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| Tuesday, July 03, 2007 |
Green Mayor: Michael Bloomberg
From our July/August 2007 issue. This article is part of our larger package, the AJL Green List.
It’s not every day the mayor of a major American city invokes the principle of tikkun olam, repairing the world, in addressing the public about new governmental initiatives. But not every mayor is Michael Bloomberg, whose $32 billion initiative to make New York “the first environmentally sustainable 21st-century city” needs all the help it can get in gaining public acceptance.
“In my faith, the Jewish faith,” Bloomberg told a crowd of Harlem church-goers, “there is a religious obligation ... to make the world whole. ... And that responsibility is found among people of good will in every faith.”
In making the world whole, Bloomberg’s “PlaNYC,” with its 127 proposals for a “greener, greater New York,” would affect New Yorkers’ entire universe, from home to work to play, and the transportation in between. In preparation for an expected population increase of a million people over the next quarter century, the plan aims to reduce the city’s energy consumption, decrease greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent, and improve New Yorkers’ overall quality of life.
Bloomberg’s most controversial and most widely publicized proposal aims to reduce traffic congestion by charging vehicles eight bucks every time they enter Manhattan below 86th Street during peak hours. But the mayor’s got lots of other tricks up his sleeve, like expanding the city’s ferry system and network of bicycle paths, creating a rapid transit bus system, and waiving taxes on hybrid vehicles. Oh, and speaking of hybrids, Bloomberg plans on converting the Big Apple’s entire fleet of yellow cabs into hybrid vehicles. To conserve energy and other resources, PlaNYC would upgrade power plants, offer incentives to building owners to recycle water, retrofit buildings for more efficient energy consumption, increase the use of solar power, and urge all New Yorkers to use longer-lasting, energy efficient bulbs. Bloomberg would also plant one million trees in the next decade to invigorate the city’s water cycle and air quality. And, to prevent a housing crunch, he would create land by building platforms over highways and rail yards and construct on top of them.
While such idealism carries a hefty price tag, Bloomberg insists it’s better to pay now, while the city’s economy is in good shape, than to pay the potentially higher costs to the population’s health and the environment later. As he said, echoing the words of the sage Hillel, “If we don’t act now, when?”
This article is part of our larger package, the AJL Green List.
-- Text by Rebecca Honig Friedman
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