From The Mayor's Desk ...
City Will Lead Fight Against Global Warming

As one of the world's biggest cities - and a city that others often look to for leadership and inspiration - New York has a responsibility to confront the issue of global warming head on. Scientists around the world have reached a consensus that climate change is a real issue with real consequences. And as a coastal city, we could feel those consequences more than most.

A few months ago, I set a bold but achievable goal of cutting the city's greenhouse gas emissions by 30% by the year 2030, when our population is expected to top 9 million people. Last week, we released the first-ever comprehensive inventory of the amount of greenhouse gases we produce - because by understanding the volume and sources of the city's emissions, we can design effective strategies to reduce them.

The inventory had a mixture of good and bad news. It showed that the city produced 58.3 million metric tons of greenhouse gases in 2005 - which represented only about 1% of all emissions produced in the United States. The energy consumed by New York's roughly 950,000 buildings was respon-sible for almost 80% of those greenhouse gases - while most of the remaining emissions were produced by cars, trucks, and other vehicles. However, the city's emissions have increased by approximately 9% over the previous 10 years - and that's a trend we've got to reverse.

How? Well, we've already made a good start. By using cleaner fuels, in-stalling energy-efficient traffic signals, planting trees on our streets, and adding alternative fuel vehicles to our fleet, City government has managed to avoid producing some 446,000 tons of carbon emissions a year. By improving energy and water conservation in many public building projects, and by implementing a new system of transferring our garbage by trains and barges - instead of diesel-burning trucks - we expect to avoid producing another 404,000 tons of emissions per year over the next decade.

This is part - but only part - of our effort to reduce greenhouse gases by 30%. We have devised a number of other innovative strategies to accomplish our goals - and we will unveil those next Sunday, Earth Day, along with other wide-reaching proposals to guide the city's growth over the coming decades in an environmentally sound way.

We understand that some of the actions we'll need to take won't be easy - but we can no longer put those decisions off to another day. Only by working together, and by thinking innovatively, acting boldly, and investing in the future, can we ensure that we leave our children and grandchildren a cleaner, healthier New York.

Reader Comments

No comments have been posted. Be the first!

Other Stories With Comments:
Article	Comments
Mill Basin Filmmaker Shoots Latest Movie On Local Streets	2
Golden City: Bought, Burned, Bought Again	1