Could New York City Cut Emissions 90% By 2050?

First time accepted submitter jscheib writes "According to Will Oremus in Slate, a report released today finds that 'New York City could slash its emissions by a whopping 90 percent by 2050 without any radical new technologies, without cutting back on creature comforts, and maybe even without breaking its budget.' The key elements are insulating buildings to cut energy needs, converting to (mostly) electric equipment, and then using carbon-free electricity to supply the small amount of energy still needed. Oremus notes that including energy savings would reduce the net price tag to something more like $20 billion."

Comments

It's Been Done Elsewhere!

[Anonymous Coward]

In Detroit. The population's gone from 1M to 800k in twenty years, and energy consumption has plummeted. New York can emulate this success just by continuing it's current direction.

Re:It's Been Done Elsewhere!

[jklovanc]

According to this article Detroit power consumption has dropped by 10% in eleven years. I would not call that plummeting..

Re:It's Been Done Elsewhere!

[amiga3D]

Win-Win

Re:It's Been Done Elsewhere!

[kenh]

New York is located close to the Atlantic ocean and that's one decent heatsink, so by pumping out excess heat in the summer into the ocean would be more efficient in two steps - less heat put out in the city, and the temperature difference when doing heat pumping will be lower which can result in lower costs. The disadvantage here is that a lot of pipes needs to be laid down for central cooling in addition to central heating.

Of course, pumping all that heat into the Atlantic ocean won't have any climatic or ecological implications, right?

It's all about technology

[phantomfive]

Cutting CO2 mainly depends on technology (or cutting the standard of living, which most people don't want to do), aimed at two areas:

1) Non-emitting cars. Electric cars look more viable every day; it's not inconceivable that most people could be driving them by by 2050.
2) Power generation. Whether it comes from coal sequestration or my preferred solution, nuclear fusion, cutting CO2 relies on improvements in power generation technology.

Re:It's all about technology

[GumphMaster]

By "large" balsy2001 seems to mean "large, densely packed population". NY City is very densely packed and that is definitely an aid to trip distance and time reduction. Unfortunately for both the US and Australia large is almost always synonymous with sprawling when it comes to cities. Coupled with "transport infrastructure" being a euphemism for "bare minimum road network for private vehicles" there's little hope that mass public transport can come to the rescue.

Re:It's all about technology

[balsy2001]

You are right and that is more what I was thinking. However, when I lived in DC, I had a near 1 hours commute that amounted to less than 20 miles. Another apartment I lived at the drive home was between 45 minutes and 1 hours 15 minutes and it was like 7 miles. I had colleagues in DC that used electric cars that did very well in the 1+ hour commute of stop and go traffic. When I lived in a mountain state away from big cities and metropolitan areas I commuted 1 hours 15 minutes but covered 56 miles, each way. It was also not uncommon for us to drive a few hundred miles in a day on the weekend.

38% energy savings

[Namarrgon]

That's what they achieved when they retrofitted the Empire State Building. Paid for itself in only 3 years, and now delivers $4.4M savings annually.

Insulation, smart energy controls etc do cost money, but the energy savings can more than pay for it over the life of the building. Better designs can save up to 69% of energy costs. And there's a lot of ripple-effect savings too, by reducing emissions and freeing up capital.

Of course, getting completely off coal, oil & gas will eventually cut emissions to zero, but there's a more immediate & guaranteed payoff simply by improving efficiencies.

Re:Dreamy

[Namarrgon]

They already refitted the Empire State Building, and achieved payoff in only 3 years. Now it's saving $4.4M/year of pure gravy.

It can certainly cost millions, but the returns can be much more, over the life of the building.

Replace the windows!

[water-vole]

I stayed at a really fancy hotel in NYC, where enormous amounts of money had been spent on interior decoration. But the windows were single glass windows which let through a lot of cold and noise. You cannot buy such bad windows in many European countries. Why do they not install proper triple-glass windows? I have not seen any building in NY with proper windows. Do they not sell them in the US?

Re:Replace the windows!

[Simulant]

My house is full of single pane, leaky windows. I'd love to replace the windows but a) the mortgage is still underwater b) I could only afford to replace 1 or 2 per year, and c) my neighborhood association would complain that I'm lowering the value of their property in our "Historical Neighborhood". (yes, seriously)

I'd love some of those German multipane windows that open two ways....they are awesome, but I'd have to import them and my neighbors would throw a fit.

Yes, I was a naive first time home buyer.... Never again.

Re:Replace the windows!

[cute-boy]

With double or triple glazing you wouldn't hear your neighbours whining so much?

Investments

[Neil Boekend]

Everybody sensible already knows you can, but people are afraid of investments. Of course insulation pays back quite soon but people are afraid of investments.
The only ones who can really help are banks. They could lower mortgages on well insulated houses. 1% is a big incentive.

Re:And pigs might fly...

[c0lo]

We might also move to 100% green energy if we carpet the entire surface of the earth with solar cells. Until people reduce and make their own efforts to reduce there energy needs through economic (if you don't save on costs or get paid, it is not reasonable to ask people to change their habits) means then it wont work.

You would only need to cover some percentage of desert area (not even all of it: do a computation using the solar constant, total world energy production and assume only 12% conversion efficiency for PV - you'll be surprised of how low the percentage of the world surface would need to be covered by PV-es. I've done this computation in the past). The only engineering problem is the transport of the energy around the globe.

Re:That's a heck of a crystal ball...

[Sockatume]

Someone's going to have to help me out here:

"anyone claiming to plan these things 37 years into the future is full of it", "Read some Ray Kurzweil books to get some perspective"

Ray Kurzweil, the futurist who predicts a technological singularity in 2045? But I'm not supposed to trust people who claim to be able to predict outcomes decades in the future?