News & Events
AHI Director and Recent ABA Panelist Now Coordinating Citywide Conference on Energy Efficiency and Climate Change
City Tech Apartment House Institute (AHI) Director Richard Koral was a panelist at a New York City Bar Association program, “Implementing Energy Cost Saving Strategies in NYC Cooperatives and Other Multifamily Buildings and Related Issues,” in April. Sponsored by the association’s Energy Committee, the program examined the compelling national and local concern about the high cost of energy, the need to address climate change, energy independence and energy reliability.
Koral and other panelists emphasized how residential buildings can provide a significant part of the solution to growing energy consumption and related climate change problems. They detailed the vital role that building managers and superintendents, both locally and worldwide, must play to conserve energy and to help reduce carbon emissions by a targeted 80 percent over the next 40 years in order to avoid a global climate catastrophe. They also provided in-depth information on the many opportunities and legal issues faced by coops and other multifamily dwellings in implementing energy-saving strategies.
The Bar Association program came on the heels of New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s unveiling of the city's greenhouse gas emissions inventory report at the New York Academy of Sciences earlier in April. The inventory shows that citywide carbon dioxide equivalent emissions were approximately 58 million metric tons in 2005, with nearly 80 percent coming from commercial and residential buildings. Local carbon emissions have increased by about eight percent in the last 10 years, and are on trend to increase 25 percent above 2005 levels by 2030.
On August 1, Koral and AHI will coordinate a major conference on global warming and housing at Baruch College in Manhattan. The conference is part of rallying the city’s housing community in the fight against climate change.
According to Koral, “Al Gore and others have done a fantastic job of familiarizing the general public with the phenomenon of global warming and its likely devastating consequences if nothing is done to reverse the damage we are doing to the environment. What is needed now is for people to internalize the danger and take corrective action in every area of their lives.
“Our growing awareness of the seriousness of the problem is speeding up the movement away from fossil fuels to other types of energy,” Koral adds, ”but changing people’s behavior in relation to energy use and its impact on global warming will require a massive effort to achieve a turnaround. In major urban areas such as New York City, that turnaround will require the collaborative participation of the media and the residential and commercial building industries.”
Spring 2007 saw growing interest in global warming campus-wide. As part of City Tech’s Earth Day observance, two special screenings of former Vice President Al Gore's Academy Award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth were held during April. Following the screenings, Professors Reginald Blake, physics, and Costas Panayotakis, social science, provided scientific and other commentary on the impact that climate change is having on our planet.
May brought six viewings on campus of Global Warming, produced by the Institute for Sustainable Communication (ISC), an entrepreneurial, not-for-profit corporation committed to educating and training the next generation of business leaders needed to grow innovative, sustainable enterprises that create job and wealth for communities in responsible ways.
At City Tech, energy conservation plays an increasingly important role in improvements to the College’s physical plant. “The College recently installed new windows throughout Namm Hall with special glass that significantly reduces the heating effects of sunlight on interior environments,” says James Vazquez, director of facilities.“ Dropped ceilings will soon reduce the height of classrooms, labs and offices throughout the building, and we just installed dark inside blinds, further reducing City Tech’s heating- and air conditioning-related energy needs. Also in the works is an entirely new HVAC system, which together with the new windows, dropped ceilings and dark blinds will substantially reduce energy consumption and save the College considerable money in the process.”
Energy conservation also has been a major theme in both AHI and Superintendents Technical Association (STA) educational and informational programs in recent years. STA, which was established at the College in 1998 and of which Koral is a founder and secretary-treasurer, is the first technical society of multifamily building maintenance personnel in the greater New York area. More than 1,200 housing industry professionals citywide read its monthly newsletter, Super! Both AHI and STA are programs of City Tech’s Division of Continuing Education.
For more information about the August 1 AHI-coordinated conference on global warming and housing, contact Richard Koral at rkoral@citytech.cuny.edu.
05/24/07
