Why one building matters—and why your voice does, too
We’re getting into the part of the year when I am loath to leave my habitat, a little Catskill mountain village at 1300 feet above sea level. The weather in Delaware County is often atrocious, but right now it’s tough to beat. The hills are leafing out, the lilacs are at their peak, and the air smells fresh and crisp.
I did have to come down off the mountain last Thursday, which I spent tooling around the Hudson Valley at one climate thing or another. First up was the New Paltz’s new energy-efficient firehouse, where local officials celebrated the near-completion of the building—and held it up as an example of what’s possible, if New York starts putting real muscle behind its climate goals.
I wrote for The River about what the firehouse means, both to the community and to larger climate problems. That firehouse might be only one building, but it stands for something momentous: a shift in the way we build new things in New York. On Thursday morning, while New Paltz’s fire chief and elected officials celebrated the new station, the state Assembly was holding a hearing on the All-Electric Building Act, which would raise the bar for new buildings in the state, requiring them to be built to a higher efficiency threshold and heated with electric heat pumps.
Putting electric heat in a new building is a lot easier and more cost-effective than weatherizing and retrofitting an older one. If New York doesn’t pass some sort of legislation soon to shift its building codes away from fossil fuels, a lot of the buildings that get built over the next few years are going to be looking at expensive rehab jobs over the next few decades—unless the state just gives up on the idea of taking climate action entirely. Buildings are the single largest contributor to the state’s annual greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for about a third of the overall pie.
There’s a lot of talk these days in climate circles about how individual action doesn’t matter compared to policy and corporate action. A stat that gets thrown around a lot is that 100 companies are responsible for 71 percent of emissions. That might be true on one level, but it obscures the power and the responsibility involved in local decisionmaking: Local decisions, and even individual ones, can mean the difference between a building that locks in tons upon tons of future greenhouse gas emissions for decades, and one that runs clean and green. New Paltz flexed that power in the firehouse planning process, despite pushback from state planners, and they’ll be reaping the benefits for decades in decreased emissions and air pollution as well as utility bills that will be a fraction of what they would have been otherwise. It matters.
Later that afternoon, I headed to Peekskill, where the state Climate Action Council was holding a public hearing on its draft plan to decarbonize New York’s economy over the next few decades. I hadn’t been to any of the state climate hearings in person, and I wanted to hear what the Hudson Valley had to say.
It was heartening. Not because everyone agreed: There was a lot of disagreement in that room about what was most important to protect, and what New York should prioritize in taking climate action. Nuclear or renewables? Union jobs or an end to lifespan-shortening air pollution? Can we find ways to move beyond pitting the priorities we care about against each other?
What struck me most about that hearing was that the vast majority of the speakers, who came from different parts of the region and different walks of life, did not come with a set of identical talking points handed to them by a larger organization. So many of them spoke from their expertise: as local government representatives, as community members, as people employed in renewable energy or fossil fuels.
As a reminder of just how local these issues are, many speakers at last Thursday’s hearing called for a shutdown of the Wheelabrator, the trash-burning facility in Peekskill that incinerates most of Westchester County’s trash, and contributes to a lot of health issues in the surrounding community. Peekskill is a “disadvantaged community” on the front lines of climate change, and like all such communities, Peekskill stands to see significant human health benefits if New York moves away from burning things in the pursuit of climate action.
Next Tuesday at 5pm, I’m hosting an online panel conversation for The River about how you can weigh in on New York’s climate plans, featuring a few folks who have been deeply involved in shaping those plans. I’m hoping for a similar energy in that event: people bringing their expertise, their priorities, and their worries about how climate plans might unfold to a good-faith conversation. We’ll see how it goes.
See you Tuesday, friends.
-Lissa Harris
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