In a stroke of both good timing and good corporate citizenship last week, Westchester County”™s largest employer, IBM Corp., announced a new product whose design earned loud applause from a gathering at Manhattanville College led by County Executive Andrew Spano.
The product, IBM”™s System z10 mainframe computer, will reduce power and cooling costs by up to 85 percent and floor space requirements by a like amount in companies”™ energy-sapping data centers. That is the kind of profitable and environmentally conscious initiative that the county”™s global warming task force asks of businesses in its action plan for climate change and sustainable development.
Available online at www.westchestergov.com/globalwarming, the massive plan was presented at a conference last Tuesday at the college”™s Reid Castle on the same morning that IBM, with 7,500 employees at its Armonk headquarters, made its well-received announcement.
More than a year in the making, the action plan identifies steps to be taken in the business, county government, education, household and municipal sectors to achieve the county”™s short-term goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by 2015. The county”™s baseline for measuring reductions is 2005, when total emissions for the county amounted to nearly 13 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalents.
The county”™s long-term goal is to reduce emissions by 80 percent by 2050. Scientists have recommended that latter goal as what is needed to avoid the worst-case climate change in the Northeast.
In Westchester, the scenario of rising global temperatures will leave lowlands and wetlands along the Sound Shore and Hudson River permanently flooded by late this century. With regional water levels conservatively projected to rise by 10 inches to 2 feet, many Westchester communities will be at risk, the task force reported. The area will be hit with more severe storms and destructive 100-year floods whose average frequency is predicted at every 10 years. Northern forests and fisheries will decline or disappear. If greenhouse gas emissions go unchecked, Westchester”™s climate will resemble that of southern Georgia by the end of the century.
As a more immediate goal, the task force recommends that businesses and households join in a nationwide challenge to reduce their greenhouse gas footprints by 10 percent by 2010.
Reese Berman, the North Castle town supervisor who co-chaired the 34-member task force, invoked the Rev. Martin Luther King”™s phrase, “the fierce urgency of now,” to describe the response needed to develop and implement what she called “adaptation strategies” to confront the global warming crisis.
“That”™s an awesome task,” she said of the county”™s goals. “We can and must do this now.”
Spano, who recently was named to the board of the national Local Governments for Sustainability, said he was moved to form the county task force in January 2007 after viewing the Al Gore documentary on global warming and its mounting economic and environmental consequences, “An Inconvenient Truth.” In business and in all sectors, “We want on-the-ground paid people involved in this effort, and then we want the volunteers to assist them,” he said. “This is everybody”™s job.
“We cannot afford to fail.”
Action plan
Many businesses in Westchester already have begun that effort at sustainability and reduced energy use.
At Swiss Re, the global reinsurance company with about 700 workers in Armonk, employees are offered company subsidies up to $3,000 for energy-saving measures that include purchases of Energy Star household appliances and hybrid fuel vehicles and home energy audits in a program started last year, Swiss Re executive Julie Pollack said. About 400 employees worldwide used the program in its first year. The company also has reduced its own energy usage in Armonk by 750,000 kilowatt hours per year.
While Spano said a bottom-up approach such as the county task force”™s was needed to act on global warming in the nation, Pollack said businesses needed CEOs and top management to effect change. “If businesses can adopt that top-down approach, I think it really builds up that bottom-up approach,” she said.
Jason Black, a global warming task force committee member and architect at the Reckson division of SL Green Realty in White Plains, advised businesses to “start small” with sustainability, which “is about the details. You have to determine what”™s best for your organization. You have to determine what”™s best for your business. Choose the low-lying fruits first.”
Reckson/SL Green, which owns about 5.5 million square feet of commercial property in the Westchester and Connecticut area, about a year ago began a recycling program for its construction waste materials, which account for one-third of all waste generated in the nation, Black said. By recycling ceiling tiles and carpet with a manufacturer, the company has diverted roughly 180 tons of debris from landfills, he said.
Robert Fischman, a task force business committee member and project director at Ginsburg Development Companies L.L.C. in Valhalla, said the company has built Energy Star residential communities in Sleepy Hollow and New Rochelle, resulting in initial savings of more than $1,000 per home. For businesses, “Saving money is now about sustainability,” he said.
But not all buyers have bought into the green movement with its increased construction costs, Fischman said. “There is always resistance from a developer”™s perspective,” especially in condo construction, he said. “It is constantly a fight, to be perfectly honest.”
Opportunities arise
Still, the business and finance climate has changed much with the global warming crisis, said John Cusack, president of the Environmental Business Association of New York State. “Ten years ago, you couldn”™t even go to companies with ”˜environment”™ in the name of your business and get financed,” he said. “We”™re in shock that so much has been happening” in the booming environmental markets in which financial giants such as JP Morgan Chase, Morgan and Stanley and Citibank now trade and invest.
“I think one of the really optimistic parts of climate change is that this is going to create a lot of business opportunities to both make a profit from climate change while also coming up with solutions to the problems,” Cusack said.
George Drapeau, chairman of the task force business committee and public affairs director of the Construction Industry Council of Westchester and Hudson Valley Inc. in Tarrytown, said Westchester”™s business sector, with its vast range of components including mom-and-pop enterprises, industries, institutions and multinationals, “is the 900-pound gorilla of the entire operation” to launch concerted action.
Regarding the county”™s action plan, “I think you have to think of this in terms of a launch,” he said. “This is not the end of the journey; this is the beginning of the journey.”
