Why NY real estate hasn’t taken a stance on climate change

From the July issue: When President Trump announced in June that the United States would pull out of the Paris climate accord, New York developer Jonathan Rose sensed that something more than an environmental safety net was at stake. He saw retreating dollar signs.

“Bottom line is, these are major economic opportunities,” he said, referring to technologies that promote energy efficiency, such as electric cars and solar energy. “We just ceded them to China.”

Nearly 200 nations, including the U.S., signed the Paris agreement in December 2015, pledging to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit global temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius or less by 2100. In some ways, supporting the accord is a symbolic gesture — even if every participating country meets its reduction goals, the world is still on track to exceed that amount of warming by 2030. But inaction or silence on the issue accomplishes even less, and in the case of New York City’s real estate industry, rising temperatures could have grave consequences — from regular flooding to major storms like Superstorm Sandy that occur every few years.