Green Building: The Next Steps To Being Green

New high-performing and environmentally sensitive skyscrapers increasingly grace the New York City skyline. But for the city to truly benefit from the energy savings, health benefits and reduction in carbon emissions from green buildings, the next step will be to retrofit existing buildings and build cleaner power plants, said a panel of experts organized by the the Green Building Council of New York on Monday evening.

Developers are increasingly aware of the economic benefits from building green, but retrofitting buildings to meet industry standards for green buildings doesn’t yet make economic sense for them, said William Rudin, president of Rudin Management. “How do we get to the point where small, medium and large sized businesses do the right thing? I don’t have the answer,” he wondered out loud.

But Ashok Gupta, an energy economist from the NRDC, countered that when one flips the question to ask whether it makes sense for tenants and the city as a whole, it changes the whole equation. This will decide, he said, how much government money goes into energy efficiency programs.

Shifting the discussion, Rudin pointed out that while everybody talks about buildings’ effect on the environment, it is the power plants providing energy for them that are the root cause of most of the pollution. He called for the construction of new, efficient power plants and Gupta agreed.

But Ed Ott, a labor leader who heads the NYC Apollo Alliance, a coalition designed to link labor and environmental issues, noted that power plants are historically imposed on low-income neighborhoods. To gain the support of the working class, he said, new plants would need to be equally spread throughout the city. “If we are going to have an energy efficient society, we are going to have to share the burdens,” he declared.