Carbon reductions in New York
Last week New York Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, launched the “One Year, One Thousand Supers” programme, intended to provide up to 40 hours training to 1,000 building superintendents as part of a campaign to reduce the carbon footprint for the city.
According to the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, energy savings from buildings is the lowest-cost method of reducing greenhouse gas emissions - greener buildings could, additionally, save the New York real estate industry as much as $230 million a year in operating expenses.
On the face of it, the scheme has merit. It is becoming more and more recognised that the greatest business carbon emitter in the corporate sector is buildings and, with the growing acceptance by that very sector that the science and the data can no longer be denied, more and more conferences and talking shops have sprung up to discuss what to do about it.
The reality is, currently, no more is happening about it than exactly that; talk. I discussed in this column (http://dofonline.co.uk/blogs/eco-finance/environment/leadership-or-management-4225514/) the Empire State Building retrofit project which has never managed to realise its full potential because the effectiveness of some the carbon reducing measures incorporated into the retrofit are able to be overridden by the tenants, at will; this latest initiative has no more chance of making a measurable differences if some of the basic conditions underpinning the lack of success of previous initiatives have not been addressed in the meantime.
Furthermore, if Mayor Bloomberg does not back his sound bites up with a more aggressive stance, this latest announcement may be perceived as nothing more than sophisticated green wash, designed to increase his re-election chances, especially since the city statutes have recently been changed to allow him to sit a third term if re-elected (3rd November is, after all, looming fast!).
As ever, the difference that makes the difference is leadership – not spin. The same challenges that face the building superintendents in New York City are faced by the Facilities Managers in the City of London and every other business building everywhere in the world. Ultimately they occupy a position in the hierarchy of authority, one which often allows them to influence but rarely permits them to take actions (like spending a bit more now to save a lot more later on); ‘buildings people’ will always propose measures that require some (though not always a lot of) investment upfront in order to save an organisation money in the medium or long term.
Their input will never be able to correlate directly to the cost of sales and it takes a more ‘visionary’ leader in the organisation to include them in strategic policy meetings than exists in most organisations today. The economic climate has further distanced them from the power core and many are, despite being knowledgeable, professional and very capable, simply hamstrung.
In all probability, 99% of the proposed 1,000 supers who are being ‘chosen’ for carbon reduction training already have a thorough knowledge of exactly how to achieve the best results; Bloomberg is, as they say, preaching to the choir. What they need is not education – its empowerment, authority to act, input to the executive team; in other words, they need to be included. Otherwise this, and any other initiative that may spring up out of this sound bite, will just be seen by the supers as a stick to beat them over the head with when, a year down the road, nothing has changed and the politicians and business leaders can shift the blame to the man with both hands tied behind his back.
Building superintendents may be many things – stupid isn’t one of them!
