At Thursday’s presidential debate, there was less interrupting and more real-estate related discussion.
As office landlords install hospital-grade air filters to lure tenants back, some worry they are putting the city’s emissions targets out of reach. The building emission reductions required under Local Law 97 — the centerpiece of a May 2019 legislative package known as the Climate Mobilization Act — could conflict with owners’ efforts to keep their buildings virus-free.
Turn-of-the-century faith in ventilation to combat disease pushed engineers to design steam heating systems that still overheat apartments today.
As summer heat waves converge with a surging pandemic and an impending economic collapse, energy-efficient homes are becoming particularly critical to Americans’ well-being. New York’s state government, for its part, is eyeing a long-term solution to this conundrum.
For more than a decade, the trust that owns the Empire State Building has been working to remake the monument as a model of sustainability. Soon, the rest of New York City will find out whether it can do the same. An ambitious regulation signed into law last year imposes a strict cap on emissions from the city’s big buildings. No place in the world has such aggressive rules for existing structures, and many in the city were skeptical of the law’s goals even before the coronavirus pandemic complicated things.
