Though he campaigned vigorously for the national Republican ticket, New York Governor George Pataki now seems bent on distancing himself from a White House that is often seen as anti-environment.
The governor's proposed budget boosts the state's Environmental Protection Fund by 20 percent, to $150 million. Pataki is also looking to offer expanded tax credits for "green buildings" to foster cleaner, more efficient energy usage here in the city. The governor's office plans as well to expand by 70 the number of state staffers at the Department of Environmental Conservation, shoring up an overwhelmed Superfund/Brownfields program in the process. To underwrite the additional salary costs, the governor is proposing that developers who seek to build in or near protected wetlands pay an additional permit-processing fee.
For the Environmental Advocates of New York, a watchdog group whose July, 2004 report, "Endangered Agency," decried the Department of Environmental Conservation's prolonged record of staffing cuts, it was a welcome turnaround. Robert Moore, the group's executive director, says he and his colleagues had met repeatedly with the governor's office, suggesting the wetlands fee as a way to finance the department’s expansion without a statewide tax.
"Before, we were basically subsidizing the destruction of wetlands," says Moore. "Developers were getting permits free of charge regardless of how much [Department of Environmental Conservation] staff time went into evaluating those permits."
The governor's budget comes on the heels of major state announcements in the way of renewable energy and emissions. In September the New York State Public Service Commission set a 24 percent renewable portfolio standard, meaning that at least 24 percent of the state's energy demand must be supplied via renewable energy sources by 2013. On January 11, the governor and Attorney General Eliot Spitzer teamed together to announce a trio of legal settlements which stand to reduce dramatically the amount of airborne pollution entering New York state while at the same time forcing polluters to pay for the clean up of dirty power plants at a time when the federal government has adopted a more lax approach to power plant regulation.
Add it all up, says Moore, and you get a pretty clear picture of a politician willing to alienate a few pro-business conservatives at home in exchange for a few green-voting Republicans outside the state..
"You have two Republican governors who have really broken with the [Bush] administration on the environment," Moore says. "Both have done very proactive things, especially when it comes to energy. Both are looking for ways to stand out."
In journalism the reflex move when faced with a giant story is to look for the local angle. In the case of the recent tsunami coverage, most New York journalism has focused on local relief efforts and the immigrant communities affected by the disaster. A few, however, have gone for the more visceral approach, speculating on what it would take to trigger a similar event here on the east coast.
The New York Post documented the "mega-tsunami" phenomenon that has some scientists concerned about the U.S. east coast. At first glance, this seems like a typical case of the Post grabbing at the most sensational storyline it can find. Upon further examination, however, "mega-tsunamis" are a legitimate phenomenon that, while unlikely in the near future, offer a useful reminder that New York City's proximity to the ocean can be both a blessing and curse.
In 1958, an earthquake-triggered landslide in Alaska's narrow Lituya Bay generated a tsunami wave more than 1,500 feet high. Survivor accounts likened it to an underwater atomic bomb test and ever since, scientists have been forced to raise the upper limit of worst-case tsunami scenarios. As documented in a 2000, BBC special geologists have since discovered credible signs of similar mammoth displacement waves hitting Hawaii and portions of the Bahamas.
That last discovery is what proves so unsettling from a New York perspective. According to BBC report, volcanologists at the Benfield Greig Hazard Research Centre in London see the Canary Islands as the potential source of a major wave train that battered the Bahamas roughly 100,000 years ago. In an effort to determine how long until the next catastrophic event, they have turned their attention to Cumbre Vieja, a volcano on the island of La Palma. Cumbre Vieja last erupted in 1949, an event that, while benign, managed to speed the separation of the mountain's eastern and western halves. Volcanologists estimate that the western half slipped four feet during the eruption and is set to tumble off into the Atlantic Ocean anywhere between now and the next 100,000 years. Computerized modeling of the wave generated by a complete breakaway of the western half of Cumbre Vieja showed an initial wave height of 650 meters moving quickly across the Atlantic. How large that wave would be once it got to America is hard to say -- as is the number of eruptions it would take to cause such an event.
"We simply don't know," says Benfield Greig volcanologist Bill McGuire in the BBC special. "But put it this way: If I was living in Miami or New York and I heard that the Cumbre Vieja was erupting, I'd be keeping a very close eye on the news."
Pondering such worst case scenarios is grim stuff. Even grimmer, however, is the realization that New York City has neither the infrastructure nor cultural memory to deal with even a moderate-level natural disaster requiring a speedy evacuation of coastlines. As noted a few months back, New York has experienced flooding and fast-rising ocean levels in the past. It also looks to be losing a few millimeters to the sea each decade. While our city has done much to guard against terrorist risk, we have done very little to safeguard ourselves against hurricanes, floods and other environmental events that might demand coordinated evacuation and recovery.
Recently, delegates from 50 nations gathered in Kobe, Japan for the United Nations World Conference on Disaster Reduction to discuss this very problem. Using the South Asian tsunami as a backdrop, the conference quickly focused in on the unmeasured disaster risk presented by "megacities" -- metropolitan regions with populations in the ten million-plus range. Factoring in population size, property values, and overall disaster history, the German insurance giant Munich Re recently gave New York City a risk index ranking higher than 43 out of the world's 50 largest cities. The only cities to rank higher were cities with a history either of recurring earthquakes, such as Tokyo, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Osaka, or of hurricanes, such as Miami.
"Perhaps the most frightening prospect would be to have a truly megadisaster in a megacity," said UN Director of Disaster Relief Jan Egelund, a conference attendee. "Then we could have not only a tsunami-style casualty rate as we have seen late last year, but we could see one hundred times that in a worst case."
Egelund focused most of his concern on fast-growing Third World cities, but the notion that natural disasters have become a global issue, not just a local one, is the resonating message coming out of December's catastrophe in South Asia.
![]() |
Take a deep breath in New York City, and chances are you are filling your lungs with particles of pollution from the tailpipe of a diesel truck.
Tailpipe pollution is the biggest local threat to the city’s air quality – over 80 percent of the cancer risk from air pollution in New York City comes from a transportation-related source. Diesel exhaust is especially dangerous, spewing a toxic stew of more than 40 cancer-causing compounds into the air. New Yorkers suffer from some of the highest asthma rates in the country (up to 25 percent of school age children in some neighborhoods in Harlem have been diagnosed with asthma), and diesel pollution is a well-known asthma trigger.
New York is not alone in struggling with this challenge. Across the country, about 170 million Americans – half the U.S. population – live in places that fail to meet the federal Environmental Protection Agency's basic healthy air standards for smog and soot.
The good news is that cost-effective solutions exist that can cut sources of air pollution substantially. New York has already begun to adopt some of those solutions, but there is a great deal more that government agencies, business leaders and even citizens can do.
There are three basic ways that New York City can cut pollution from the many truck and other diesel engines that flood the city with bad air.
Diesel engines live long lives. Some, like those used in construction and commercial marine vessels are used for decades and emit more soot pollution than cars and trucks combined. School buses present a special challenge, with kids inside exposed to unusually high levels of soot pollution.
But pollution from these old engines can be substantially cut in two ways -- the installation of new parts, such as filters, which are called retrofits; and the use of the cleanest grade of diesel fuel.
Right now, the cleanest grade of diesel (ultra-low sulfur diesel, with a sulfur content of 15 parts per million, or ppm, compared to regular diesel with a sulfur content of 500 to 3000 parts per million), is available in the New York market ahead of much of the rest of the country. Tailpipe retrofits, the best of which require use of the cleanest fuel, can cost only a few thousand dollars -- a small fraction of the cost of a large construction vehicle.
New York has begun to take steps to adopt these technologies. Last year, New York City became the first major city in the U.S. to enact legislation (in pdf format) requiring all companies that receive city contracts for public construction projects to use ultra-low sulfur diesel fuel and "best available" retrofits. The city can use its purchasing power to help bring these technologies to this market at the best price.
There is legislation before the city council now that would expand this commitment to all city fleets, from sanitation trucks to school buses. If enacted, that legislation would make New York a national leader in cutting diesel pollution. Every major construction site and every diesel fleet in the public and private sectors should make the same commitment.
The Environmental Protection Agency has set standards that will require new diesel engines to be much cleaner. Yet, many diesel engines stay in use for decades and won't be replaced by vehicles with cleaner engines for many years. The EPA estimates that the full health benefits of its new standards will not be fully realized until the year 2030. A child born today might not be breathing the cleaner air until after she finishes graduate school.
Another council bill would, if enacted and signed by the mayor, commit New York public fleets to buy the cleanest possible vehicle available for its intended use. That means speeding the transition to the most fuel-efficient vehicles available, including hybrids and alternative fuels like compressed natural gas or, over time, hydrogen.
Private fleets can make a big difference too. Last year, FedEx introduced into New York City a new generation of hybrid delivery trucks, developed in partnership with Environmental Defense (the national non-profit environmental organization where I am New York regional director). The ten trucks travel 57 percent farther on a gallon of fuel and emit 96 percent less soot than a regular FedEx delivery truck. We believe that every fleet can begin now to take advantage of cleaner vehicle technologies.
Clean technologies are great, but they are not always enough. The number of trucks on our streets is growing dramatically. In fact, the transportation sector is the fastest-growing source of greenhouse gases in New York, and the miles these trucks travel are projected to increase substantially over time. Every year, for example, the trucks that pick up our garbage travel about eight million miles a year (300 times around the earth!) on Manhattan streets alone.
A recent report entitled Investing In Mobility (in pdf format) shows how, by shifting the majority of waste transport to barge and rail, truck traffic can be cut in half. The mayor’s new solid waste policy takes important steps in this direction. But for waterfront neighborhoods to accept the necessary infrastructure to transfer garbage onto barges, basic ideas about how to design municipal facilities must change. Attractive facilities can be built that eliminate queuing, get trucks off city streets and cut diesel pollution.
It is time also to look creatively at using incentives to cut traffic in our neighborhoods. London adopted a remarkable congestion-pricing plan that has cut traffic congestion in its downtown core by about 30 percent. Hudson River crossings in New York City have shaved peak travel volumes by about seven percent with a modest congestion pricing plan. San Diego is using pricing to help pay for new forms of transit, like bus rapid transit, that are flexible and cost-effective. These incentives work just like off-peak phone discounts – travel is cheaper at off-peak times. New technologies make it possible to introduce these pricing incentives here without tollbooths and in ways that are suited to local business needs.
In short, New York City needs a comprehensive plan to attack pollution from tailpipes. Both the public and private sectors can help expand the market for the cleanest possible technologies. Infrastructure can be built to minimize dependence on trucks and maximize incentives to make clean transport choices. By making these choices, the city can meet minimal clean air standards and allow New Yorkers to breathe easy.
Andy Darrell is the New York regional director of Environmental Defense
Mayor Michael Bloomberg has made the creation of a Manhattan greenway a goal of his administration. Within two years of taking office, he completed an interim bicycle and pedestrian route around the entire island. He has supported putting into place the citywide 350-mile greenway plan, developed in 1993 by the Department of City Planning. But in Brooklyn, where the city is about to build one of the first sections of the trail envisioned along the downtown waterfront, the administration's current plans undermine the purpose of the greenway as a park space and a safe corridor for bicyclists and pedestrians.
All over the country, cities are creating landscaped bicycle and pedestrian paths (In PDF Format) for the many benefits they bring, including reducing traffic congestion, encouraging exercise, increasing real estate values and softening the hard edge of the city. So far, New York City has built about 100 miles of greenway, helped by the availability of federal transportation funding for this purpose.
Still to be built is the proposed Brooklyn Waterfront Trail in northwest Brooklyn, from the Brooklyn Bridge to Sunset Park. It would meet an existing path along Bay Ridge and could potentially connect with greenways along Jamaica Bay.
The first section of the trail slated to be built goes through the Columbia Street district, a mixed residential and industrial neighborhood wedged between the piers and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Cut off from the rest of Brooklyn by the highway and connected to the working waterfront, it has the feel of a village and views of the Manhattan skyline. In a neighborhood only a few blocks wide, residents created four community gardens, which are now official city parks, and have been trying for a decade to get the city to put in the greenway through their neighborhood.
The city is finally putting a pedestrian/bicycle path through the area as part of a long-planned road reconstruction to better accommodate truck traffic to the piers. But the current design would leave the greenway with a hole in one section, where it eliminates the green - and the off-street path for bicyclists - in favor of widening the road.
For several blocks along Van Brunt Street, the city Department of Transportation plans to narrow an existing wide sidewalk and route bicyclists onto striped bike lanes on both sides of the street. To rejoin the greenway going north, riders would have to cross the street just before a blind turn that is being redesigned to allow trucks to pass at higher speeds.
Hundreds of residents have signed a petition to Bloomberg asking him to intervene in the impending reconstruction project and establish an interim greenway on the existing harbor-side sidewalk.
Residents believe that the greenway is being downgraded in favor of widening the road because adjoining neighborhoods, which are more populous and politically powerful, want to divert traffic from their streets. They note that the Columbia Street area already has 14 lanes of moving traffic. The Department of Transportation did not respond to numerous requests for comment.
Community Board 6, which stretches from the Red Hook and Columbia Street waterfront to Park Slope, approved the road reconstruction project. According to Craig Hammerman, the district manager, the roadwork was originally proposed 15 years ago to reduce the impact on the neighborhood of trucks going off the approved routes. "If we design the truck route properly, then we won't need to rely on enforcement down the line," he said. The project has since taken on two other elements - infrastructure work for the Third Water Tunnel and incorporating the Brooklyn Waterfront Trail. In the negotiations over the project, the
Department of Transportation agreed to turn over for a park a 100-foot site originally intended to divert trucks. "We believe the agency has gone as far as we can get them to go," Hammerman said.
Bicycle advocates credit the Department of Transportation with becoming more bicycle friendly in recent years. The agency has added 200 miles of bike lanes as well as bicycle crossings on all four East River bridges, one factor contributing to doubling of the number of people riding bicycles in the city over the past 20 years. But they say it has been less receptive to off-street greenways or even physically separated lanes, giving first priority to moving vehicular traffic through the city.
One example is on First and Second Avenues in Manhattan, where there are high volumes of traffic. The city chose not to put in a physically separated bike lane, "letting people fend for themselves in traffic," said Noah Budnick, projects director at the advocacy group Transportation Alternatives. "In the Columbia Street area where you have a community that very much supports building the off-street path, it's harder to understand why the city and the Department of Transportation don't want to choose the safe alternative," he said.
Dave Lutz, a neighborhood resident and member of the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway Taskforce, an advocacy group, said that Van Brunt Street isn't the only place the city is putting a greenway along the road where there is space for it to go through a landscaped corridor. Lutz, who is also the director of the Neighborhood Open Space Coalition and one of the creators of the city's greenway plan, said, "As we paint those stripes on our streets and put greenway signs on those streets, we water down the term of what a greenway is. A greenway is a separate trail for pedestrians and bicyclists buffered by greenery."
The Overall Path
Because the land along the Brooklyn waterfront is controlled by so many different entities - including city agencies, the Port Authority, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and numerous private companies - piecing together a greenway promises to be a complicated and politically charged process.
The goal of greenway advocates is a 30-foot-wide, 14-mile-long landscaped off-street path along the waterfront. Such a trail would provide greenery and recreation for many neighborhoods that have very little public open space, as well as access to the borough's far-flung beaches and parks and its diverse neighborhoods. "It is as much a park space that you move through as a transportation corridor," said Robert Pirani, director of Environmental Programs at the Regional Plan Association, an independent planning group for the tri-state area.
Several local organizations are beginning to create an overall framework for the trail, which ultimately would be implemented by various city and state agencies and private landowners. The office of Borough President Marty Markowitz was instrumental in getting grants for the work through the New York State Waterfront Revitalization Program.
One of these organizations is the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative, Inc., led by two former members of the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway Taskforce who split off from that group to take a more active role in planning and advocating for the overall path. Milton Puryear, director of planning for the initiative, said they believed that the way to "get around the DOT's refusal on Van Brunt Street and the quality we are after was to really communicate the whole vision and engage a much bigger population than the couple thousand people who live along the BQE."
Together with the Regional Plan Association, the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative has begun a six-month process of developing a route in Community Boards 2 and 6, from Red Hook to Newtown Creek in Greenpoint. The first public meeting was held in November. The planners will return with a conceptual plan at another public workshop on February 1.
In Community Board 7 in Sunset Park, the community-based organization UPROSE has trained neighborhood youths to lead a grassroots participation process to design a greenway through the largely Latino, Asian, and Arabic neighborhood. UPROSE helped block the construction of a power plant along the waterfront and is involved in a number of efforts to reduce pollution and increase greening in the neighborhood. The neighborhood has 35,000 young people, yet just a quarter-acre of parkland per thousand residents and almost no public access to the waterfront.
As the Brooklyn waterfront changes, there are many competing visions for how it should evolve. These range from preserving the working waterfront and encouraging water-borne transportation to current city proposals for housing, parks, and a cruise ship terminal. The city recently approved a zoning change in Red Hook to allow a controversial Ikea store to be built, and other big box stores may follow. These changes could provide opportunities for the creation of a green pathway, as well as obstacles.
Many of the projects proposed or in the works for the Brooklyn waterfront have the potential to increase automobile traffic unless there is an effort to develop alternatives. "Communities all across the country are trying to get automobile traffic off the waterfront so that the amenity value can benefit the community," said Pirani. "What is Brooklyn's waterfront edge going to be like? Is it going to be designed more for moving cars and trucks around the waterfront, or as more of a space for pedestrians and bicyclists and people being comfortable walking around it?"
Anne Schwartz is a freelance writer specializing in environmental issues. Previously, she was the editor of the Audubon Activist, a news journal for environmental action published by the National Audubon Society, and an editor at The New York Botanical Garden.