New York, Decarbonized

A 2019 city law threatens big fines for landlords who don’t clean up their buildings

The Grand Tier, a 30-story high-rise at Broadway and 64th Street in Manhattan, features trappings typical of posh digs on the Upper West Side, including Central Park views and a lobby ornamented in French tapestry, silver travertine and Italian ironwork. The 20-year-old tower also boasts a singular feature: In the basement, an array of pipes and compressors the size of six parking spaces scrubs exhaust from the building’s two natural gas boilers, separating carbon dioxide from nitrogen and oxygen, liquefying it and storing it in metal tanks.

The city’s only residential carbon-capture rig, installed last year, reflects a citywide environmental challenge. Local Law 97, a pioneering climate mandate passed in 2019, aims to cut emissions from New York’s largest buildings 40% by 2030 and 80% by 2050. Next year the city will begin penalizing owners of inefficient properties, with fines growing considerably in 2030.

New York’s density makes it an outlier among US cities: The largest share of its greenhouse emissions comes from buildings, not cars or power plants. The big bet behind the law, which inspired similar legislation in Boston and Washington, DC, is that New York’s wealth and entrepreneurial energy will turn the city into a proving ground for climate tech. “In New York City, 17 million tons of CO2 is emitted from boilers and heaters annually,” says Brian Asparro, chief operating officer of CarbonQuest, a startup that worked on the Grand Tier system with owner Glenwood Management. “Why shouldn’t every boiler system have technology like this?”