof of the future in New York, says Laurie Kerr, an architect in the Office of Sustainable Design, the eco- conscious division of New York City’s Department of Design and Construction. “The city controls maybe one in ten buildings in terms of square footage. Over the next 20 years, all of those buildings should have cool roofs.”
But others are pushing an alternative -- a “green roof,” in effect a rooftop garden, with plants (even trees) atop a layer of soil.
Common in Europe, and growing more popular in American cities out West, green roofs remain a challenge in New York.
“Roof tops are an enormous wasted resource,” says Leslie Hoffman, executive director of EarthPledge, a Manhattan-based nonprofit that has helped build green roofs atop eight local buildings, including the Rheingold Gardens building in Bushwick, a 250-unit senior housing facility. Her organization’s efforts are paralleled by Sustainable South Bronx, the Hunts Point non-profit that recently opened a demonstration green roof project atop the American Banknote Building. In an interview with WNYC at the time of the installation, Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion said the borough was home to at least nine green roof installations. “We can’t force anybody" to install green roofs, Carrion said, "but we are certainly creating incentives by saying we will be very supportive of your project."
Expanding that support to the rest of the city could take some time. Green roofs, while attractive to look at and useful when it comes to minimizing both heat and water runoff, are roughly five times as expensive as the typical roof installation.
Cool roofs demand less of an investment from private property owners and less paperwork for city contractors. With the recent signing of a new law mandating that all major city- funded construction and renovation projects meet energy conservation standards laid out by the U.S. Green Building Council, Kerr from the Office of Sustainable Design expects most projects to go with the easier white roof method.
Green roof advocates, meanwhile, are working hard to boost the economic case for green roofs in the hopes of convincing city leaders to set up incentives for builders and property owners.
“The problem is the reflective roofs don’t deliver one twentieth the benefits of a green roof,” says Steven Peck, president of Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, a Canadian advocacy group.
Peck points to green roof’s ability to limit storm water runoff, something the city needs to do in order to bring its sewage system in compliance with the Clean Water Act. The largest green roof on record, a 10.4 acre installation at Ford Motor Company’s Rouge River truck factory, is expected to cut that facility’s storm water runoff -- and the resulting sewer bill -- in half. If New York City were to take a cue from Portland and some European cities and charge building owners for the amount of storm water they send into local sewers, the return on investment issue would quickly balance out.
Peck also points to green roofs’ ability to filter pollutants and to remove carbon dioxide via photosynthesis. Like their counterparts in urban forestry, green roof promoters are hoping to come up with models that put a dollar figure on such services.
Should those dollar figures become available, however, they might not be enough to convince individual building owners to make the switch, says Stuart Gaffin, a scientist at the Center for Climate System Research at NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Sciences. Earlier this year, Gaffin served as host of a graduate seminar on green roofs. In their attempt to put together a model on the environmental benefits of green roof installation, however, they found most of the benefits appearing at the societal level, as opposed to the individual property owner.
“You try to get the economic benefits to the owner and you run out of things pretty quickly,” says Gaffin. “There aren’t a lot of direct cost-benefit effects.”
Gaffin says he has deals with two local schools -- one public, one private -- to install and monitor green roofs. With these plots, he hopes to build up local data which can then be used to convince the city council to offer additional incentives for green roof owners.
Gaffin and his students are joined in their effort by Diana Balmori, the architectural designer of the city’s largest green roof, atop the Silvercup Studios facility in Long Island City. Built with the help of Earth Pledge and the New York Power Authority, the installation is the first of what Balmori expects to be two major installations in that neighborhood. Balmori plans to use rainwater data from both installations to push city leaders to follow in the footsteps of their Seattle and Chicago counterparts and add green roofs to the evolving “green building” concept.
“It would be really great if New York grew some industries around this, but it hasn’t reached the critical mass to make it affordable enough for the majority of the population,” Balmori says. “With just some minimum incentives, that turnaround could happen. All we need is that relatively small push.”
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Should New Yorkers sacrifice the city’s last remaining wetlands to help the citizens of Louisiana and the Gulf Coast regain theirs?
The bargain isn’t that direct, of course, but as the White House and Congress budgetmakers count up the dollars needed to meet President George W. Bush’s September 15 commitment to rebuild Mississippi River levees, extend Gulf Coast breakwaters, and restore the once massive network of flood-absorbing bayoux around the New Orleans metropolis, those with a stake in local, federally-subsidized marsh restoration are already bracing for impact.
“The [U.S. Army] Corps of Engineers has a big plan to do about 70 to 90 acres of restoration next spring,” says Don Riepe, Jamaica Bay guardian for the American Littoral Society. “This project only costs $16 million, but with the Bush Administration promising $200 billion for the Gulf Coast, I’m wondering if we’re going to lose a lot of these projects as Congress or whoever authorizes the money for this takes it away.”
The $16 million project is already underway and already budgeted according to an August 3rd summary put out by the New York District of the Army Corps of Engineers. It involves the relocation of sand and sediment gathered in the dredging of local shipping channels and the spraying of that sand onto targeted islands such as Elders Point and Yellow Bar Hassock.
Based on a successful 2003 pilot study that increased both the acreage and amount of erosion-resistant vegetation of Big Egg marsh, the project is slated to commence this month with the dredging of Ambrose Channel at the entrance of Lower New York Bay and of Rockaway Channel at the entrance of Jamaica Bay. The gathered materials, estimated to be upwards of 200,000 cubic yards, will be stockpiled at the end of Floyd Bennett Field and relocated to local marshes in the spring of 2006.
While Riepe has few doubts that the project will go off as planned, it’s the fate of future projects that causes him concern. The restoration plan for Elders Point and Yellow Bar owes much to a mid-1990s policy shift on the part of the Army Corps of Engineers. After the upper Mississippi River flooded its banks in 1993, the federally-funded civil engineering agency began looking for alternative remedies to levee-raising, a tactic which had merely increased the volume of water penned in during flood conditions. Encouraged by environmental groups eager to regain wetlands lost when the Corps effectively channelized the river in the 1930s, the agency began buying up lowland portions of the river valley in an attempt to regain the river’s natural floodplain and thus create an escape valve for flood waters.
That eco-friendly strategy is sure to be modified in the coming years. Earlier in September, according to the Associated Press, the Justice Department sent an email to regional U.S. attorneys’ offices, seeking information on the role environmental lawsuits played in the delaying of federal funded levee-strengthening projects in and around New Orleans. The inquiry came on the heels of an Internet posting by the conservative think tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, noting that in 1996 the Louisiana chapter of the Sierra Club sued to block an Army Corps of Engineers project to raise and fortify levees along the lower Mississippi.
Congressional Democrats, including New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg, denounced the Department of Justice inquiry as a Bush Administration attempt to deflect blame at a time when polls showed a majority of Americans disapproving both the president and the entire federal government’s initial response to Hurricane Katrina. Subsequent news stories, meanwhile, have shown that the levees in question were eventually fortified and were not the levees that failed in the wake of Katrina.
Still, with the death toll from Hurricane Katrina still rising, restored habitats and healthy marshland will no doubt take a back seat to the simple protection of life and limb in the coming allocation of Congressional funds. What’s more, as fiscal conservatives float the argument that the $200 billion needed to fix the Gulf Coast should come from pet local projects, even a $16 million effort to fight marshland erosion in the heart of New York City has a target on its back.
Maybe that’s why Jamaica Bay’s primary Congressional benefactor, Democratic U.S. Representative (and former mayoral candidate) Anthony Weiner, when discussing next spring’s sand-spraying and other related projects, framed it as a way to strengthen the city’s own flooding defenses.
"We need to increase coastal protection programs in New York,” Weiner said, and such programs mean “marsh restoration, beach renourishment and the contruction of jetties and groins to protect waterfront communities like Manhattan Beach, Sheeps Head Bay, Rockaway, and Broad Channel."
Such arguments might not win over the newly ascendent deficit hawks in Congress, but they are playing well at City Hall. That’s where Jim Gennaro, Democratic council member for the 24th District in Central Queens and chairman of the council’s Committee on Environmental Protection, has secured the recent passage of two laws designed to push the city to the lead role in both protecting and reversing the loss of Jamaica Bay wetlands. Passed this spring, the first law calls for the development of a watershed protection plan encompassing Jamaica Bay and its surrounding environs. The second law calls for the creation of a task force to examine city-owned properties adjacent to Jamaica Bay and earmark which of those properties can be returned to wetlands status and put under the aegis of the parks department.
“I feel that each level of government has to be responsible and do what’s appropriate,” says Gennaro. “I think we’re still going to have [federal funding]. My focus is more on taking steps to try to stem the loss of the 40 or 50 acres of wetlands we lose every year from the forces that are at work now.”
Gennaro is particularly interested in finding a bigger role for the city’s Department of Environmental Protection in the restoration of Jamaica Bay. Currently, the department’s primary interaction with the bay comes via the 26th Ward Water Pollution Control Plant, a facility near the end of Flatlands Avenue that has been blamed for boosting the nitrogen content in the bay and possibly contributing to the die-off in local marsh grasses. Currently, the state Department of Environment Conservation, a superseding agency when it comes to waterway discharge, is looking to impose a cap on the maximum amount of nitrogen effluent released. Gennaro says he would rather avoid the inevitable litigation such a process would generate and simply give the Department of Environmental Protection a greater stake in keeping the bay’s waters healthy enough to support marsh ecosystems.
“We’re looking for creative ways to have DEP expand its role and they have been very receptive to that,” says Gennaro.“We want to take it beyond stormwater and sewage treatment and take it to the point that some of the properties that are managed by DEP, such as the old Pennsylvania Avenue landfill, would become prime spots for wetlands restoration.”
Such a strategy would literally work around the edges of the current problem. It would allow a percentage of the dry land along channelized inlets such as Hendrix Creek near Canarsie to revert back to their original wetlands state. It wouldn’t, however, be able to replace the fast-disappearing islands soon to be targetted by the Army Corps of Engineers and its sand-spraying project. That’s why environmental stakeholders such as Don Riepe of the American Littoral Society are keeping an eye on both the weather in the Gulf of Mexico and the political climate in Washington, D.C.
“If we don’t start doing these [sand-spraying] projects, we’ll never get a basis for restoration. We’ll lose the whole system,” he says. “I know in the past [the Army Corps of Engineers] have had a lot of projects on the books for Jamaica Bay, and they haven’t done them because Congress hasn’t authorized the money. I’m hoping it doesn’t happen again.”
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