by Mailande Moran
On Tuesday night, over seventy people filed into Room 220 in NYU’s Vanderbilt Hall. The lecture space filled quickly as people settled in with notebooks and laptops, fixing their gazes toward the podium at the front of the room.
At first glance, it could have been any normal night class at NYU Law; however, closer scrutiny showed some surprising elements. There were a strange number of people in pinstriped suits, for one. And a table of Tostitos and pastries. And an unusual assembly in the front: Adam Freed, a key member of Bloomberg’s PlaNYC crew; Reuben Teague, a social entrepreneur and Echoing Green Fellow working for green housing in New Orleans through Green Coast Enterprises ; Kathy Baczko, New York City’s main advocate at the Clinton Climate Initiative ; and Susan Leeds, from the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Center for Market Innovation . Kicking things off was Alisa Valderrama, the executive director of EcoNext, an organization designed to tackle the big problem of the night: Can capital markets deliver environmental benefits?
The panel members were aligned toward a common goal: hashing out the problem of creating market-based approaches to energy efficiency. Despite the fact that investments in energy efficiency pay for themselves over the long term, financing for the upfront cost of retrofits, particularly for existing commercial buildings, is still a huge problem – especially in places like New York City, where particular realities of life create specific barriers to realizing the financial benefits of energy efficiency.
Because New Yorkers are largely renters, for example, we deal with a larger-than-usual proportion of buildings that aren’t retrofitted for energy efficiency because of split incentives: if a landlord doesn’t pay for tenants’ energy use, he or she isn’t compelled to make changes to increase efficiency. On the flip side, when tenants don’t pay for their energy use, they have no urgent reason to press their landlord to take measures (even if they are often easy and incredibly cost effective in the long run) to conserve energy. New York’s buildings are particularly important because they make up such a large portion of the city’s energy use (as opposed to transportation, which is the biggest problem in most other urban spaces). There have been signs of progress: Freed cited Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to make the city progressively greener through 127 initiatives in order to accommodate the 1 million people who will move here in the next 20 years.
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