The Green Building That’s Flunking New York’s Climate Law (2)

On the corner of 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, Pete Sikora gazes up at a glass-enclosed tower that twists with unexpected grace as it rises 51 stories into the sky. Sikora is director of climate and inequality campaigns at New York Communities for Change, an activist organization. On this breezy September day, however, he’s posing as an energy specialist in the hopes of gathering intelligence about the skyscraper, One Bryant Park, also known as the Bank of America Tower in honor of its primary tenant.

Tall and bespectacled with the mischievous air of a professional agitator, Sikora ...