Geneva and I are big fans of the architectural cruises that take a waterway spin around Manhattan, with commentary supplied by local architects. Recently, we noticed a hybrid cruise had been added that focused on climate change. So on July 1, on a splendid New York day, we set sail with architect Doug Fox, who surprised us with how much the city is doing to battle climate change.
It’s not shocking that New York would be a leader. After New Orleans, New York is one of the most vulnerable cities in the country to rising sea levels. Superstorm Sandy, coming up on its 10th anniversary, did almost $20 billion worth of damage to the city. New York is also, after California, among the most politically disposed to confront climate change. Still, it was eye-opening how many initiatives New York has taken on, and how many are now being constructed or implemented. Most urgent are the projects that would protect New York from a rising sea and intense rainstorms. But perhaps most heartening are those that would reduce the city’s fossil fuel consumption in favor of clean energy.
Following are highlights of Fox’s fine presentation – plus a few items from follow-up reading.
RISING SEA LEVELS
Sandy was New York’s wake-up call. Its nine-foot storm surge inundated subways, buildings, roadways, neighborhoods, and left big questions about how the city could survive rising sea levels and likely more deadly storms.
Massive Sea Gates
The dream solution to New York’s vulnerability to the Atlantic Ocean is to keep the storm surge out – via a six-mile-long closable gate from the Rockaways to New Jersey. As audacious as it sounds, the Army Corps of Engineers is studying such a possibility, with its huge expenses, uncertainty of success, and unpredictable side effects. Although it seems like a longshot, a smaller version of this has been tried (seemingly successfully) in The Netherlands and elsewhere.
Flood Walls
On our cruise, we saw a couple of newly constructed flood walls. One was on the Lower East Side, a particularly vulnerable area on the East River. Another was on Manhattan’s northern tip, along the Harlem River, in an area where subway cars are repaired. More are in the works, though Fox said there’s no way New York could afford to put flood walls everywhere.
Natural Barriers
Someday, the city hopes to erect a U-shaped barrier that protects all of Lower Manhattan and, to the extent possible, a preferred option is green spaces. For starters, officials focused on East River Park, the narrow strip of parkland created by Robert Moses between the East River and FDR Drive. The idea was to reimagine the park in such a way that it would provide a natural sea wall. Construction has now begun on a project that will use landfill to raise the park by 8 feet. But this is also a cautionary tale, because it took almost a decade of intense infighting among community groups and government officials to arrive at an acceptable plan (acceptable to most, that is).
PROTECTING AGAINST TORRENTIAL RAIN
Storm surge gets most of the headlines, but New York is also quite vulnerable to damage from ever more violent rainstorms. Within just two months in 2021, the city was hit with deluges from Elsa and Ida, the latter of which dropped three inches of rain in one hour. Streets, subways and buildings were flooded. (Our co-op had hundreds of thousands of dollars in water damage to the elevators and boiler in our flooded basement.)
In a city that has as little green space as New York, the solutions are hard to see. The most effective one would be a total upgrade of the sewage system, which is unfortunately far too cost-prohibitive. But many things are in the works. According to an April story by Bloomberg’s Linda Poon, New York has spent $1 billion on 11,000 projects in its green infrastructure program. “They include installing more than 4,000 curbside rain gardens and bioswales — with another 5,000 planned — making sidewalks and roadways porous, greening the city’s medians and rooftops,” Poon wrote.
The city is also devising rainwater retention projects such as rain gardens alongside roads. Poon reported on one experiment using recreation areas. “The city will lower the basketball court in a Queens housing project below surface level,” she wrote, “to create a storage space that can hold some 300,000 gallons of stormwater.”
CLEAN ENERGY PROJECTS
New York has massive projects under way to reduce fossil fuel use in the city, both on the supply side (wind power and hydro power) and on the demand side (retrofitting buildings to make them more energy-efficient).
Atlantic Ocean Wind Turbines
Giant wind turbines are starting to appear in the Atlantic south and east of Long Island. Projects in current development will power more than 2 million homes. By 2035, hopes are that offshore turbines will power 5 to 6 million homes, a large majority of New York state’s residential units.
Canadian Hydropower
New York is proposing to spend $4 billion to build a transmission line from Quebec to New York that would bring electricity generated by Canadian hydropower plants. The idea is to use excess hydropower capacity in the summer, when electrical usage is highest in New York but lowest in Canada. A particular benefit is that this new power source could replace much of the electricity generated by peaking plants in New York, which are by far the most polluting of all the city’s power plants. A separate plan to phase out peaking plants relies on the use of giant batteries during peak demand.
Building Retrofits
Buildings in New York account for about two-thirds of greenhouse emissions. New laws are on the books that are intended to reduce that number by setting tougher clean-energy standards, both for new and existing buildings. By 2024, New York City buildings of more than 25,000 square feet must start meeting efficiency standards. Those standards get considerably tougher by 2030, when fossil-fuel hookups no longer will be allowed in new buildings or major renovations. (Our co-op received a very high efficiency rating, but even so we will have to start paying fines in 2030 if we don’t improve our score.)
A primary goal is to push residential and commercial buildings away from oil and natural gas, and toward electricity – heat pumps for heating, electrical induction stoves for cooking.
We ended the cruise with lots of questions:
- How were New York City and New York State able to launch these initiatives over the interests of the fossil fuel industry?
- If all of these projects were completed, what portion of current fossil fuel use would be eliminated? Same goes for share of greenhouse gases.
- As ambitious as these projects are, are they aggressive enough to make a difference?