Mr. Aggarwala: I can’t second-guess what the Ravitch report will include, I’m optimistic it’ll be good for the city, and, at the end of the day, any thoughtful proposal that fully funds the M.T.A.’s capital needs is good for the city.

 
But do you think that peoples’ perspectives around congestion pricing have changed since it went down in the spring?

You know, the bottom line is that the problems that congestion pricing sought to address have not gone away. In fact, they’ve gotten worse. Over the summer, people were talking about ‘Oh, we don’t need congestion pricing, the traffic has gone down because oil prices have gone up,’ which I think is short-sighted because the $600 million per year we were going to raise for the M.T.A. just went to OPEC. But now that oil prices are going down, you see the first sign that truck sales are picking up again, and people are going to be driving more, and so our traffic will get worse again; and you know as well as I do that the M.T.A. is in an even more troubled condition than it was six or 12 or 18  months ago, when we first came out with the idea.

 
Whatever solution they come up with for the M.T.A., at the moment they’re looking at reducing capacity, rather than growing it, which is sort of an integral part of PlaNYC’s transit component. Has that made you think differently about how this all can happen?

To a certain degree traffic and ridership always decline during a recession because fewer people are going to work and people tend to shop less. What the current crisis, I think, really highlights is that the way we fund the M.T.A. both on the capital and the operating side needs to be rethought, because the M.T.A.’s operating budget is also so correlated to the kinds of tax revenues that come in from cyclical revenue streams.

If you think about it, the M.T.A. gets the mortgage transfer tax, which goes up when the real estate market is hot, goes down when the real estate market is cold. It gets part of the sales tax, which means as retail sales have declined, the M.T.A.’s revenues decline. This is not a rational way to think about funding a system that is really part of our basic infrastructure. 

 
How else has the economic crisis affected the initiatives that you’re working on?

With the stretch-out of the capital budget, some of our projects, some of the parks projects in particular, really have been put into some of the further-out years. We’ve protected, thus far, some of the investments in city buildings, because they pay for themselves, so it would be short-sighted to say we’re going to cut that, and wind up paying more in the next couple of years in terms of energy. We are currently maintaining the schedule for the million trees, just because we just think that’s so important, it’s such a marquee thing, and in part because some of it comes from private donations, so we have a little bit of flexibility there. 

 
Are there still things about this process that feel elitist to stakeholders who have to be a part of it? Is it tough to persuade people that you’re not just building LEED homes for rich people?

A couple of thoughts. The facts show that it’s not just about making luxury condos green. You do want luxury condos to be green, but, for example, we just had the first rehab of an affordable housing project, the one in the Bronx [1347 Bristow Street]. We have focused the tree plantings in the Trees for Public Health neighborhoods, where we … prioritize the neighborhoods with the highest childhood asthma hospitalization rates as the places that are going to get trees first. And inevitably, those are the neighborhoods that are less wealthy. If you think about something like power plants, if you make the power production cleaner, that will have a disproportionately beneficial impact on the neighborhoods that have environmental justice issues.

Is it possible to have a grass-roots movement of 8.25 million individuals all signing on to something? Of course not. We try to involve groups as much as we can. There are always going to be people who believe we’re not doing enough.

 
I think it’s more a concern about priorities—like ‘How can you be spending money on this, when people still can’t afford to eat?’

Oh, well, at the end of the day, sustainability is not a veneer. It is, in fact, the solution. And so if you think about the things over the long term that can help people get jobs, help people save money, lower the cost of living here, it is about more efficient energy consumption. If we can make our power plants cleaner and more efficient, they will be cheaper to operate, and the price of electricity will be lower. If we can make our cars more efficient, then New York City’s total spending on gas will go down. And the $13 billion worth of time that New Yorkers waste in traffic. Think about the economic drag of that.

 
We were talking about developers earlier. What kind of impact did they have on the evolution of PlaNYC?

First of all, we’ve got the Real Estate Board, and Dan Tishman of Tishman Construction, and Bob Fox, the architect of the Bank of America tower, all on our sustainability advisory council. So they were all, on the real estate side, integrally involved in the development of the plan. The plan actually started out as a real estate plan. I mentioned this realization that New York City had grown, even when the first Bloomberg administration had really been focused on stabilizing the city after 9/11 and making sure that we didn’t have a decline in the quality of life, that we didn’t go bankrupt again. With the midpoint census numbers that came out in late 2005, the mayor basically turned to Dan Doctoroff and said, ‘Holy cow, we’ve grown in spite of the last few years. What does that mean for the trajectory of population?’ It was a result of that that City Planning did its projections seeing the city reaching 9.1 million people—we’re going to have a million more people, where are they gonna live? Efficiency is the answer.

I think [developers] helped us think through the areas where green design really can be cost-effective. They helped us think through what kinds of trade-offs we’d really have to make. For example, there are things you can just require that cost money; there are processes that you can impose and the process costs money. Delays in a construction project literally cost money. So I think we took a much more sophisticated view of how to do green building goals and how to do energy efficiency because of their input. One example of that, I think, is that other cities have tried to do green building simply by requiring all privately owned buildings to be LEED. Now, that is one way to do it; it is not necessarily the best way to do it. And even the U.S. Green Building Council doesn’t necessarily think it’s the best way to do it.

So one of the things in the plan is a thorough review of all the building-related codes in the city to identify what are areas where either we can clear away obstacles to green design or we can impose cost-effective, hard-headed, doable requirements that improve energy efficiency. And I think this is a much more sophisticated approach, and I think we took that approach because we learned from a variety of perspectives within the development community what it means to do LEED and where it helps and what its shortcomings are.

 
So, about that third Bloomberg term. Has that changed your thinking about how PlaNYC continues?

The answer is yes and no. No, in the sense that we have been working to get done as much as we can. That doesn’t change. We have been working to put in place the practices and the tools that will make it easier for subsequent administrations to do sustainability planning, so things like the set of sustainability indicators that we are working on that we hope to have up and running in the next few months. That’s critical. That we want to do whether it’s a third Bloomberg administration or some other mayor in 2010 or 2014. So it doesn’t really change what we do on a regular basis. It does get us thinking if the mayor does win a reelection campaign, if he does ask us to stay around, then the idea of writing the next generation of the plan is kind of exciting.

ldepillis@observer.com

State and local tax collections are in decline, and the MTA bears the burden of the Pataki philosophy of borrowing to fund transit infrastructure. As a result, the MTA is about to raise mass transit fares for the second time in two years. Gene Russianoff of NYPIRG's Straphanger's Campaign argued the other night that the city contributes too little to the cost of transit-providing only 4% of the MTA's budget. Mayor Bloomberg expressed no interest in raising the city's subsidy and pushed the MTA to do more with less. Former Mayor Ed Koch made the point that fare payers should pay about 50% of the cost of their ride and Russianoff maintained that riders now pay 58% of the cost of each ride.

In Wednesday's Daily News, Pete Donahue wrote that:

"City bus and subway riders pay a bigger share of transit operating expenses than straphangers across the nation... MTA bus riders pay 40% of NYC Transit division expenses through fares while subway riders cover 72%, federal transit data show. Riders in other major cities or metropolitan areas like Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston and San Francisco pay significantly less. MTA officials say comparisons are unfair because riders here have a system unlike any other - with 468 subway stations and 24-hour service."

The MTA response misses the point. New York's larger system also includes larger ridership, and higher revenues to go along with higher expenses. The issue actually has nothing to do with the MTA-and everything to do with our elected officials in Albany who during the Pataki years steadily reduced subsidies for mass transportation. The issue is one of public policy priorities, not the management practices of the MTA. The goals of an effective transportation system are to move people from place to place at the least possible cost and the highest possible speed in as pleasant a way as possible. In this region that means mass transit. Our high population density requires us to reduce the use of autos. We all know that mass transit is more energy efficient and less destructive of the environment than the auto. Currently we use a variety of sources, including bridge tolls, to subsidize mass transit. Obviously, these subsidies are insufficient.

Keeping the fare low requires greater efficiency at the MTA, but no matter how efficient the agency is, public subsidies are still needed. One source of revenue for mass transportation is the real estate transfer tax which has been declining at the same time that energy costs have been rising. Debt service for the MTA is also growing and will total 20% of their budget by 2012. Mass transit is caught in a cost squeeze and new forms of revenue are needed. Some of the capital needs of the agency should be borne by the state and city and not be part of the MTA's budget. Former MTA Chairman Richard Ravitch and his state-appointed Commission are looking at transit financing and hopefully will develop a realistic long-term plan. The plan needs to take another look at congestion pricing and on raising the other taxes now charged on autos, trucks and taxis.

We need to get away from the idea that mass transit can be funded on the cheap. Capital finance-or borrowing for infrastructure-is appropriate, if the revenue sources are removed from the fare box. If a facility is being used for a decade, it makes sense to pay it off in ten years. One of the best potential sources of revenue for mass transit remains congestion pricing. Maybe, if the choice is between higher fares or high auto use fees, our courageous leaders will reconsider congestion charges. I wouldn't make any bets...

Here in New York City community must be nurtured in the face of big anonymous institutions and the speed and intensity that is always present and taken for granted. We see community being nurtured when families bring their kids to crowded ball fields, when neighborhoods rather than the “street fair industry” host block parties and in the hundreds if not thousands of community based organizations that come and go throughout the five boroughs. Some of these organizations are started on front porches in Flatbush and never hire staff or even last very long. Some grow, raise funds and eventually incorporate as nonprofit organizations. In his classic, Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville commented about the tendency we Americans have to join organizations, a phenomenon he observed in the 19th century:

Today, we find social web sites like Facebook provide a way to create and join groups and thousands of these virtual groups have been formed. Just as de Tocqueville discovered at the start of the American Republic- Americans are joiners. The environmental movement is no exception- it is as American as apple pie. It began at the community level and continues to demonstrate enormous strength at the grass roots. In the next few months we will use this space to highlight some of the great community-based environmental groups that are hard at work throughout New York, making this city sustainable.

One of the best known community based environmental groups is Sustainable South Bronx. Founded in 2001 by Majora Carter, who received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award three years ago, Sustainable South Bronx is dedicated to achieving “environmental justice through innovative, economically sustainable projects that are informed by community needs.”

Carter launched Sustainable South Bronx after organizing a successful campaign to fight a proposal to locate a new waste facility in the South Bronx. The facility would have brought 40% of the city’s waste to an area that already received a disproportionate amount of it. Once residents made the connection that community health problems, such as high child asthma rates, were intrinsically linked to these land use patterns, people began to mobilize.

According to Deputy Director Miquela Craytor, “We wanted to offer opportunities which don’t have to come at the expense of health. The communities that haven’t had green space and haven’t had opportunities are the ones that most deserve them.”

One of Majora Carter’s first accomplishments prior to starting Sustainable South Bronx was to secure a $1.25 million federal grant for a feasibility study on developing a greenway for bicyclists and pedestrians along the South Bronx Waterfront. Two waterfront parks have already been constructed, which serve as destination points as part of the greenway plan, and construction of the greenway, which connects these parks and South Bronx communities, will begin next spring. The greenway will eventually stretch 11 miles, and will address the disparities in open space and waterfront access in the South Bronx compared to other areas in the city. A 5K run planned for this Saturday will celebrate the coming of the greenway.

In another effort to “green” the community, Sustainable South Bronx is planting hundreds of trees along the greenway and throughout the Hunts Point peninsula. “When we started we had the least number of trees per acre of any community in New York City,” says Craytor. “We were comparable to Warsaw after World War II, looking like a bombed out city.” So far, almost 400 trees have been planted.

In 2003, Sustainable South Bronx initiated the Bronx Environmental Stewardship Training. “We realized a lot of jobs can be generated from green space; someone has to maintain it. No one was training people, so we took the jump to start a job training program.” The 10-week program is free and open to anyone in New York City who is over 18, has the equivalent of a high school diploma, and has a “drive to be outside,” as Craytor puts it.

This year the program will reach 100 graduates. “We’re very proud of it. The people we train face a lot of barriers––many were formally incarcerated or are coming off of public assistance,” says Craytor, who rattles off the program’s success rates, “As of last year 85% of our graduates were employed or in college, and 70% of them were in the green collar field.” Graduates are now working for the parks department, doing remediation for brown fields, and working at Sustainable South Bronx to maintain the street tree network in Hunts Point and the new waterfront parks.

In February this blog covered a partnership between Sustainable South Bronx and students at Columbia University to develop a business plan for a green-building retrofit program, to make buildings “green” through installing energy efficient and environmentally friendly features. The business plan is now finished, and Sustainable South Bronx is currently seeking funds to pilot the program, with hopes to eventually incorporate it into their Bronx Environmental Stewardship Training.

Advocacy is also a big focus at Sustainable South Bronx. As part of a broader coalition they brought forward the city’s first equitable trash plan, which requires Manhattan to begin managing some of its waste. (It currently handles no city waste, while the South Bronx handles 25%.) That legislation passed the city council and is now at the state level.

Sustainable South Bronx worked on successful legislation to address shortfalls in PlaNYC’s storm water management provisions. “PlaNYC didn’t create a clear plan of action for how the City would assess and encourage best management practices on public and private properties, nor how implementing these strategies would result in the creation of jobs” says Craytor.

As a key member of the S.W.I.M. coalition, the organization has also pushed legislation for a tax credit for green roofs, which has passed both houses in the New York State legislature. In addition to the legislation, Sustainable South Bronx launched their own green roof company last fall. Since then they have installed four green roofs, including their own. The roofs have soil and vegetation, which help cool buildings and lower energy costs, and reduce pressure on water treatment systems by absorbing rainfall.

Sustainable South Bronx’s newest program, FabLa
b (short for Fabrication Laboratory), was established through a partnership with MIT and serves an incubator for green manufacturing and design. According to Craytor, “These FabLabs give people the opportunity to visualize and create solutions to problems that their communities have. We are using it to think about waste and how to reuse it.” The FabLab has generated furniture made out of recycled wood and cardboard, is working to create environmental monitoring devices.

As Craytor sums up, “We’ve changed the landscape of what sustainability means for poor communities. Our hope is that the South Bronx will no longer be associated with burned and blighted buildings but with green, innovative projects.”

Community-based environmental groups play a vital role in representing the public to government and in developing and implementing environmental improvement projects. Groups like Sustainable South Bronx are particularly important because they help achieve environmental justice—ensuring that poor people do not bear the brunt of our society’s environment environmental insults.

To learn more about this terrific group visit http://ssbx.org.

Photos courtesy of Sustainable South Bronx.

Release below.

The story discussed San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s zeal for keeping garbage out of landfills. Currently, his city keeps 70 percent of its disposable garbage out of landfills.

You might think that would be enough, but it’s not. He is about to propose legislation to mandate recycling of cans, bottles, paper, yard waste and food scraps. If you don’t recycle, the city won’t pick up the rest of your garbage.

How much of New York City’s waste is kept out of landfills? About 30 percent. Of course, that puts us ahead of Boston at 16 percent and Houston at less than 3 percent.

For some reason people on the West Coast are more serious about waste management. Despite Mayor Bloomberg’s forward looking PlaNYC 2030, New York’s waste policy is to get the garbage out of here to some place else as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Waste management was excluded from PlaNYC 2030 because the city already had a comprehensive waste management plan. That plan was proposed in 2006 and enacted in 2007. The city’s waste plan is to build marine waste transfer stations and barge the garbage to any place that will take it. Water-borne and train transport of our garbage will reduce pollution from trucks and is better than our current system. Currently we dump the garbage onto the floor of huge warehouses and then scoop it up and truck it out of state.

But whether its trains or barges or trucks, our policy is to pray that our garbage goes to solid waste heaven. More likely its toxic components will leak out of landfills into groundwater in rural Pennsylvannia.

PlaNYC 2030 focuses on land, water, transportation, energy, air and climate change. It’s a terrific and important initiative, but it leaves out waste. Why are we so ashamed of our garbage? Why no consultant-driven, PowerPoint-laden, Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff-produced multimedia show in the park for waste management? Why isn’t waste reduction, recycling and enhanced waste management part of the city’s high-visibility sustainability plan? Is garbage just too negative a subject to get excited about?

Mayor Bloomberg has taken on traffic, smoking, crime and countless other challenges facing the city. The city’s waste management plan is an improvement over current practices and so the people who developed it deserve credit for a job well done. Still, it lacks the boldness and vision of many of the mayor’s other initiatives? Why?

One wants to find a psychological explanation in our unwillingness to deal with this issue. Tokyo burns most of its garbage in clean-burning incinerators that generate electricity. Barcelona has a facility that does that and also sorts garbage for recycling and creates compost. San Francisco is heading toward a 75 percent rate of landfill waste diversion. I guess New York is the city that’s too busy to manage its waste.

In the long run, we will need to do something different. Just like we own our water system and control that vital resource, we will also need to control the place we put our garbage. The price of disposal is only going to increase over the next few decades.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that as the planet’s population grows, and finite natural resources become more scarce, the economics of recycling will continue to improve. When we develop low-cost renewable energy, one of the main cost factors in recycling will be reduced.

Today’s garbage will be tomorrow’s raw materials for manufacturing. New York City’s population density will make the city an excellent place for “mining” waste.

Maybe it’s too late for this administration to develop a vision for our garbage. The clock in the City Hall bullpen is fast counting down to zero. Just like the failed congestion pricing program was a missed opportunity of historic proportions, so too has been the failure to focus attention on the city’s waste. What a waste.

“This is the worst situation I’ve ever encountered in terms of [dealings with] the community,” said Carol Greitzer, a former councilwoman from the West Village who helped start a group called 250+ Friends of New York Parks. It opposes many of the Bloomberg administration’s park plans. “They come up with a plan. Maybe—maybe—if you’re lucky, you can tweak it slightly, but that’s about all you can do.”

The examples of such contention over fresh parkland are myriad as of late, raising questions of government priority and private sector meddling over a basic concept that ordinarily isn’t so controversial—who, after all, is against more parks?

In Union Square Park, opponents have so far succeeded in halting construction, with a lawsuit, of a possible seasonal restaurant. The concept of a park-based restaurant in an area lined by them has frustrated some in the community, as the idea is being pushed by the area’s business-improvement district.

Lawsuits or political opposition have also hobbled plans for new ball fields on Randall’s Island; a redo of Washington Square Park; and the future of a key pier in Hudson River Park, with opponents of the projects complaining that the city’s decisions lack meaningful public input.

Much of the contention springs from public-private partnerships undertaken by the Bloomberg administration to develop or to change the parks. The administration has countered that such partnerships often spur the very changes that would otherwise never occur.

Still, the distrust and the anger mounts.

“There’s more trouble now with the community groups in this last four years than there was before,” said Henry Stern, the former city parks commissioner under Mayors Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani. “There is a pattern of resistance.”

THE INCREASED RESISTENCE stems in part from the sheer number of projects the city has undertaken, particularly with the environmental PlaNYC initiative announced last year.

The Parks and Recreation Department, led by Commissioner Adrian Benepe, is working on dozens of creations and expansions around the city, spanning from a new, 2,200-acre Fresh Kills Park in Staten Island to creating a parkland-lined shore along the Williamsburg and Greenpoint waterfronts.

Staffing and funding levels have accordingly risen for the department in the Bloomberg administration, with about $1.21 billion being devoted to capital investments in the mayor’s first five budgets. That number is compared with $1.07 billion for the prior five years, and $665 million for the five years before that, according to inflation-adjusted figures from a Citizens Budget Commission Report and the city comptroller’s office.

With respect to community opposition, the Parks Department emphasizes its full plate of projects, saying that a wide array of initiatives is bound to attract controversy.

“No great urban development project comes without temporary inconveniences to the community and even controversy,” Mr. Benepe said in an e-mailed statement. “Parks are our common backyards, and most New Yorkers have strong proprietary feelings for their parks and are not shy about expressing their opinions.”

The agency also noted that it consults the community boards about park alterations, and has an active community engagement program.

But critics claim the frequent dissonance with the city stems more from the decision-making process at the Parks Department, saying the agency fails to take in community input and is inflexible in its positions.

Assemblywoman Deborah Glick, who has criticized many recent park initiatives, said the city has an “inherent arrogance that has been more in evidence over the last few years.

“Scarcity creates conflict; scarce parkland is a hot commodity,” she said.

IN MULTIPLE PARKS projects, the tactics of opponents have been similar, relying on a lawsuit to delay or to stop the project. Taken with the support of a local elected official, such opposition can either block the initiative or result in changes to the plan to help mitigate concerns.

Construction of the pavilion at Union Square is now delayed indefinitely as a judge considers a lawsuit, which claims the city needs state approval to make way for a new restaurant.

In the fight over the redesign of Washington Square Park, a plan that many community residents vehemently opposed over numerous design issues, opponents held up the project for months with multiple lawsuits. The project, to which the Tisch family pledged $2.5 million to help move and redo the park’s central fountain, is now moving forward after the city made some changes that community members requested.

And at Randall’s Island—perhaps the most clear-cut example of private sector involvement—park advocates won a legal battle in January in which they alleged the city needed to gain approval from the City Council for an expansion plan. The city had agreed to expand the amount of ball fields on Randall’s Island from 36 to 63, taking $52 million from private schools to do so. In exchange, the city would have agreed to set aside two-thirds of the fields for the private schools three hours every weekday.

There was no lawsuit over the fate of Pier 40 in Hudson River Park; however, West Village residents have successfully fought off a proposal by the Related Companies for an entertainment complex, in large part because Assemblywoman Glick vowed to block it in the State Legislature. The West Side park, controlled jointly by the city and the state, is supposed to gain crucial operating revenue from some sort of commercial operation at Pier 40.

Opponents of the Related plan fought it because they said its scope was out of character with the neighborhood. But if another viable alternative is not found, at some point the park will need additional operating funds to come from some other source.

Whatever the tactics, opponents of individual projects have delayed or halted them at a time when construction costs are rising and the clock on the Bloomberg administration’s tenure is ticking down, frustrating those in the city.

How could the opponents be appeased?

More consultation and more public money for parks, they say, as it would free the city from a reliance on private funding.

“Parks are not a priority,” said Geoffrey Croft, president of NYC Parks Advocates, which was a plaintiff in the lawsuit at Union Square Park. “The government doesn’t want to be in the business anymore of building and maintaining parks.”

The Bloomberg administration vigorously contests such a viewpoint, and Mr. Benepe frequently hails the city’s investment in parks as a new golden age for the system. He has also stood strongly by the department’s private partnerships, which amount to about $87 million that private groups contribute annually to the system, along with the $48 million the city takes in from concessions each year, according to the Citizen Budget Commission report, though the concession money goes to the city’s general operating fund.

The amount of funds derived from the
private sector are poised to rise in coming years.

A Regional Plan Association study last year estimated that the approximately 700 acres of new waterfront parkland would cost an average of $135,000 an acre to maintain annually, which, at around $100 million a year, seems like it will be difficult to fund.

“You have this explosion in new park space, which is great, and something we’ve all fought for, and it’s going to help close the gap when you think about the park needs of the city going forward,” said Rob Pirani, an author of the report. “But it’s going to cost money to maintain it.”

The only borough that’s on the mainland of the North American continent is the Bronx; all the rest are islands or parts of islands. As the region’s economy has been transformed from industrial to post-industrial, and as sewage treatment has ended the role of rivers as the repository for untreated sewage, residential, park and commercial development has gravitated to the shore line. In the old days, we avoided waterfronts. Why do you think that Riverside Drive is a quarter of a mile from the Hudson River? It’s not really by the “side” of the river because as recently as a few decades ago, we dumped raw sewage directly into the Hudson. No one in their right mind would want to get very close to the Hudson River on a hot summer day. One benefit of federal water pollution laws is that sewage is now treated before it is released into our waterways, and rivers like the Hudson are clean enough today to live next to. The bike path along the river is now one of the great cycle paths of the city.

It is difficult to project how much the sea level will rise, but it’s definitely heading upward. Writing over a decade ago, in a prescient 1996 article in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Professor Rae Zimmerman of New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service estimated that the sea might rise by a half a foot by 2030. However, she recognized that the world would probably last longer than that and cited projections of sea-level rise that ranged from two and a half to three feet by the end of the 21st century.

Of course, we don’t need to wait for the end of the century to know what flooding can do. We already know the impact of a storm surge on the subway and on roads like the Bronx River, Hutchinson and Saw Mill River parkways. They become submerged and are often impassable in heavy rain. Sea-level rise will make these storm surges worse and will increase wear and tear on infrastructure.

Even if storms do not grow in intensity, as many experts on global warming believe will happen, the impact of storms will increase.

Transportation, schooling and production will be disrupted. Some of this disruption will simply be accepted. When the subways and highways are flooded, we will close them and either figure out a way around them or simply close the region down for business until the water goes away. When a blizzard comes, we all stay home and watch the snow fall, so I suppose we can always do the same thing when it rains.

Unless the damage is permanent and wrecks our homes, roads and subways we may do nothing to adapt to the impact of climate change on our infrastructure. If New Orleans could ignore its levees, why can't New York simply turn its back to the sea and hope for the best?

This is not to say that New York is as vulnerable as New Orleans. But we are vulnerable. Some of our government agencies recognize this problem.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has responded to the impact of flooding from nor’easters and constructed a dike and levee system that surrounds La Guardia airport. They have also undertaken floodgate construction beneath the Hudson River’s PATH commuter train tunnel. Of the 648 miles of subway track in New York City, 411 miles are underground. As Professor Zimmerman wrote back in 1996, “The system operates 343 pumping stations which remove an average of 15 million gallons of water a day accumulating from rainwater, high water tables and water main breaks.”

In addition to the subways, Zimmerman discuses a wide range of vulnerable infrastructure including solid waste transfer stations and sewage treatment plants that are located by the water.

The New York City Department of Environmental Protection (D.E.P.) and PlaNYC 2030 have been working on adaptation to climate change for a few years. In 2004, DEP began a Climate Change Task Force to work on adaptation to climate change. This was in part a response to an important study of the impact of climate change in this region that was completed back in 2001 and co-led by my Earth Institute and NASA colleague, Cynthia Rosenzweig, along with Rutgers Professor William D. Solecki. In its first progress report, PlaNYC announced the formation of a citywide intergovernmental Climate Change Adaptation Task Force to work on protecting our infrastructure from the risks posed by climate change.

Are we capable of adapting to climate change and investing in the infrastructure we need to prevent catastrophe? Well, to quote at least 20 well-known politicians, yes, and no.

If a huge and damaging flood comes suddenly and destroys billions of dollars of infrastructure, we are probably (excuse the pun) sunk. On the other hand if we get a few small, but painful, visible and easily understood examples of what may come, we might very well develop the political will to invest scarce capital in major infrastructure that could resist damage.

At its peak in World War II, nearly half the Gross National Product was spent by the government on national defense. Most healthy people contributed to the war effort. Many people who didn’t serve in the military worked in defense factories. While the invasion never got any closer than Hawaii, everyone could see the threat.

We also know how to invest in the future. Currently, New York City is nearing the end of a multidecade, multibillion-dollar project to build a third water tunnel to carry water from upstate. It is not a project designed to deal with a crisis of the moment, but to prevent a crisis in the future.

Hopefully, when we figure out what we need to build to prevent damage from sea level rise, we will make the necessary investment. Climate change is real and will require investment and sacrifice if we are to successfully adapt.

The right political leadership will make the threats posed by climate change just as clear now, and help form the political will to do something about it despite the cost. Hopefully, we haven’t forgotten how to act as a community.

I am grateful for the research assistance of Drew Foxman, a graduate student in Comparative and International Education at Columbia’s Teachers College.