The Big Apple’s 1 Percent
Photo by Hugh Sitton/Getty Images
Is it just me or is it getting hotter in here?
New York City produces nearly 1 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions—an amount comparable with that of Ireland or Portugal—according to a study commissioned by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “You have to have a real baseline or we’re just talking past each other as to what works and what doesn’t work—we won’t ever know whether we really made a difference,” Bloomberg was quoted by the Associated Press as saying.
The study was conducted by the New York City Office of Long-term Planning and Sustainability to assess the city’s progress in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 30 percent by 2030.
The town that was so nice they named it twice produced a net emission of 58.3 million metric tons of greenhouse gases in 2005. The biggest gas belchers are the city’s hundreds of thousands of buildings, which consume enough electricity, natural gas, fuel oil, and steam to contribute 79 percent of the city’s total emissions. The study also found that emissions increased by more than 8 percent between 1995 and 2005, though the city’s focus on environmentally friendly initiatives appears to have helped stabilize emissions rates of late. “Each one of these things really does make a difference, and they add up,” our chief knish said.
Still, in New Yorkers’ defense, the city does harbor 2.7 percent of the country’s population—8.2 million of 300 million—with the average New Yorker contributing less than a third of the emissions generated by the typical American, largely because of the popularity of the mass-transit system.
