Steve Cohen's Blog

Earlier this week, New York Times reporter Felicity Barringer filed an excellent story on San Francisco’s successful waste management strategy.

The story discussed San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s zeal for keeping garbage out of landfills. Currently, his city keeps 70 percent of its disposable garbage out of landfills.

You might think that would be enough, but it’s not. He is about to propose legislation to mandate recycling of cans, bottles, paper, yard waste and food scraps. If you don’t recycle, the city won’t pick up the rest of your garbage.

How much of New York City’s waste is kept out of landfills? About 30 percent. Of course, that puts us ahead of Boston at 16 percent and Houston at less than 3 percent.  read more »

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the pandering Presidential politics of Clinton, McCain and Obama. McCain pandered on the gas tax and Hillary and Barack pandered on trade.

A few days ago, in a disheartening display of more of the same, Clinton joined McCain in supporting the suspension of the federal gasoline tax this summer. In contrast, Obama continued to oppose the tax suspension. With key primaries coming up in Indiana and North Carolina and in a clumsy attempt to court the hard-pressed middle class, Clinton has abandoned principle for a moment of possible political gain. Obama, who seems to be remembering that he is always at his best when he levels with the voters, deserves credit for doing the right thing on this issue.

This latest bit of political gamesmanship is part of Clinton’s newest attack line: Barak Obama is out of touch with the concerns of average Americans. After a year of intense campaigning and constant travel I’m quite confident that both Senator Clinton and Senator Obama are fully aware of the concerns of the American public. It’s a contrived argument—and Hillary knows it is. Anyone who gets in a car or doesn’t have a million bucks in the bank knows that the middle class is feeling the squeeze. The answer to that squeeze is policies that generate real wealth and then work to ensure that the middle class shares in the wealth they help generate.

Revitalizing the economy won’t be accomplished by sending rebate checks in the mail or defunding our infrastructure. We need to invest in science and technology, build a fossil fuel-free green economy and help working Americans and their kids get the education they need to participate in the global economy.

The war in Iraq is another drain on our economy, as amply demonstrated by my Columbia colleague, Joseph Stiglitz in his new book, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (co authored with Linda Bilmes). Clinton and Obama both know this. While I realize it’s too much to ask that the Presidential campaign be used to educate the country about the real challenges we face, the candidates could at least avoid misleading the American public.

The gasoline tax is needed to build and maintain our roads and bridges. Lower fuel taxes will encourage more driving and add to air pollution and global warming. A lower gasoline tax is bad public policy and it really saddens me to see someone I admire as much as Hillary Clinton sink to this level to try to squeeze out a few more votes in this campaign.

I suspect that most people can see through these blatant political maneuvers and they don’t really work. People think that gasoline is too expensive, but they also know we need to figure out a way to reduce our addiction to it. We have had seven years of politics that appealed to self interest and fear. The result of that has been an endless war and an economy on the skids.

Thee surest sign that Senator Clinton is on the wrong side of this issue was President Bush’s announcement in the Rose Garden on Tuesday that he was open to the idea of suspending the gasoline tax. Of course, the President thinks the real answer to high energy prices is additional oil exploration and refining capacity. Perhaps his Texas oil friends are envious of the profits being made by BP PLC and Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Europe's two biggest oil producers, who recently announced combined first quarter profits of $17 billion. We have paid a heavy price by allowing our energy policies to be dominated by the oil industry.

We need fresh thinking and honesty from our politicians on energy policy. We see signs of honesty from Obama, less and less of it from Clinton, little of it from McCain and of course none of it from President Bush.

When we walk down Broadway in Manhattan, we sometimes forget that New York is virtually surrounded by water. In fact, the five boroughs have 578 miles of shoreline. If global warming ends up melting enough sea ice at the poles to cause the sea level to rise, New York City is in a world of trouble.  read more »

A little more than a year ago, Mayor Michael Bloomberg launched his pathbreaking "PlaNYC 2030" urban sustainability plan. According to the city’s own progress report on the plan’s first year:

The implementation of PlaNYC's 127 initiatives requires the effort of more than 20 City agencies; the help of our Sustainability Advisory Board; partners and supporters from all across New York City; and close cooperation with the City Council and other elected officials. In the first year since the release of the plan, we completed rezonings, planted 54,484 trees, moved our taxis and black cars toward fuel efficiency, encouraged bicycling with 60 new lane miles, and engaged New York City in the most significant transportation discussion in a generation.

   read more »

In his ceaseless effort to maintain his record as the worst President on the environment since the creation of the EPA in 1970, President George W. Bush has somehow managed to outdo himself with his latest Rose Garden pronouncement on climate change. He has decided that we should continue to increase emissions of greenhouse gasses, but at a slower rate of growth than today and in 2025 we should finally stop the growth of these dangerous emissions.

You can tell the President’s team must have lost some of its spin doctors, because this latest effort in environmental public relations had no snappy title. Earlier in his administration we saw the “Healthy Forest” initiative that was a thinly disguised attack on the nation’s wilderness; and the “Clear Skies” program that was a clumsy and ultimately unsuccessful effort to dismantle the nation’s air pollution controls. Now, I propose we call this latest endeavor the “Floating Cities Initiative” because that is what we are going to need to survive this pathetic excuse for a policy on an issue as significant as global climate change.  read more »

We may be seeing the limits to public-private partnerships in park development.

The plan to use funds from the development of the West Side waterfront to finance new park construction and maintenance seems to be collapsing. While this doesn’t mean an end to these partnerships, it is a signal that public amenities still require public investment. There really is no such thing as a free lunch.

The latest episode in the Pier 40 saga took place on March 28, when Hudson River Park officials rejected a plan by Related Companies to build a $625 million performing arts complex on Pier 40, located at West Houston Street.  read more »

I don’t know why it still surprises me, but the political pandering of presidential politics continues to reach new and even lower levels. With bridges falling down, potholes unfilled and mass transit never mentioned, John McCain wants to suspend the 18.4-cent-a-gallon federal gas tax from Memorial Day until Labor Day this summer.

McCain’s idea of an economic stimulus is that we all get in our cars and take a ride. Why worry about global warming and collapsing infrastructure? Let’s all hit the road!

It may be painful to hear, but America’s gasoline tax is too low. It should pay for all the costs of road construction and maintenance and it doesn’t even come close to covering our needs.  read more »

Last week Mayor Bloomberg announced that the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS) would request proposals from private developers to enter into a 20-year deal with the city to buy, install, own and maintain solar panels on city-owned buildings in New York’s five boroughs.

The goal is to deliver two megawatts (MW) of solar power to city-owned buildings. In 2007 New York City was selected by the U.S. Department of Energy (D.O.E) as one of 13 cities to help build the country’s solar-energy market. As part of this partnership, the city set a goal of increasing its photovoltaic cell capacity from 1.1 MW in 2005 to 8.1 MW by 2015.

This is of course a small drop in a very large bucket.  read more »

I stumbled into my first class in Environmental Politics at SUNY/Buffalo in the Fall of 1975 and first went to work for the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1977, and if you told me back then that thirty years later they would replace pickles and blintzes with eco-fashion on the Lower East Side—I would have thought you were nuts. I also would not have had the slightest idea what an eco-fashion was.

Fortunately, Sara Schonhardt, a graduate student at Columbia University, joins me on this piece, and helps explain what it means to shop green.

It turns out that New York City is fast developing a green shopping district. To learn more about green commerce in New York City checkout the Green Apple Map.

Venture into many of the small shops between East Houston and Delancey and you’re likely to find a new world of environmentally friendly fare, from leather-less shoes to organic stockings to dairy-free cheesecake.

As Jill Fehrenbacher, a green-design consultant and graduate of Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning, told us by e-mail: “I live in the lower east side, and I think my little neighborhood is the center of the universe for eco-friendly shopping. Within a three block radius we have three eco-friendly clothing boutiques – Kaight, Ekovaruhuset and Organic Avenue; a vegan shoe store, Moo Shoes; Whole Foods Market; and tons of vegetarian/vegan restaurants, including Teany, Tien Garden and Babycakes.”  read more »

"Shelly just came out of our conference and said our conference does not have the support to bring this to the floor,” Democratic Assemblyman Mark Weprin yesterday told reporters after a meeting with Speaker Sheldon Silver and Assembly democrats about Mayor Bloomberg's congestion-pricing bill. “I want to be clear that the conference was overwhelmingly against it,” he further said.

To say that congestion pricing died because the Assembly members were against it is of course true, but not the point. When items are important to Speaker Silver he has this habit of “leading” his conference. He will maintain that his style is to engage his members and compromise, and his ability to bully the legislature is overstated. That is, of course, ridiculous—the Speaker usually gets what he wants. The bottom line is that Shelly Silver killed congestion pricing.  read more »