Essay One Draft

Dear Mayor De Blasio,

                            Greetings, my name is Ruben Aponte and I would like to introduce myself as a very dedicated student attending Laguardia Community College. My intention is to compliment and criticize the projects and ideas New York has sought out to prepare the city for climate change. Actually, to be completely honest this letter has been created for a class assignment to share opinion about New York City’s readiness to deal with climate change. Although the city’s proposals will benefit the economy in current times of peril, there is definitely a lack of solid ideas that suggest each plan of action will deal appropriately with climate change for the future. I am concerned about the city’s readiness to deal with hurricanes and flooding. However, despite the fact that I agree New York is taking action to prepare the city for climate change, I disagree the city is adequately prepared to deal with climate change in general. For this reason city officials should hire researchers, scientist, and engineers that understand the consequences and events global warming will cause to New York residents. As a result learning about global warming will help eliminate skepticism of potential consequences.   

Before I elaborate my reasons let me explain the science of climate change. Climate change is an important issue because our specie hostility towards the planet will cause most natural species including our own to go extinct. According to the book The Climate Casino, “We humans control the future of our planet. with its lakes, forests and oceans teeming with life”(Nordhaus 13). This means the damage the human species cause to the planet can be prevented just by taking care of the Earth. To take our planet's health into consideration our priority should focus on eliminating greenhouse gases that arise from burning coal or fossil fuels. It’s important because, if we continue our habits, the Earth will rapidly become hotter. Having large ice sheets melt worldwide will obviously cause ocean levels to rise, causing the potential threat of flooding to parts of  New York City. In addition, climate change has the potential to cause ocean acidification that becomes a large menace to natural underwater species. As a result climate change will affect the City of New York in unprecedented ways since the last dramatic change in climate 2.6 million years ago. The planet will be a much better place without global warming. The risk involved with climate change is that the consequences have never been recorded to present “accurate,” data for New York residents to believe the impact of climate change and how it can affect their daily lives and activities. According to The Climate Casino, “Global warming is a special problem for two central reasons: it is a global externality caused by people around the world in their everyday activity of using fossil fuels and other climate affecting measures, and it casts a long shadow into the future, affecting the globe and its people and natural systems for decades and even centuries into the future”(Nordhaus 18). This means the use of fossil fuels should be regulated to the point that greenhouse gases are no longer considered an externality, I think that anyone who uses any instruments that emit greenhouse gases should compensate for the damages fossil fuels are causing the atmosphere. It’s important because climate change will affect every individual on this planet including future generations; necessary is a plan of action to protect the climate. The implied meaning of this passage suggest implementing “special” solutions to dealing appropriately with climate change such as setting a price on atmospheric pollution.  

The City of New York is producing gradual changes to prepare for climate change. According to the Green Building And Energy Efficiency by PlaNYC webpage, city officials are implementing “PlaNYC,” to achieve, by 2030, an important reduction in the amount of greenhouse gases the City emits by about less than one third. In addition to implementing “Green codes,” the purpose of which will be to insure that  heating oil is regulated and monitored, will help reduce the amount of pollution that taints air in New York City. This idea is important because reducing global warming begins with eliminating pollution. In addition, improvising more ideas that regulate air pollution will set examples for other major cities to follow. Other objectives include the “Energy Efficiency policy.” The goal of this policy is to significantly reduce building energy use. To confront this issue, City officials will work to improve energy efficiency for buildings that already exist and provide effective strategies that  recommend the best methods to reduce cost. This passage suggest that New York is in fact seeking methods to make the city more verdurous by taking initiative to prepare to produce more energy at less cost to the environment. Another strategy to reduce climate change will be to slowly prepare city residents to convert to vehicles that are more friendly to the environment such as driving electric vehicles. According to the PlaNYC webpage the City plans to prevent climate change by advocating for vehicles that run on tesla electricity. The City regards this plan as the “Mission Electric New York,” that hopefully by the year 2015 electric vehicles in New York will prosper and  pioneer the path to changing the world we live in. The “Mission Electric,” project is the construction of new factories with the sole purpose of constructing electric vehicles to significantly reduce the price of such automobiles allowing market prices to compete with other vehicles in market.

Energy efficiency is a top priority to prepare New York City for climate change. The transition to energy efficiency will significantly reduce the price of living in New York and create job opportunities. According to the PlaNYC webpage, “To reach its aggressive sustainability goals, New York City needs to do more than improve new construction and renovations. It has to proactively address energy waste in it’s existing structures, a problem that is difficult to tackle because New York City has over a million of them”(PlaNYC webpage). This means City officials plan to eliminate unnecessary energy waste by providing solutions for buildings that already exist in New York. It’s important because the transition to reduce energy waste in existing buildings is a sensitive topic that is relatively difficult because persuading  building owners to spend money to potentially do good for Earth is apparently impractical.     

New York City residents contribute to climate change but are not conscient.  William Nordhaus states, “Global warming begins and ends with human activities, growing food, heating our homes, and even going to school”(Nordhaus 15).  Economic activity includes most actions that people rely on to make life simpler and easier such as driving or using certain products. What goes unmonitored are the consequences that the New York population contributes to climate change. However, the City lifestyle necessities requires residents to actively contribute to climate change as most of New York’s population depends on vehicles to travel across borders. Driving happens to be the activity that contributes dearly to the devastation of the atmosphere’s balance, especially when the City is famous for congested traffic. The atmosphere becomes heavily tainted to the point that a shroud of deadly Co2 becomes semi visible. In addition, if New York residents choose to drive vehicles that are Eco friendly, the city would be able to contribute a fair share to prevent climate change As a result, the problem is not so much the amount of people that are on Earth, but the dependency of using vehicles and instruments that cause long term damage to the planet.   

In conclusion climate change is a serious problem that requires the attention of  individuals who care about the future of Earth. In addition, implementing strategies that reduce CO2 will contribute to saving the planet’s equilibrium and delay adverse consequences.  I believe educating present and future generations on the harm of global  warming  will give New York City residents the direction to overcome global warming.  Overcoming global warming will require the participation of nations to work together to achieve solutions for problems that once seemed impossible until finally solved.