Mayor SUV Decries Glass Towers as Energy Hogs

Mayor Bill de Blasio, the man who gets driven 11 miles to the gym every day in a gas-guzzling SUV, is now promoting his own Green New Deal to go with the city’s recently adopted Climate Mobilization Act, Crain’s reports.

A centerpiece of hizzoner’s plan, which would require legislation by the city council, is to ban the ubiquitous glass towers that have sprouted across the city in recent years, most spectacularly at Hudson Yards on the West Side of Manhattan. 

"Buildings got built that should never have been built to begin with, if we were thinking about the needs of our Earth," de Blasio says. "So we are going to introduce legislation to ban the glass-and-steel skyscrapers that have contributed so much to global warming. They have no place in our city or on our Earth anymore." 

The mayor and his aides acknowledged that, even if the Green New Deal were to become law, developers still would have ways to use acres of glass. They could, for instance, employ heat-retaining panes or compensate by reducing their carbon footprint in other ways. The aides cited as examples of proper "modern" use of glass walls the East Side's American Copper Building apartments and the Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island. “Some of the ones at Hudson Yards,” de Blasio says, “are examples of the wrong way to do things.” 

A spokeswoman for The Related Cos., Hudson Yards' developer, touted the massive complex as carbon-efficient. "Hudson Yards was planned as the largest LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) neighborhood in New York City," she said in a statement. "A first-of-its-kind microgrid powered by two cogeneration plants is estimated to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually." She called 10 Hudson Yards, a glass tower, "one of New York's most energy-efficient Class A office towers." 

Maybe people who ride around in fossil fuel-guzzling SUV’s shouldn’t throw rocks at all glass buildings.