Back to Mannahata Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Utopian Plan to Decarbonize New York.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/back-to-mannahata-1411687744
This week’s United Nations anticarbon summit featured more than the usual share of political fun like drum troupes and a Wall Street rally with the official slogan of “Stop Capitalism.” But the most amusing gesture may have been Mayor Bill de Blasio‘s pledge to chop New York City emissions by 80% by 2050.
“We know humanity is facing an existential threat,” Mr. de Blasio said at the Turtle Bay event, giving even Al Gore competition for climate calamity. “No one is spared. And our mutual need to survive should instill in us a kind of unity we so rarely experience.”
The city will no doubt need unity, not to mention a few spare trillion dollars of capital spending. Most of greater New York’s emissions are the result of energy consumption by the city’s office and residential buildings. Mr. de Blasio plans to get started by retrofitting city-owned property such as public housing to be more energy efficient, such as installing better insulation and solar panels on the roof. Private real-estate owners are merely encouraged to go green for now, but the Mayor promised at a press conference that “if we don’t see progress, we will certainly move to mandate.”
The carbon levels Mr. de Blasio favors were probably last seen in New York around the time of the Civil War or before, given that the region was until recently home to so much 20th-century heavy industry. On present trend, metro emissions will reach 55.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent by 2050. Mr. de Blasio favors 10.2 million tons, which in today’s world is equal to the annual energy use of about 3.4 million average homes. Barring a technology miracle, the mayor will have to stop not merely capitalism but the laws of thermodynamics.
Such antirealism is the hallmark of the climate lobby, but the irony is particularly thick in the case of Mr. de Blasio, whose main theme is income inequality and New York’s “two cities.” Who does he think is going to pay for his green utopia? It won’t be the Manhattan rich but the poor and middle class.
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