Steve Cohens Blog

On January 5th of this year, Alaska Governor and Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin wrote an op-ed in the New York Times opposing listing polar bears on the endangered species list. Her argument was well reasoned and thoughtful, although in the end, unsatisfactory. In her piece Governor Palin noted her support for policies that helped preserve polar bears:

"We have a ban on most hunting - only Alaska Native subsistence families can hunt polar bears - and measures to protect denning areas and prevent harassment of the bears. We are also participating in international efforts aimed at preserving polar bear populations worldwide.

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Last week Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed that New York City engage in a serious effort to develop alternative energy sources, and in return for his trouble he faced skepticism and even ridicule from a cynical media. Cartoons were drawn with King Kong trying to swat a windmill off the top of the Empire State Building. Still, even the tabloids could not dismiss the idea entirely. Bloomberg commands respect, and $4 a gallon gasoline has everyone looking for alternatives.

New York City has been built by people who dreamed large and were able to project into the future. Imagine the city without Central, Van Cortland or Prospect Parks.  read more »

The Brooklyn Children's Museum -- the hands-on instititution popular with tykes from Tremont to Poughkeepsie -- is slated to reopen as the first LEED-certified museum in New York City on Sept. 20, according to a spokeswoman for the project and Interior Design.

The Rafael-Vinoly-designed addition to the Crown Heights insititution will, according to the design mag, double the size of the museum to more than 100,000 square feet. The addition, covered in 8.1 million (!!) very, very yellow ceramic tiles, will presumably allow for more exhibition space (and maybe even bigger digs for Fantasia, the 17-foot-long Burmese Python?).

To achieve LEED-silver certification, the addition has "rapidly renewable and recycled materials" like "bamboo and recycled rubber flooring.  read more »

The Presidential nominating conventions are now approaching, first the Democrats' and then the Republicans'. The President hangs out at the Olympics, stomps his feet over the Russian invasion of Georgia and then makes another pass at gutting the Endangered Species Act by reducing the time and scientific analysis needed to assess the environmental impact of federal projects. The energy and climate issue have provided some environmental content to this campaign, but the folks running the country still don't see the stake we have in environmental sustainability.

What does an extinct frog have to do with human well-being? What does the environment have to do with economic wealth? Can't our technology solve any environmental problem we make? The short answer, as we learned nearly half a century ago from Rachael Carson and Barry Commoner, is that everything is connected to everything else.  read more »

Watching the wonderful spectacle of the Olympics this year, one finds the world outside the sports arenas constantly intruding. Russia manages to invade Georgia, human rights activists try to communicate their message to the world and oh yeah, breathing in Beijing remains a challenge. All of these issues are important, but as you might expect, I'm going to focus on breathing today.

I have the honor of participating in a program at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs where we provide management training for senior government officials from Guangdong Province in China. Guangdong is an industrial province with about 80 million residents and a large number of guest workers, and is at the heart of China's massive effort to develop economically.  read more »

The energy issue has become central in the presidential campaign and we see little to suggest that either candidate will engage in a real discussion about the real choices we have. The fact is that the era of fossil fuels is coming to an end. There are too many people and too much need for energy for this to continue for very long. How long? More than a decade and less than a century. Why should we care? Because we probably can think of better things to do with petrochemicals than burning them for fuels. Because we shouldn’t be handing this problem to our children to solve.  read more »

If we are to make this planet more sustainable, all of us--individuals, families, schools, nonprofits, and especially corporations--will need to change our behavior. This does not mean that we must live grim lives where we stay at home freezing in the dark. It does mean that we need to pay attention to the resources we consume and we need to switch as quickly as we can to renewable resources. This is going to require changes in public policy and increases in the funding for scientific research and development. It is also going to require the private sector do more to incorporate sustainability principles into best management practices.  read more »

Over the past weekend we got to hear President Bush, Senator McCain and then Senator Obama all supporting drilling for oil off our coasts. Both Bush and McCain maintain that the way to reduce gasoline prices is to develop more supplies of oil. They argue, and polling shows people believe, that drilling for more oil will lower prices. Although Obama is not crazy about drilling in fragile environments, he's willing to allow some drilling in exchange for a bill that would promote alternative energy.

For a brief moment I admired the artfulness and subtly of Obama's perspective-a little carefully controlled drilling can't do much harm, as long as our policy encourages renewable energy.  read more »

As summer heats up, our thoughts return to garbage--specifically New York City's garbage. As I've mentioned before, it would be hard to invent a more environmentally damaging, or more expensive system of waste management, than the one we use. To reiterate--in New York City we collect the garbage that residents place on the curb and then dump it on the floor of huge warehouses that tend to be located in low-income neighborhoods. We then scoop it up and load it on to trailer trucks and ship it far away--mostly to landfills (dumps), or waste-to-energy plants (incinerators). In the old days, when we had more vacant land in the city, we dumped the garbage in our own landfills.  read more »

In the early 1980's a water engineer once described the Hudson River to me as "the biggest and fastest flushing toilet in the world". Until the North River sewage treatment plant opened in 1986 for what was called "advanced preliminary treatment" we dumped all of the west side's raw sewage straight into the Hudson. No wonder Riverside Drive is about ¼ mile from the river--up on a bluff with railroad tracks and later a park and highway between the fancy apartments and the river. No wonder the most expensive residential avenues in Manhattan, 5th Avenue and Park Avenue, were traditionally those furthest from the East and Hudson Rivers.  read more »