Green or Greenwashed?

Developers pledge to “endeavor” to “consider” eco-construction.

As climate chaos gathers speed, egged on by Washington’s attack on the environment, New York State would appear to be an oasis of eco sanity. On July 18, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, with former Vice President Al Gore standing alongside, signed into law the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), one of the most sweeping plans to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Although it is too soon to know exactly how the new law will affect the construction industry, it is clear that green building’s time has come.

But not, apparently, in Kingston.

In an October 2018 presentation on the Kingstonian at the LBGTQ center, developer Joe Bonura Jr. touted his green bona fides (13:56 minutes), boasting that his Poughkeepsie complex uses no fossil fuels because he had installed Mitsubishi 21 SEER heat pumps, and, he advised, renters have the option to heat and cool their homes with electricity delivered by providers that source from renewables. In April 2019, he claimed the Kingstonian was green because the site was infill, i.e. land that had already been developed, as opposed to wilderness, grassland or forest.

But in a truly green project, the apartments would hardly ever need electricity for heating or cooling. Take the building pictured here in Drawdown, which even high in the Rocky Mountains never needs its thermostat adjusted. The truth is that most electricity in the United States comes from gas or coal-fired plants; renewables provide a smaller fraction of domestically produced power, and much of that is nuclear or hydro-electric, which carry risks or have ill effects downstream. (Here is the New York State breakdown.) Meanwhile, households account for about 22% of domestic energy use, with about half directed to heating, cooling, and hot water.

Instead of counting on end users to go renewable, which entails dealing with the Wild West of lightly regulated providers in New York State, what if building with green construction materials reduced or even eliminated the need for outside energy?

Consider this net zero apartment complex, in Rotterdam, NY, where tenants pay no utility bills because solar panels on the property provide 100% of their needs; this one in Los Angeles; this one in Brooklyn; this one in Philadelphia, or even Energy Square right here in Kingston. Residents at this passive-house high-rise on Roosevelt Island in New York City enjoy utility bills of $30 a month tops and possess bragging rights to a projected annual savings of 882 tons of carbon dioxide.

“Environmental protection needs to be a priority,” Ulster County resident and clean energy consultant Hugo Jule wrote in an email. “New buildings need to propose aggressive energy goals such as fossil fuel free, net zero energy plus, zero water, zero waste and be affordable and inclusive of all demographics.”

Mitsubishi 21 SEER heat pumps are a good thing, but they are only a beginning. To say the Poughkeepsie complex uses no fracked gas is to pass the buck, in this case, to the tenants.

Evelyn Wright, Ph.D., an economist specializing in energy and signatory to a letter from Kingston’s Transition chapter calling for environmentally friendly construction, said in a statement, “It would be foolish in the extreme to build a project of this size with little or no attention to clean energy features. Especially in the wake of the recently passed state climate legislation, constructing a fossil fuel-reliant building will saddle the residents with ever-escalating energy costs. The heat pump approach taken in Poughkeepsie, bundled with strong investments in energy efficiency and perhaps in partnership with a community solar project, would be the minimum responsible choice.”

The “Green Concepts” document released by the developer in response to the Transition letter promises to “consider” R-21 walls and R-49 roof, which by the way are already called for under the 2015 International Energy Conservation Code the developer pledges to follow. It would be better to promise to install — not promise to consider, but promise to install — at least R-60 in the roof and to adopt the plethora of green amenities to make this a truly net zero building.

Having LEED accredited staff to “review project features as appropriate,” as “Green Concepts” promises, is meaningless word salad and is not the same thing as going green. Bike racks and electric vehicle charging stations are nice, but they hardly compensate for the failure to produce a net zero building.

“Green Concepts” is a fake response to valid public comment from Transition and should fool no one.

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Interested in learning about the IECC code and extra costs with net zero? See Net Zero Almost to Cost Parity, Zero Energy and Today’s Code, Code Override.