Earth Equity News

Taking Stock of New York for Climate Week. By Kate Galbraith, NYTimes, September 21, 2009. "This week environmentalists, business executives, global leaders and even filmmakers are descending on New York City as it hosts two major events: the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, and Climate Week N.Y.C., billed as a run-up to the international climate meeting in Copenhagen in December, where delegates from around the globe will try to hammer out a new agreement to address global warming. But for all the environmental and climate-related fanfare in the city this week, it's worth noting that New York often gets left out of the top 10 'greenest city' rankings in the United States -- not least because it lacks the wind-power obsessions of Austin, the green roofs of Chicago and, above all, the bicycling-cum-organic-cum-light-rail predilections of towns like Portland, Ore. But some sources -- especially those in New York -- argue that the Big Apple deserves more recognition as the Big Green. In 2004 David Owen wrote in the New Yorker, 'By the most significant measures, New York is the greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world... The average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn't matched since the mid-nineteen-twenties, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. 82% of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That's ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County. New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank fifty-first in per-capita energy use.'"