A leaked memo suggests Governor Kathy Hochul may roll back part of the state’s climate law.
The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority memo says elements of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act are unbeneficial to New Yorkers. The memo focuses on the Clean Air Initiative, a cap-and-invest program that it claims would make energy less affordable.
Vanessa Fajans-Turner, executive director of Environmental Advocates New York, said this is intentionally misleading.
“The scenario this latest memo prices quietly excludes all material protections for consumers,” she said. “It is a scenario no one was seriously considering for implementation.”
The missing consumer guardrails include rebates for homes affected by higher energy costs and home weatherization investments. The cap-and-invest program limits greenhouse gas emissions statewide, with higher emitters having to buy allowances for their emissions. This money would in turn help the state afford renewable-energy developments, which have higher up-front costs, without passing the burden on to consumers.
The memo comes as Hochul already faces challenges to enacting New York’s climate goals – from federal cuts to climate funding to higher costs for climate-smart programs. The pandemic also increased the cost of clean-energy development, which led to some offshore wind projects being canceled because of contracts priced at pre-pandemic levels.
But Fajans-Turner said justifying delays makes climate action more expensive.
“Materials continue to get more expensive,” she said, “the cost of meeting climate goals or drawing emissions down gets more expensive, and the costs New Yorkers and other taxpayers are already paying for increasingly extreme weather is skyrocketing.”
The Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act has been on the books as a state law since it was enacted in 2019. Hochul is bound to its timeline because of a court ruling late last year that the state had violated the law’s implementation goals.
