Could New York City Cut Emissions 90% By 2050?

First time accepted submitter jscheib writes "According to Will Oremus in Slate, a report released today finds that 'New York City could slash its emissions by a whopping 90 percent by 2050 without any radical new technologies, without cutting back on creature comforts, and maybe even without breaking its budget.' The key elements are insulating buildings to cut energy needs, converting to (mostly) electric equipment, and then using carbon-free electricity to supply the small amount of energy still needed. Oremus notes that including energy savings would reduce the net price tag to something more like $20 billion."

Re:It's Been Done Elsewhere!

[jklovanc]

According to this article [dteenergy.com] Detroit power consumption has dropped by 10% in eleven years. I would not call that plummeting..

38% energy savings

[Namarrgon]

That's what they achieved when they retrofitted [rmi.org] the Empire State Building. Paid for itself in only 3 years, and now delivers $4.4M savings annually.

Insulation, smart energy controls etc do cost money, but the energy savings can more than pay [rmi.org] for it over the life of the building. Better designs can save up to 69% of energy costs. And there's a lot of ripple-effect savings too, by reducing emissions and freeing up capital.

Of course, getting completely off coal, oil & gas will eventually cut emissions to zero, but there's a more immediate & guaranteed payoff simply by improving efficiencies.

Re:It's Been Done Elsewhere!

[BlueStrat]

In Detroit. The population's gone from 1M to 800k in twenty years, and energy consumption has plummeted. New York can emulate this success just by continuing it's current direction.

Yup. I live a little over an hour away from Detroit (thank goodness!).

Want to see what over 40 years of total Liberal/Progressive Democrat and labor union control (Detroit was actually the centerpiece of the Democrat Progressive "Model Cities" program...Google it) looks like?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hhJ_49leBw [youtube.com]

That was a couple years ago. It's worse now, and no indications anything will change for the better. It's also the place to go to kill someone, as around 60%-70% of homicides in Detroit go unsolved.

I had to go there a couple months ago. Do you know there are now parts of Detroit that have big freaking *signs* up, like near a war-zone, warning people entering that they are on their own, that police and emergency services will NOT respond in large and ever-growing areas in the city?

WTF!?

To those who always throw out the "go live in Somalia" in response to those desiring a smaller, less intrusive and abusive government, I say "I don't have to "go" anywhere! Your ideas are *already* bringing Somalia to US! Just look at Detroit!"

I'm just waiting for Somali-style pirates to start operating on the Great Lakes from the harbors in Detroit. That is, if they aren't already, and we just haven't learned of it yet.

Strat

Re:Dreamy

[Namarrgon]

They already refitted the Empire State Building, and achieved payoff in only 3 years. Now it's saving $4.4M/year of pure gravy.

It can certainly cost millions, but the returns can be much more, over the life of the building.

Re:And pigs might fly...

[c0lo]

We might also move to 100% green energy if we carpet the entire surface of the earth with solar cells. Until people reduce and make their own efforts to reduce there energy needs through economic (if you don't save on costs or get paid, it is not reasonable to ask people to change their habits) means then it wont work.

You would only need to cover some percentage of desert area (not even all of it: do a computation using the solar constant [wikipedia.org], total world energy production [enerdata.net] and assume only 12% conversion efficiency for PV - you'll be surprised of how low the percentage of the world surface would need to be covered by PV-es. I've done this computation in the past). The only engineering problem is the transport of the energy around the globe.