Eric Adams Is ‘Getting Stuff Done’ on Climate Law — For the Real Estate Lobby

The Adams administration argues that fines could strip money away from improvements or jack up rents and maintenance. But the penalties for violating the initial limits are quite low: At $268 per ton of pollution over the limit, they work out, per unit, to the equivalent of a parking ticket. A residential building owner that has to fork over something on the order of five to 15 bucks a month per apartment isn’t going to go into financial crisis.

The administration emphasizes that in exchange for the delay, developers will have to submit a plan to implement pollution cuts to satisfy the law from 2026 onwards. As Chief Climate Officer Rit Aggarwala, the administration’s point person on the law, put it to The New York Times: “What we have done very intentionally is say if you are late on 2024 targets, you can go ahead and pay the fees, or you can enter into a legally binding agreement with the city.” But landlords are already obligated to follow the law. Suggesting that some sort of new agreement is extra special legally binding is absurd.

The delay program would simply reward building owners who stuck their heads in the sand.

Eric Adams is eager to break up homeless encampments, arrest turnstile jumpers, and punish immigrant street vendors. Poor people of color don’t get an option to ignore laws by promising to follow them in two years; neither should the owners of the city’s dirtiest big buildings, who were given half a decade to fulfill a basic social responsibility.

There are also serious administrative challenges with the mayor’s approach. After multiple rounds of budget cuts under Adams, the severely understaffed Department of Buildings is not in a good position to evaluate large numbers of plans to upgrade big buildings. This month, Adams announced a hiring freeze and is insisting agencies cut budgets again, by 15 percent. Building owners will hire well connected consultants and lawyers who know the right dance steps to get pro forma approval from overwhelmed agency staff, and the process will likely devolve into an exercise in paperwork.

It’s not even clear that the city will penalize owners who haven’t gotten into compliance by the end of the delay period. The proposed rules are clear as mud; the department “may” choose to fine landlords retroactively, not “shall” or “must.” Now that Adams is letting them off the hook for 2024, why would owners expect he’ll do differently in 2026 — or 2030, when stricter requirements come into effect?

The 2030 limits are where the rubber hits the road. They match the pace and speed of the Paris climate agreement: an over 40 percent reduction in pollution across large buildings. Watering down the initial limits signals to the real estate lobby that landlords can get a re-elected Mayor Adams to water down the later requirements, when they really start to force down pollution.

That works out well for the mayor on one level: It tells the titans of real estate that he can deliver value for money spent on his re-election. The law effectively requires billions of dollars of new investment across New York’s building stock, so what’s a few million through an Adams super PAC in comparison?

Allowing owners to purchase unlimited RECs to offset their pollution from electricity would severely reduce how much pollution they cut. Analysts have crunched the numbers: The Urban Green Council found that about 50 percent of required pollution cuts could be offloaded to REC purchases, if the sole restriction is that they only offset pollution from electricity. The City Comptroller’s office estimates about 70 percent.

The city’s official Advisory Council for Local Law 97, which included a wide range of experts, industry practitioners, unions, and advocates (like yours truly), made a fair and specific proposal: RECs should be limited to offsetting only up to 30 percent of the pollution by which a given building is over its limit. Councilmembers Carmen De La Rosa, Lincoln Restler, and Pierina Sanchez also rounded up 26 colleagues — a majority of the City Council — to urge the mayor to adopt that limit.

The mayor’s proposal ignores the expert consensus and allows unlimited RECs to offset electric use. The only restriction is that buildings opting for the two-year delay program couldn’t use RECs.

Adams is giving landlords a choice of giant loopholes: Either they can get a two-year reprieve or they can purchase RECs starting in 2026 to cover a huge proportion of their pollution.

Big building owners like billionaire Douglas Durst — the chair of the Real Estate Board of New York, who has donated heavily to Adams and employs his former chief of staff — pushed hard for this approach. The Durst Organization’s showpiece property, One Bryant Park — the Bank of America Tower — is a skyscraper polluting well over the 2024–2029 limit. If Durst can simply purchase RECs to cover electricity use, no pollution will be cut and no jobs will be created.

RECs are meant to help induce renewable energy development by creating a guaranteed revenue stream for developers, but there is open debate over whether they work.

The city and the state can’t meet their respective climate plans without reducing on-site pollution. The electric grid must be cleaned up, cars and truck pollution must be slashed, and buildings must become more energy efficient — all at the same time. It can’t be one or the other.