The recent op ed by Ken Lovett (Advocates Opposing Climate Act Changes Ignoring Reality), a communications advisor for Governor Hochul, continues the pattern of misleading and incomplete information promoted by her administration to defend her efforts to avoid complying with the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA).
While Lovett and Hochul defend her retreat on the grounds that the world has changed since the CLCPA was passed, they ignore that the biggest change is that global warming and extreme weather are continuing to accelerate, even faster than expected. Former President Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders have repeatedly warned that climate change presents an existential threat to humanity. The Secretary-General of the United Nations has repeatedly warned that the slow climate efforts by governments have opened up the Gates to Hell.
Climate action should be a matter of science, not politics and election spin. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admits that its climate emission reduction goals (faster than the CLCPA) are too slow to avoid catastrophic climate change. To avoid that fate, the IPCC promotes carbon capture, even while admitting that it is not presently feasible. Climate activist Greta Thunberg chided them in her address to the UN for leaving the fate of her generation to the success of a Hail Mary pass.
Converting the state’s energy system from fossil fuels to clean renewable energy certainly poses challenges. The biggest challenge, however, is not technical but political. Meeting timelines requires coordinated planning and strong leadership at the top – both of which have been missing under Hochul.
While President Trump certainly deserves blame for his war against clean renewable energy and his promotion of the fossil fuel industry and their high prices, New York’s failure to meet renewable energy goals stretches back decades, long before Trump. Governor Pataki for instance set goals in 2002 for renewable energy which the state’s failed to come close to meeting.
The CLPA, adopted in 2019, largely put into statue climate policies that had been official state policy since a 2009 gubernatorial Executive Order. Two hundred climate and community groups had supported a stronger bill that would have required a much stronger planning process while updating the state’s climate goals, including making them more aligned with the lower heating target developing nations had won in the Paris climate accords. It also had a much faster timeline with short-term benchmarks. To get legislators and the executive to act, you need 2-year goals and benchmarks, not 10-to-30-year milestones.
New York moves as slow as molasses. After the climate law passed, the state spent three years to develop a scoping plan for climate action. Even though the plan was largely written by the Governor’s office, Hochul has ignored many of its recommendations, including ignoring the legal mandate to incorporate it into the recent update to the state energy master plan.
The state’s climate scoping plan provided a low-ball estimate of needing $10 billion annually for 30 years to fund the transition to a renewable energy future. Lovett wants us to applaud Hochul for providing $1 billion (to be spent over 5 years) in last year’s budget for a Sustainable Future Fund, which represents 2% of what her administration previously said was needed.
Both plans were more of a college white paper, outlining key questions and visions rather than providing a detailed plan of action with budget, timelines, and intermediate goals. The Governor for instance rammed in support for extremely expensive nuclear power plants contrary to the scoping plan. New York continues to provide more money to nuclear subsidies than it does to renewables, with Hochul recently adding $30 billion plus over two decades to the initiative started by Cuomo to keep 4 unprofitable, old, upstate nuclear reactors open that the owner wanted to close. Lawmakers should impose a 2 year moratorium on nuclear to do a financial assessment while re-directly the $30 billion to renewable energy.
Another example of slow action is the issue of the state power plant which powers the Capitol and State Plaza. For more than a century, the plant has polluted Sheridan Hollow, a low-income community of color, by burning coal, oil, trash, and now gas. Since 2017, climate and community groups have been calling to shut down the plant and use geothermal instead. The state finally did a study, which took two plus years to complete and then proposed a 15-to-20-year timeline. Meanwhile, the State of Michigan took 18 months – from study to completion – to convert its state Capitol to geothermal while also building a new floor.
A second study of the NY Capitol complex was done as part of a budget agreement to look at how to decarbonize the state’s 15 largest greenhouse gas emitters. Lawmakers had initially sought a concrete commitment to do the conversions. That two-year study was finally completed in January, but NYPA says it can’t release it until June (i.e., post-legislative session) since it argues it has to redact details about individual buildings.
Governor Hochul recently stated that it would be foolish for anyone – including her and her staff – to imply that high utility bills in New York are due to the climate law giving the slowness of her administration in implementing it. States with lower electric costs also tend to be the ones with a higher percentage of their electricity coming from renewable energy.
As even the NY Independent System Operator has acknowledged, the main driver of high energy costs is reliance on natural gas and its volatile prices, a situation made worse by the present Trump-Netanyahu war on Iran. Continued investment in expensive gas pipelines also drives up costs. Hochul recently had the state reverse course and approve the NESE gas pipeline under the NYC Harbor.
Solar is the cheapest source of electricity on the planet, though government red tape and bureaucracy in the Unted States has slowed down adoption compared to other countries such as those in Europe. In Bill McKibben’s new book, Here Comes the Sun, he points out that everyday Pakistanis – with virtually no help from their government – have installed a massive number of cheap solar units from neighboring China to escape from the high cost and unreliability of the existing electric grid. In only six years, solar has gone from 0 to 30% of Pakistan’s energy supply. Texas makes it easier than NY to build renewable energy and leads the country in the development of solar, wind, and geothermal. California often meets 100% of its energy needs from renewables and battery storage for at least part of the day.
Besides more funding for solar, lawmakers should pass several bills (ASAP, SUNNY) to speed up solar development.
Lovett and Hochul ignore that massive costs and negative health impacts that New Yorkers are already experiencing from climate change. New Yorkers annually pay an estimated $50 billion in Increased health care costs due to air pollution. Flooding is an increasing problem, especially in NYC, with some even dying in basement apartments. Air quality has plummeted in recent summers due to wildfires in Canada. Extreme heat is the leading cause of weather-related deaths in the U.S and New York State., with more than 500 residents of NYC alone dying annually.
One way to achieve lower energy costs is through public power, as has been done in many states (though public control is also critical). Even in NY, we have seen this with the fifty-plus municipally owned utilities plus the cheap hydropower from the New York Power Authority. Yet Hochul and NYPA are resisting the direction by the state legislature to build publicly owned renewables.
Lovett also trots out the much maligned – and indeed fraudulent – 3-page memo by NYSERDA that contends that the Governor’s cap-and-trade/invest proposal for carbon pricing “would cost upstate households more than $4,000 annually on their utility bills.” In order to come up with the $4k estimate, Hochul is using a price that is more than 800% higher than what she has been proposing, a fact not mentioned in the NYSERDA paper.
Carbon pricing – making fossil fuels pay for the damages their use causes to the rest of society – is viewed by economists as the single most effective way to reduce their burning and convert to renewable energy. While a carbon price is intended to raise the price of fossil fuels in order to reduce the use, rebating part or all of the revenue reduces or eliminates the negative impact on people’s wallets. Hochul has proposed a 33% rebate. A carbon tax bill that I drafted a decade ago, along with some economic professors, had a rebate of 60%, targeted to low- and middle-income New Yorkers which would have held them harmless. Some groups prefer a 100% rebate. (And perhaps the only positive thing from COVID is that the state now knows how to send checks to individual New Yorkers without relying on tax filings to do that.)
Most climate groups prefer a carbon tax approach instead. Environmental justice (and even Pope Francis) have long opposed the cap-and-trade approach promoted by Hochul as hurting such communities while being subject to Wall Street speculation. Interestingly, both fossil fuel companies and senior Republicans (not Trump) have long supported a carbon tax – though they want it to be national for standardization and with the poison bill of absolving them of any legal liability for knowingly causing climate change.
The state’s climate law does not require a price on carbon. It does require a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a deadline which Hochul missed. Hochul chose cap-and-trade to do this. One problem with this approach is that in the last moments before the plan is formally adopted, politicians invariably weaken the targets to appease the fossil fuel industry. In this case, Hochul is seeking to weaken it much earlier in the process.
In 2010, the Green Party first proposed a Green New Deal, which combined a ten-year timeline to 100% renewables and zero emissions with an Economic Bill of Rights (living wage jobs, universal health care, education, and jobs). A key point is that we need a Just Transition, that guarantees a decent standard of living for everyone.
With Trump installed as climate-denier-in-chief, it is critical that state governments step up to take effective climate action. Governor Hochul unfortunately is not the only Democratic governor that is responding to high energy prices – caused by excessive profits and exploitation of the fossil fuel industry and utilities – by backing away from existing climate goals. Fortunately, many state lawmakers, especially from downstate, have been resisting so far. For the sake of our planet, our grandchildren, and ourselves, state lawmakers need to say NO to Hochul and redouble efforts to speed up climate action.
Mark Dunlea is author of Putting Out the Planetary Fire