City co-op and condo owners want relief from the city’s punishing and costly green-building mandates, Local Law 97.
Join the club — and if you really want change, start calling out the entire scheme as insane.
The law requires larger city buildings to cut their carbon emissions 40% by 2030 and 80% by 2050. Fines for noncompliance can reach $1 million a year.
It’s not easy for older buildings: The Empire State Building’s owners spent $13.4 million for a green refit but still haven’t met the 2030 requirement.
And city residents in condo and co-op buildings (the law will eventually hit more than 12,000 of them, with 832,000-plus units) are collectively staring at fines as high as $900 million a year by 2030, with some getting hit next year as the requirements kick in.
But complying means huge hits to monthly maintenance fees, or huge one-time assessments (maybe a series of them).
One group, Homeowners for a Stronger New York, is seeking state legislation to make the city provide property-tax breaks to help offset compliance costs.
Landlords of rental buildings should get the same break, but they’re fighting on multiple fronts and of course progressives see them as the enemy.
And any tax credit only shifts the burden onto the city budget, meaning service cuts or more tax hikes.
The real issue is the climate law itself: It’s plain idiotic — even as a bid to combat climate change.
Forcing buildings to electrify doesn’t stop carbon emissions, and can increase them, since most electricity in New York is still generated by fossil fuels and will be for decades to come.
And burning natural gas at the point of use is far more efficient than burning it elsewhere, because some electricity is lost for every mile of transmission.
Coupled with the state’s lunatic energy plans, this also makes blackouts more likely — putting more New Yorkers at greater risk of losing heat in the winter and AC in the summer.
All this, when the entire Empire State is now responsible for about 0.04% of global carbon emissions, so getting carbon-neutral won’t mean a damn.
The pain, as the Empire Center’s James Hanley notes, massively “outweighs the benefit to New York.”
Like the state’s carbon-neutral drive, Local Law 97 simply inflicts bitter costs (and imposes insane risks) to make a purely symbolic gesture.
Climate change is real, but fighting it this way makes as much sense as the medieval Children’s Crusade.
This isn’t science, but superstition.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
