NEW YORK CITY — New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters on Sunday during the People’s Climate March that the city’s private sector buildings may be mandated to be retrofitted to adapt to the city’s green house gas emission reduction plan.
“We are now the largest city on the earth to adopt the 80/50 standard. We are going to retrofit all of our public buildings. We are going to work with the public sector. We are going to work with the private sector to retrofit their buildings. I’ve said very clearly, I think the private sector is ready and willing. I think it’s in all of our interests,” he said. “It’s a matter of survival. We’ll work with them. We’ll incentivize. We’ll support. If that is not moving fast enough, we will move to mandates because we have to get there. This is a matter of survival.”
Mayor de Blasio announced he was committed to an 80 percent reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, beginning with sweeping regulations among buildings in the city.
According to the mayor’s office, the plan will be implemented via a “Compstat-like portal at the Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, in partnership with the Mayor’s Office of Operations and the Department of Citywide Administrative Services.”
These offices and operations, according to the mayor’s administration, will “track the City and the private sector’s progress towards these goals with periodic updates and a public-facing web presence to report on progress each year.”
Among other goals, the mayor’s plan expects every city building with significant energy use to be scheduled for an upgrade by 2025 and “challenge the City’s largest institutions and leaders in the private sector to commit to deep carbon reductions of 30 to 50 percent over ten years.”
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