Scholars often characterize local action to mitigate climate change as a puzzle. No locality’s greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) are sufficiently large to materially affect climate change; cities that reduce their emissions will therefore bear the costs of doing so, while deriving few climate benefits.
This Article analyzes why New York City has taken on the task of reducing GHGs, and the evolution of its policies in the first two decades of the 21st century. This Article argues that the city’s initial climate measures imposed few costs on private actors and were largely linked to the traditional local government objective of promoting economic growth. In contrast, the city’s move in 2019 to impose legally binding requirements on local building owners to decarbonize their buildings portend material costs and cannot easily be explained in economic terms. These building mandates arose from the work of committed policymakers inside city government and the city council, and the grassroots activism of community groups motivated to oppose President Trump and his stance on climate change.
With a new, more real estate-friendly mayor in office and a difficult economic climate in the city, there is uncertainty about whether the city will enforce the building mandates. However, federal and New York State actions since the city passed its building mandates in 2019, such as the federal Inflation Reduction Act and state-led electricity decarbonization, may reduce the costs to building owners of lowering building emissions, and therefore increase the political and economic viability of New York City’s building mandates. In sum, the history of New York City’s decarbonization efforts emphasizes the potential for local action to address climate change and the difficult political economy of such action.
Published in Fordham Urban Law Journal