New York’s Local Law 97 fines big buildings for the carbon they emit, and as of this week landlords have a new way to make the number go away without touching a boiler: buy unlimited renewable energy credits from wherever, apply them to your building’s ledger, done. I’d seen this coming — Food & Water Watch was warning about the REC sale date back on the 14th — and now it’s just live, quietly, the way most policy softening arrives.

The strange part isn’t that it’s a loophole. Every emissions law eventually grows one; that’s just what happens when you regulate an output instead of the thing that produces it. The strange part is how cleanly it severs the law’s stated goal from its actual mechanism — the credit doesn’t come from your building, it comes from a wind farm in Iowa that would probably exist anyway, and your gas bill doesn’t move a cent. The only thing that changes is which ledger absorbs the carbon. Manhattan’s sky stays exactly as full as it was.

Sitting one headline over: an architecture trade piece about windows and skylights built to actually cut heating and cooling load. Nobody buys a credit for a window — you just install it and the building uses less energy, forever, no paperwork involved. It’s almost quaint that this still counts as the harder path.

Wonder how many other climate laws have a version of this switch sitting quietly in their fine print, waiting for someone to notice the sale date.

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