Until the Next Storm

This essay is part of a series in which writers reflect on Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration as the mayor of New York City. 

Climate policy didn’t feature much in this mayoral election, possibly because much of the exciting legislation necessary to start moving New York toward a carbon-free future has already been passed. The Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), signed in 2019, which commits the state to net zero emissions by 2050, is one of the country’s most aggressive climate laws. So is New York City’s Local Law 97, passed the same year, which sets increasingly strict emission limits over time for buildings—which account for over two thirds of local emissions—if they rise above a certain square footage. The All-Electric Buildings Act, a state law passed in 2023, requires most new buildings to use electric heating and appliances. The task that falls to the city and state’s current leaders is equally important but far less politically rewarding: implementing the regulations as they go into effect, even as developers and building owners start to dig in their heels.

Governor Kathy Hochul has recently caved to pressure from builders and upstate Republicans on several significant points, as outlets such as New York Focus have reported: citing “affordability” and a “realistic approach,” she said she was having second thoughts about the All-Electric Buildings Act and agreed to delay implementing it until a lengthy industry lawsuit wends its way through the courts. She also abruptly shelved a cap-and-invest program that was intended to be her signature contribution to meeting the deadlines of the CLCPA. This has left New York two years overdue in issuing regulations that would ensure it achieves that goal; a state supreme court judge ruled in October that it was in violation of the law. Meanwhile, in November Hochul approved a much-contested gas pipeline favored by Trump—hardly in the spirit of compliance with the CLCPA.

As for the city’s Local Law 97, decarbonizing a wide range of buildings is such a complex task that mayors have a fair amount of influence over how it plays out. The Adams administration softened the law’s provisions, allowing a two-year delay of fines for any building owners who could prove they were making “good faith efforts” to get into compliance with the regulations initially planned for 2024. Perhaps more significantly, Adams gave owners fairly wide latitude to offset the emissions from their electricity use by purchasing Renewable Energy Credits, which support renewable energy projects based in or providing energy to the city—a strategy that owners prefer because it’s generally cheaper than significantly retrofitting their own structures, but that doesn’t help reduce energy use by improving building efficiency. Buying such credits could become a major method by which owners meet the 2030 guidelines, unless the City Council sets tighter limits on what percentage of emissions can be offset, as it attempted to do earlier this year.

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who had a strong record on climate while serving in the state assembly (he successfully helped fight off a fracked gas plant planned for Astoria, though a bill he sponsored to ban the construction of all fracked gas plants in the state failed to pass), has promised “greater enforcement” of Local Law 97. And yet, ever a proponent of the carrot over the stick, he most often talks about extending an existing tax break to help middle-income homeowners who find themselves struggling to meet the requirements. That proposal is sensible enough, but it remains to be seen how Mamdani will respond in the face of the far more coordinated and strenuous opposition that the real estate industry will surely mount as the stringent limits planned for 2030 start to loom. About 90 percent of large buildings are currently in compliance with the 2024 limits; only 43 percent are in compliance with the 2030 ones.

Mamdani’s favored climate policy proposal, and the most detailed—beyond his famous promise to make buses fast and free, which is a climate proposal insofar as it is projected to modestly decrease the number of cars on the road—is to transform five hundred public schools into green showpieces, addressing carbon emissions, pollution, environmental justice, and adaptation all at once. Among other things, the proposal would entail installing solar panels on the schools’ roofs, upgrading their HVAC systems, and transforming their asphalt yards into green spaces, which could not just reduce inequities in access to such spaces but also have a cooling effect and help prevent flooding. Fifty schools, Mamdani proposes, would become resilience hubs where people could take refuge during heat waves or storms. All this, he says, would create 15,000 union jobs per year.

It’s a proposal in the spirit of the Green New Deal, an enticing vision that gives people a reason to feel excited about climate policy, rather than browbeaten by it—likely no coincidence, given that Rhiana Gunn-Wright, one of the architects of the national Green New Deal, is on his transition team. But it’s far from a comprehensive plan: New York’s next superstorm hangs uneasily just out of mind. Two people died in flooded basements in heavy rain this past October, and recent projections estimate that a relatively weak hurricane, hitting at the wrong angle, could cause $20 billion in property damage and leave neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant under eleven feet of water.

Any solution at the necessary scale would involve years of concerted and innovative building to reimagine the city’s hubristic relationship with our watery environs. It would cost well upwards of $100 billion, require extensive coordination between the city, state, and federal governments, and mean convincing some not-insignificant number of people to leave their homes, ideally by providing them with the financial means to do so. That’s all to say, it’s a problem no one is eager to touch.