De Blasio Takes Aim At Trump With Climate Change Plan

NEW YORK CITY — In his latest effort to stick it to President Donald Trump, Mayor Bill de Blasio released a plan Tuesday to dramatically cut emissions in line with the 2015 Paris climate accord. The plan would expand the city's composting program, run the government entirely on renewable power and double the number of bikes on city streets by 2020, among other efforts to make New York greener.

The plan follow's de Blasio's June 2 pledge for the city to honor the Paris pact, an international agreement to curb the harm of global climate change by limiting greenhouse gas emissions, after Trump said the United States would pull out.

"In the Trump era, cities have to lead the way when it comes to fighting climate change," de Blasio said in a news release Tuesday. "Hotter summers and powerful storms made worse by climate change are an existential threat to a coastal city like ours, which is why we need to act now."

Over the next three years, the plan says, the city will accelerate its existing efforts to cut emissions by 80 percent by 2050 in pursuit of the Paris accord's aspiration to make sure global temperatures don't get more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above than pre-industrial levels. The pact, which took effect last year, mandates that global temperatures should not risemore than 2 degrees above that mark, with 1.5 degrees as an ideal limit.

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By 2020, building codes would limit future fossil fuel use and encourage environmentally friendly building techniques as well as green retrofitting projects, the plan says. It also calls for the city to implement single-stream recycling and compost collection citywide by 2020 and 2018, respectively; and to power government buildings entirely with renewable energy "as soon as sufficient supply can be brought online."

Bolstering public transit is also a big part of the plan, as it says 90 percent of New York's greenhouse gas emissions come from personal vehicles. The city would work to expand the MTA's Select Bus Service and create 50 more miles of bike lanes, including 10 miles of protected bike lanes, the mayor's office said.

"Given New York City’s status as a leader among world cities, the smart choices we make now about transportation will not only help make New York a safer and more equitable City, they can make a real difference in combating global climate change," city Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg said in the mayor's news release.

It will take changes to state policy to accomplish all the goals outlined in the plan, which de Blasio acknowledged. It includes a push for a "millionaire's tax" on the wealthy to help fund fixes to the subway system, a de Blasio proposal that Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the mayor's political nemesis who controls the MTA, was not eager to embrace this summer.

The plan also relies on the state expanding its power transmission system so that renewable energy produced upstate could help power the city.

De Blasio said he was confident that the state-level changes would get done despite political obstacles.

"I have my differences with the leadership in Albany, but on moving to address climate change there's been a lot of really good policies by this governor and this legislature, so I'm really hopeful that there will be a lot of cooperation going forward," de Blasio said at an unrelated news conference Tuesday.

Read the mayor's full plan below.

(Lead image by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)