Q. How did you end up in the role you’re in now? Have you always been environmentally aware?
A. I’ve been with the Bloomberg administration for three years now. I was hired after I was a transportation consultant at a consulting firm, McKinsey & Company. Prior to that, I was in graduate school and at the U.S. Department of Transportation during the Clinton administration. So I think I’ve always been environmentally aware, because I was always interested in transportation policy. I would not say I’ve always been an environmental advocate, and one of the interesting things I’ve had to learn coming into this job is this realization that transportation’s really important, but in terms of energy and carbon footprint, it’s mainly in buildings.
Q. Did you envision yourself working on green stuff when you graduated from graduate school?
A. Well, efficient transportation is inherently good for the environment. I always thought that well designed transportation can be good for the planet.
Q. Are you from New York City?
A. I’m from the City and the suburbs. Born in the City, grew up mainly in Westchester and a little bit in Europe.
Q. It sounds like you grew up in places that are “more green” than New York City.
There’s more greenery, but you know one of the key things we’ve learned at PlaNYC is that cities are far more efficient than suburban areas. People walk. People take transit. We live in smaller apartments, and apartments naturally insulate each other whereas in family homes you have more walls exposed to the weather. So where I grew up had more trees, but I don’t think it was “more green.” In fact, the average New Yorker has a carbon footprint that’s only one third that of the average American.
Q. Is that because most New Yorkers don’t drive?
A. It has to do with driving. We’re transit dependent already—even when we do drive, our distances are shorter. The average New Yorker lives in a smaller space than the average person who lives in a big house in the suburbs. And it's because big buildings naturally insulate each other. Apartments don’t have as many outside walls.
And New York City gets almost no electricity from coal, only a very small amount. Coal is the biggest cause of carbon emissions in the United States.
Q. What does your office do exactly and how do you work with other City agencies?
A. We didn’t develop PlaNYC alone. There were a couple of people at various agencies within the City, and our national and state advisory board, and non-profit experts. Since then we’ve been implementing the plan. Now, it varies; there are 127 different initiatives, and each of them has a slightly different implementation challenge. When we look at something on one extreme, like upgrading the eight regional parks that were in the plan, there isn’t much of a need for my office to be involved because it’s something Parks knows how to do and can set out on their own to do it. On the other extreme, there are certain things where nobody is set up to do that within the City government, to do a carbon inventory for the City or begin climate change adaptation. There was no obvious agency to do that, and therefore, we have to put in virtually all of the work on that, consulting with others of course, but it really falls here. There are many other issues that fall to Transportation or City Buildings, for example, where there has to be some level of partnership.
Q. You’ve got 127 initiatives for PlaNYC. Can you talk about some of the ones that are related to schools?
A. Among the ones that most directly affect schools are the Schoolyards and Playgrounds Initiatives, where we have more than 90 playgrounds that have already been or are currently being renovated so they can be open to use after-hours, on weekends, and during the summer. This automatically increases the access New York City children have to playgrounds.
Another one, for example, is our MillionTrees initiative. You know, our schools don’t exist in isolation; they exist in neighborhoods. What we’re able to do with this initiative is, among other things, fully stock every place in New York City with a sidewalk tree by the end of eight years from now. That means roughly 210,000 or 220,000 of the million trees will be on sidewalks. The first neighborhoods targeted for tree planting have very high rates of asthma attacks—we call them the Trees for Public Health neighborhoods. Those are the places where, for the first two years, we’ve targeted as much of our tree planting as possible.
If you go back two years, neighborhoods like Far Rockaway and East New York had virtually no sidewalk trees. Today they’re getting to the point where they’re almost fully stocked. That kind of change can really make a difference in air quality since the leaves trap particles in the air and clean the air. We know that heat waves can trigger respiratory challenges, and with all of those trees on the street, we’ve helped to cool the air on a hot summer day.
Q. What do you hear from people about the effort? What’s the reaction typically like?
A. Many people are aware of the plan, but something as big as PlaNYC is very difficult to grasp all at once. It’s hard to say that PlaNYC affects every New Yorker on a daily basis, so I think people relate to individual components.
We’re doing a wide, ambitious agenda. MillionTrees, when we come into somebody’s neighborhood, when we’re adding trees to somebody’s park or upgrading their playgrounds, people really relate to the plan and a portion of the environmental community really gets PlaNYC. People really relate to the individual components they care about or that really affect them.
Q. You recently made an announcement with the Department of Education about benchmarking energy efficiency at our schools. What does that mean exactly?
A. The benchmarking is a way to measure how efficient any building is compared to what it might be or compared to what other buildings are doing. One of the issues is that until you understand the true efficiency of a building, you don’t know whether you are spending too much or too little on energy. If I tell you my electricity bill is $100 a month, you don’t know whether that’s efficient or not—you don’t know whether it’s a single person living in a studio, where $100 a month is very inefficient, or if I’ve got a family of four and $100 a month is very efficient.
Buildings are the same way. A school can, for example, have summer school with air conditioning. That’s clearly going to have a different energy profile from a school that’s only used eight or nine months out of the year. You have to take that into account, and the benchmarking tool allows you to do that. Therefore, you can begin to understand if it’s an efficient, highly used building or an inefficient one. That will then allow the Department of Education to make decisions about where to invest in upgrades that will make the schools more efficient, help lower the cost to the taxpayer and therefore reduce pressure on the budget. It’ll also help educate the kids because students are going to be able to find out how their school stacks up.
Q. What is the benchmarking tool? Is it a computer program?
A. It’s a computer program that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency developed, and it’s available for free online. If you’ve got a building, you can set up an account using some data including your street address and see how your building stacks up. It’s kind of like filling out TurboTax online.
Q. What kinds of things can New Yorkers do at home to become more energy efficient?
A. One of the things that I find interesting is that people often feel like “green” means expensive or cutting edge. Most of the things that we should be doing are actually quite boring. They require us to think and do, for example, changing your light bulbs to compact fluorescent bulbs. If all New Yorkers changed their light bulbs to compact fluorescent bulbs we could run the subway system on the saved energy.
Q. Really? That’s amazing.
A. That’s because something like 20 percent of our total city consumption is from lighting. Some buildings already use fluorescent bulbs, but an awful lot of residential buildings still have the incandescent bulbs. They’re in your home so change those.
Think about insulation, if you’ve got a crack around your air conditioner, then you just put some weather stripping around that. That can make a really big difference, both on a hot summer’s day and a cold winter’s night.
If you buy a quart of milk at the store, often times the clerk is just going to put it in a plastic bag whether you need it or not. Do you really need a bag to carry one item? You know, making small decisions actually can have a huge cumulative impact, it can add up to an awful lot.
Q. How about you at home? Do you do anything unusual?
A. I don’t think I do anything unusual. I get green power so I voluntarily pay a little more in my electric bill to get electricity from wind farms Upstate. That’s a personal investment I’ve decided to make. But what I really think is important is doing things that New Yorkers do: walking, not taking cars when possible, being conscious of when you take plastic bags and changing the light bulbs. Those are things that I do because it makes sense for everyone.
Q. How do you think the work you’re doing will shape the way New York City operates in the future?
A. Our overall goal is to make sure that the City can grow and that our quality of life will be good. And being energy efficient is making everything we love about New York even better. It means taking the trains we rely on and making their service better. It means making neighborhoods that have great sidewalks more pleasant to walk on so people don’t feel the need to drive as much. It means taking our parks and investing in them and making them greener. All these things, along with being more energy efficient, literally save us money. Therefore we can be economically competitive, have a better quality of life—have a better New York City all at the same time.
Q. Earth Day was last week. Did you do anything special? Was there a big celebration?
A. We had a very big milestone, in a couple of ways. First of all, we issued our annual report. We also supported and passed a rule that requires a NYC progress report every year on Earth Day. Mayor Bloomberg believes strongly that we need to tell the public how we’re doing. This year’s report shows that we’re ahead schedule or on time with two-thirds of our initiatives. That means 85 out of 127 initiatives are on time. Then the other thing we did on Earth Day yesterday was announce a major component of the plan. We call it the Greener, Greater Buildings Initiative. We’ll end up requiring existing buildings around the City to make energy-saving investments over the next 12 years that will pay for themselves.
Q. When you go out and talk about PlaNYC, what kind of questions do you get from the public?
A. There are a couple of things people say, a couple initiatives that catch people’s imaginations. It helps me see what people really relate to. Hybrid taxis. Everybody gets hybrid taxis, right? This iconic NYC vehicle?
One question now is that there’s a recession, can we afford being sustainable? And the answer to that of course is now more than ever we have to do this because sustainability is about being competitive, meaning we should save money by saving energy.
Another question I get is what should individuals do? I often get people who say my apartment looked into getting solar or wind or whatever and it was way too expensive. I always tell them that, you know, you shouldn’t be thinking about that unless you’re doing everything else. It’s the small, boring, cheap, but highly effective stuff that we need to focus on. Don’t be distracted by people who will tell you that green means expensive price tags that only rich people can afford. That’s not true, and that’s getting green wrong.
Q. Have you met Bette Midler? Do you get that question a lot?
A. I have, but, it’s funny, I don’t really get that question. I get the question of have I met Al Gore.
Q. Have you met Al Gore?
A. I have. And he’s an even more powerful speaker in person than in the movie An Inconvenient Truth. It’s nice to know that a policy wonk with a PowerPoint presentation can win both an Oscar and a Nobel Prize.