It’s the Trumps and the Kushners that are polluting this city

July 2, 2018 11:10 AM

2 Percent Of New York City’s Buildings Emit Half Its CO2 Pollution. They’re Luxury Towers. -- Alexander C. Kaufman (SLHufPost)
posted by MartinWisse (21 comments total)

Don’t forget to add the emissions given off by Trump Tower every time it catches on fire.
posted by ejs at 11:32 AM on July 2, 2018 [5 favorites]

Don’t forget to add the emissions given off by Trump Tower every time it catches on fire.

I may reconsider my perspective on emissions.
posted by entropone at 11:34 AM on July 2, 2018 [8 favorites]

I don't remember the last thing I saw that was this "Well, of fucking course...", and I'm saying that as a person who's been saying "Fire the writers" for like two years now.
posted by Etrigan at 11:35 AM on July 2, 2018 [7 favorites]

Obviously, the solution is to turn half the city into luxury condo blocks so the percentages sync up, and if you disagree you're just a NIMBY.
posted by tobascodagama at 11:44 AM on July 2, 2018 [6 favorites]

(Although this detail gives me a moment of pause about the trustworthiness of the work that went into this report: "The coalition of local environmental groups who authored the report, shared exclusively with HuffPost...")
posted by tobascodagama at 11:46 AM on July 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

What is it that makes these buildings so much worse than others? Are they large spaces that require that much more energy to heat and cool? Is there just more stuff in there that draws more power? Private elevators in every condo? It’s not hard for me to imagine that luxury buildings are wasteful and excessive, I just didn’t see anything in the article that explained how.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 11:48 AM on July 2, 2018 [8 favorites]

Yes, I would like to know if the greater emissions are because they're drawing more power from the grid as a whole and the NYC grid is coal-powered, or are these direct emissions from engines and generators?
posted by suelac at 11:51 AM on July 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

I mean, I'm here for hating on Trump buildings but... those numbers seem really questionable and exaggerated. From the report:

These are examples of large buildings over 50,000 square feet that while only 2% of the city’s buildings, collectively cause about half of the city’s climate pollution

Even if those large buildings were as efficient as the average building per square foot, they'd represent much more than 2% of the city's pollution simply because they're bigger than average.
posted by ripley_ at 11:54 AM on July 2, 2018 [4 favorites]

The Death of a Once Great City
The fall of New York and the urban crisis of affluence
posted by robbyrobs at 12:04 PM on July 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

Even if those large buildings were as efficient as the average building per square foot, they'd represent much more than 2% of the city's pollution simply because they're bigger than average.

I guess part of the issue, and I can’t remember if they mention it in the article, is that a lot of those spaces are empty a lot of the year. Someone might own multiple condos and spend very little time in any of them, while they continue to draw energy and resources.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 12:18 PM on July 2, 2018

2 Percent Of New York City’s Buildings Emit Half Its CO2 Pollution.

...

The median energy use intensity for office buildings in New York is 186 kBtu per square foot, for multifamily homes it’s 125 kBtu per square foot. For public schools, it’s 112 kBtu per square foot.

For 157 West 57th Street, that figure came out to 287. Trump Tower hit 208. The Trump International Hotel & Tower reached 267. 666 Fifth Avenue had 285. 15 Central Park West notched 222. The Baccarat soared to 386.

Something weird about the math here. I suspect that a less interesting version of the story is that towers make up 20-40% of New York's square footage, and use 50% of the energy.
posted by clawsoon at 12:25 PM on July 2, 2018 [3 favorites]

I'm as much "Fuck Trump" as the next person (maybe moreso) but this article doesn't show its work. The report shared exclusively with HuffPo is not linked in the article AFAICT, and the details in the article don't pass the sniff test. If the median (why not report the average?) energy use for an office building is 186 kBtu/sqft and the highest rate for a luxury home is 386, or very roughly 2:1, how do you get to 2% of the buildings being responsible for half the pollution? NYC is a big city and the ~6 buildings pointed out in the article surely are dwarfed in total square footage by the rest of the city combined. I'm not saying they're wrong, but this article doesn't make any damn mathematical sense. Unless they're somehow including the carbon footprint that the wealthy use "jet-setting around the world" into the CO2 output of the buildings they own (which seems like a stretch), I don't get it.
posted by axiom at 12:26 PM on July 2, 2018 [7 favorites]

It’s the Trumps and the Kushners that are polluting this city

CO2 doesn't pollute the city. It pollutes the planet. I don't want to get overly pedantic, but this is an important distinction. It doesn't cause breathing problems like NOx or particulates from diesel, and it doesn't cause acid rain. It's not dirty. It does absolutely nothing to the local environment. Instead it makes a global problem worse.

Likewise, cutting these emissions doesn't help NYC - it helps the earth.

I'm not sure what makes luxury towers more energy intensive. Is it the floor to ceiling windows throwing heating and cooling costs out of whack? Costs for more lighting, more elevators?
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 12:46 PM on July 2, 2018 [7 favorites]

how do you get to 2% of the buildings being responsible for half the pollution?

The report seems to be embedded at the bottom of the article, and has this bit in the introduction:

These are examples of large buildings over 50,000 square feet that while only 2% of the city’s buildings, collectively cause about half of the city’s climate pollution

So they are looking at the largest buildings in NYC (some of which are "luxury towers"). Unsurprisingly, large buildings use more resources than small buildings. This "report" is genuinely terrible and misleading.
posted by ripley_ at 1:01 PM on July 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

coalition of local environmental groups who authored the report, shared exclusively with HuffPost

Don't see any other data except the headline; I'm also wondering how these figures were calculated (or if somebody's just making shit up).
posted by Rash at 1:05 PM on July 2, 2018

I suspect others have found out the more impactful of the dodgy math. Very large buildings can in fact be much larger proportions to the total square footage of area. I suspect the real story is more along the lines that 1/3 of the built square footage of the city creates 50% of the emissions.
Often these buildings have a few things going on that make them energy hogs:
- Too much glass
- Mechanical systems designed to instantly cool or heat to comfort, which occasionally end up operating in such a way that they are literally both running in competition with each other
- Mechanical systems selected for comfort first and capital cost second, without a lot of regard for operating cost
- Lighting (!) which is selected for effect and looks, not energy performance
- Custom features such as pools, spas, etc. which use extra energy both to provide a specific experience and then to remove the excess heat and energy from that experience from the surrounding environment.

The underlying message of this report is right on. We aren't going to reach any sort of building emissions climate change goals if we don't mandate improvement to existing buildings. Doing so is politically very difficult in part because a poor performing building may be owned by a senior citizen on fixed income as much as by a tycoon (admittedly less likely in NYC, but true across the US). Studies which 'lie with statistics' about who the bad actors are don't necessary help.
posted by meinvt at 1:07 PM on July 2, 2018 [5 favorites]

The point is that climate change is due mostly through the actions of the big players; not just that a surprisingly small percentage of buildings in New York are responsible for half its output, but in general. Anything we do as consumers to limit our output is dwarved by what industry and the 1% does.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:09 PM on July 2, 2018 [3 favorites]

I'm not sure what makes luxury towers more energy intensive.

I think it must be that (1) glass walls are bad insulation and (2) excessive A/C. Pretty amazing that this would overwhelm the benefit of a lower surface to volume ratio.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 3:18 PM on July 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

I have to agree that the article was a mess. I’d really like to see a more believable / scientific take on this.
posted by freecellwizard at 3:40 PM on July 2, 2018

Without any comment on these specific calculations (or veracity thereof)
There seems to be some confusion here, just based on statistics and distribution of people, square footage, and CO2 emissions. This is all perfectly plausible from a math perspective, even if poorly explained and presented without proper reference.

Unsurprisingly, large buildings use more resources than small buildings.

We're talking about higher emissions per square foot when grouped by building type, so the point here is that (in some cases) a building that houses 20x more people is causing e.g. 50x or more CO2 emissions, not the 15x (or 10x!) more we might expect if large luxury buildings were reaping benefits of scale and smart engineering.

suspect... that towers make up 20-40% of New York's square footage, and use 50% of the energy.

That could in fact be the case, figures quoted are per square foot, not per building.
They tell us the median of one source but just a few values of the big buildings (this is indeed sloppy). But unless they are cherry picking with intent to deceive (possible), the idea that this is 40% of sq. footage causing 50% of emissions doesn't pass the sniff test. (If anyone has a size distribution of NYC buildings that house people, I'd be very interested to see it!)

median (why not report the average?)
The median IS a type of average. It is often used because, unlike the mean, it is not as susceptible to being determined largely by a few outliers (consider the mean of [0,0, 1, 1, 100], compared to the median. The mean is 20 and the median is 1.)

are these direct emissions from engines and generators?
Almost certainly this is intended to be a full building emission estimate, and would include both the emissions of any generators (and fireplaces!) but also the emissions due to electricity consumption. This is the norm for scholarly research in the field (see below for example methods).

As for scholarly sources: See this 2011 nice study of housing in Sydney AU. They do not demonize high rise/high density (in fact come off fairly in favor), but they do show how some of the energy (and CO2) emissions go up with high rise architecture, on a per person basis. However, they also argue that density afforded by high rises makes up for that overage (and more) via gains (e.g. decreasing emissions) in transportation.

Notably, they compare luxury to non-luxury dwellings, and generally present much more reliable evidence and analysis in this area than HuffPo piece.

TLDR: luxury living leads to higher per person emissions, pretty generally (This should be fairly obvious: larger spaces per person demand more energy per person to light and HVAC). However, it seems the HuffPo piece seems to have identified some luxury high rise buildings that emit much more CO2 per square foot that the median single family home in NYC, and this would make the effects of more square footage per person even more noticeable in terms of the rich/luxurious producing most of the pollution.

But, large high-rise apartment buildings in big cities have the potential to decrease per capita carbon footprint in real terms, taking an approach of synoptic, lifecycle analysis of people's and cities' emissions.
posted by SaltySalticid at 7:43 PM on July 2, 2018 [3 favorites]

Having working in a couple of large skyscrapers, notably 600 3rd Ave, they are, indeed, energy hogs. The elevator shafts are basically large chimneys, even with the elevator doors shut you could feel a strong suction around the frames as well as the outside front doors, it always sounded like a vacuum cleaner. Whenever someone opened both airlock-style doors (usually kept locked, mandating the use of either the revolving doors, with all deliveries sent to the loading dock, which had its own airlock-style system) the breeze almost knock you off your feet whenever an elevator door opened. The one time I remember both the elevators and the revolving doors being worked on so both sets of doors and an elevator shaft door were open, the noise alone from the air wooshing in was nigh-deafening, and entering the building was a challenge in keeping clothing, possessions, and small children from being blown across the lobby.

Building management insisted on shutting down heating/cooling from 4:30pm until 8:00 am M-F, and off entirely during the weekend (or maybe my own mangement didn't want to pay the cost,) and even with double-paned glass the office would heat up or cool down by several degrees an hour, resulting in amusing incidents of frozen beverages and melted wax decorations left on desks. I believe they kept the building core with the plumbing above freezing, but certainly the offices would regularly have frost on the inside of the windows for much of the winter, and in the summer it would often take until after noon until the office became comfortable. Since the server room, and presumably those of the other businesses, as well as the restaurants on the ground floor had their own HVAC, the lower and upper roofs were covered in heat exchangers and similar gear, which couldn't have been as efficient as the building's main central systems, which took up an entire floor about 3/4ths of the way up the tower.

And that was a newer building -- I once fixed a cow-orker's home PC, and discovered she was independently wealthy and lived in a high-rise apartment overlooking Central Park, absolutely beautiful art deco architecture and with huuuuge windows with a magnificent view, but it still had old-style cast-iron steam radiators on the walls with their own boiler in its own little room, window-based AC, and when I asked about how much it cost for heating/cooling, she just grimaced and admitted that her paycheck as the CFO/Publisher of the magazine didn't even cover that, let alone rent and monthly fees for the doorman and concierge. It wouldn't take too many more buildings like that to account for the discrepancy in energy use.

I've only been inside one Trump building in NYC, installing an Internet router back in the 90s for a corporate office, and while the facade and lobby were nice, once you got behind the "Employees Only" door, it was all filth: rat and mouse turds everywhere, the stink that always means cockroaches, leaking sewer and steam pipes, rotting insulation, even the telco demarc was just a rats nets of unmaintained spaghetti wiring and moldering particleboard jammed in wherever there was a space not too damp or already claimed by other utilities. I just pointed the customer to where they needed to plug in and got out of there, there was no way I was going to try to run a connection through that maze of fire and health hazards to their office, nor was it my job to though I usually took care of that if it was doable without drilling holes in the building. Six months later, when I left that company, the building still hadn't gotten that extension run for them.
posted by Blackanvil at 9:13 PM on July 3, 2018 [2 favorites]