Rich Kassel's Blog
PlaNYC 2030: Breathing Easier in 2030 and beyond?
December 11, 2007
Posted by Rich Kassel in Curbing Pollution , Environmental Justice , Health and the Environment , Living Sustainably , Solving Global Warming
About a year ago in Queens, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the outlines of his sustainability plan. I wrote about it in a recent Gotham Gazette article, but neglected to alert Switchboard readers to it, so am doing so now.
He presented a great slide show, and one of the highlights came when the mayor contrasted the current state of our air – we fail to meet federal air quality standards for ozone and particulate matter — with his goal of enabling every New Yorker “to breathe the cleanest air of any big city in America.” (Another highlight was seeing the amazing panorama of New York City at the Queens Museum of Art, where the event was held. If you’ve never seen it, you’ve got to go.)
But what did Bloomberg’s pledge really mean? Air quality has improved in the city over the years, and some of the worst air quality in the nation isn’t in the big cities: California’s Bakersfield, in the San Joaquin Valley, is home to the second-worst particulate pollution and the highest ozone pollution in the country, despite its complete lack of skyscrapers.
Even if the city were to do nothing, the air should keep getting cleaner, thanks to the implementation of federal programs to reduce pollution from cars, trucks and construction and farm equipment.
But one problem with federal programs is that they are very good at reducing pollution from some sources (especially vehicles, since the fleets turn over relatively quickly), but not so good with others, like power plants (thanks to loopholes that allow power plants to be modified without being cleaned up).
An even bigger problem may be that federal programs don’t focus on what happens when you combine millions of pollution sources in the same place, like New York City. In most cases, a new car will be much, much cleaner than the old car it replaces. But if you put 2 million cars on the same island, that island will have a lot of pollution.
My Gotham Gazette column tried to answer the question, “How Will PlaNYC 2030 Improve Our Air?”
In short, the bottom line is that there are some really great, important measures that will go a long way to cut the public health impacts of our current pollution by focusing on reducing particulate soot emissions from buildings and transportation.
In the buildings sphere, many of these will also help cut the City’s energy consumption and global warming pollution (e.g., switching to more efficient power plants that burn natural gas or biodiesel blends, or reducing the sulfur content in home heating oil from today’s 2,000 parts-per-million to the 500 parts per million that is already used in most construction equipment).
Transportation has its share of win-win ideas too—and not just the congestion pricing proposal that is getting most of the attention, but also waiving the city’s sales tax on hybrid cars, improving the fuel efficiency of taxis and other for-hire vehicles, and cleaning up diesel trucks and buses.
This post is already too long, so if you want to read the details, please check out my article in its entirety.
And, if you want to learn more about the City’s implementation of its plan thus far, chec out the City’s October 22 status report.
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- Rich Kassel
- Senior Attorney and Director, Clean Fuels and Vehicles Project
- New York City
- I came to NRDC in 1991 on a three-year grant, and never left. Over the...
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