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The state has binding emissions cut goals but still no regulations to meet them.
When New York Governor Kathy Hochul gave her State of the State address on Tuesday, climate advocates expected her to unveil an overdue plan to implement and fund the state’s climate law, which was enacted in 2019. Instead, she implied that she was delaying the plan indefinitely. In doing so, legal experts say Hochul would be breaking the law.
New York has a statutory requirement to cut emissions 40% from 1990 levels by 2030, and 85% by 2050. The deadline to draw up regulations to achieve this passed in January 2024. Hochul’s administration has been working on a solution — a cap and invest program, which would set a limit on total greenhouse gas emissions from the state that would decline over time and put a price on those emissions, bringing in revenue that could be reinvested in carbon reduction projects. The state expects decarbonization to cost $15 billion per year by 2030, and $45 billion in 2050.
As recently as a few weeks ago, New York climate advocates were hearing that Hochul planned to preview the program in her State of the State address before including it in her proposed budget. “All indications were that this was all systems go,” Justin Balik, the senior state program director for Evergreen Action, told me.
But Hochul didn’t mention cap and invest once in her speech. Her State of the State policy book, published Tuesday, acknowledges the program and notes that in the coming months, her administration will propose new emissions reporting regulations “while creating more space and time for public transparency and a robust investment planning process.” Advocates interpreted the message as a kiss-off.
“There have to be enforceable regulations that ensure we can meet the emission reduction mandates,” Rachel Spector, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, told me. “Those were supposed to be in place a year ago. Now they are late and there’s no clear date when we are getting those regulations, and that’s a really troubling situation.”
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Governments miss statutory deadlines all the time. But without any clear timeline on when the regulations might happen, the state’s overarching climate law could become impossible to carry out. “We have a [presidential] administration that’s coming in that's extremely hostile to moving forward on climate mitigation, and is going to potentially take us backwards,” Balik told me. “And so we need states to be the bulwark like they were during the last Trump term.”
There are a few possibilities for what can happen next.
Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change at Columbia University, likened the situation to when Hochul tried to impose an indefinite delay on congestion pricing in New York City last June, just days before it was set to go into effect. “I helped coordinate an effort that led to two lawsuits in New York state court claiming that Hochul did not have the power to do that,” he told me in an email. “We won the lawsuits, congestion pricing survived several lawsuits against it, and it launched on January 5.”
Gerrard added that some of the groups involved in those suits and others are now considering challenging Hochul’s indefinite delay of cap and invest. The text of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, which created the emissions targets, “allows citizens to bring proceedings in state court for violations of the statute,” he said. And there does not appear to be any pathway for achieving the targets without cap and invest, he added.
Liz Moran, a policy advocate for Earthjustice, said that cap and invest was never going to be enough anyway, and is urging the legislature to make progress on sector-specific policies. She called for the state assembly to pass the New York Heat Act, for instance, a bill that would remove barriers to transitioning away from the use of natural gas for home heating and set in motion a plan for mass conversion to efficient electric heating.
Early outlines of New York’s cap and invest program indicate that regulators were considering a relatively low price ceiling on pollution, making it easier for companies to buy their way out of compliance with the cap. As New York Focus has reported, the state’s own modeling shows that the program alone would not achieve the 2030 target. “Given what the governor has outlined as the ambition of the cap and invest program, there was always going to need to be additional sectoral mandates or policies that come from the legislature to drive emission reductions,” Moran told me.
In theory, the legislature could also put forward a bill outlining its own cap and invest program. Assemblywoman Anna Kelles, from Ithaca, New York, introduced a cap and invest bill last year, though it never left the environmental conservation committee.
Hochul spoke at length in her speech about affordability, and her stalling of cap and invest may be related to concerns that it would raise costs for consumers — or at least the perception that it would. “New York needs to get the transition right and keep our state affordable for families,” her policy book says. This would not be the first time Hochul’s fears about the cost of climate action (and potential backlash to it) have caused her to do an about-face. In 2023, Hochul tried to change the way the state accounted for greenhouse gas emissions under the idea that it would lower the cost of decarbonization. Her backpedaling on congestion pricing is another example.
The state’s own analysis, however, found that cap and invest would likely raise costs slightly for some New Yorkers while lowering them for others. Low-income residents would be eligible for direct rebates that would more than offset the higher cost of fuel. Depending on how the remaining revenue is spent, it could bring further cost reductions by helping New Yorkers pay for energy efficiency improvements that lower their bills.
“The governor is rightly focused on affordability, which is why extensive consumer rebates were baked into this,” said Balik. “From our perspective, the way that the state was planning on moving forward with this was perfectly in line with the governor's affordability agenda.”
The one bit of climate action Hochul did commit to on Tuesday was to call for spending $1 billion of the next budget on climate action — the “largest climate investment in the history of the state budget” — though she did not say where the money would come from or where it would go. Her State of the State book gives little more detail, noting only that it will “span different sectors of our economy and across the state’s geography,” with nods to clean heating and transportation projects. Cap and invest, meanwhile, is expected to bring in $3 billion to $5 billion in its first year.
“It's a start,” Spector said of the $1 billion. “But it’s definitely not enough.”
Trump’s pick for Energy Secretary had an easy go of it.
With Donald Trump due to take office in less than a week and a Republican Congress already sworn in, much of the Biden administration’s effort to advance clean and especially renewable energy is now in doubt. The fate of the Inflation Reduction Act is likely to be a major flashpoint — and yet the confirmation hearing for Chris Wright, a literal fracking executive, for Secretary of Energy proved to be relatively low-key and collegial among senators from both parties.
Here are three takeaways from the day’s proceedings:
Wright is not one of Trump’s more controversial nominees, so it’s no surprise that his hearing went smoothly — and that Wright was introduced by his fellow Coloradan, Democratic Senator John Hickenlooper, was an early strong signal that will likely pass through confirmation with ease. To the extent there were any fireworks, they came not from the legislators on the dais but rather from several quickly muffled protests in the hearing room. One protester shouted, “I'm 18 years old and I want a future!" before being removed, while another one yelled, “Will your fracking liquid put out fires in L.A.?”
The questioning before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources was a mix of parochial concerns from senators about their own states — the committee’s ranking Democrat, Martin Heinrich, for instance, asked if Wright would visit Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories, located in his home state of New Mexico, while Pennsylvania Senator David McCormick, a Republican, asked about the prospects of a liquefied natural gas export terminal in Pennsylvania.
That’s not to say climate change didn’t come up. Wright repeatedly avowed that climate change is happening and is caused by the combustion of hydrocarbons, although he demurred that it was a “global” problem and turned his responses repeatedly to developing energy resources in the United States.
“If you shut down industry, those emissions don’t go away, they go somewhere else,” Wright claimed. “The only pathway to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve quality of life is energy innovation.”
Wright generally stayed away from specifics on spending levels or individual programs, aside from expressing generalized enthusiasm for the Department of Energy’s network of national laboratories and the importance of its work maintaining the nuclear stockpile. In his opening statement, he identified one of his goals as to “unleash American energy at home and abroad to restore energy dominance.”
Over the course of the hearing, what he meant became at least marginally clearer. Under questioning from McCormick about the Department’s Office of Fossil Energy — renamed the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management under outgoing President Joe Biden and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm — Wright lamented that fossil fuel had “fallen out of fashion and out of favor. There’s less interest in investing in it and less interest in talking about it,” he said, before declaring, “I don’t share that aversion.”
He did, however, expressed enthusiasm for certain clean energy technologies, including next-generation geothermal (“It’s an enormous, abundant energy resource below our feet”) and nuclear power. He also went along with Democratic senators who asked about reforms to existing federal permitting regulations to facilitate the buildout of long-distance energy transmission, a focus of the last Congress’s failed permitting reform bill and a key precursor to cleaning up the grid. (Nuclear and geothermal are also two areas where Wright’s company, Liberty Energy, has investments.)
To the extent Wright was willing to talk about solar — there was barely any mention of wind in the entire hearing — he had to be prodded by Democrats in sun-rich states, such as Heinrich and Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto. Wright also called into question some estimates of how cheap renewables are, arguing that a popular measure for comparing energy resources with each other, the levelized cost of energy, “misses the boat on electricity generation because it’s like, would you take Uber that was 10% cheaper in cost if you didn’t know when the Uber would pick you up or where it would drop you off?” essentially arguing that the low price of energy generated by renewables doesn’t take into account their unavailability during certain times of day or in certain weather conditions.
Wright’s relatively easy reception reflects the fact that there actually are wide areas of bipartisan agreement on the kind of energy research and technology development work the Department of Energy does. Members on both sides of the aisle saw their enthusiasm for nuclear power — especially small modular reactors — reflected back by Wright, with Arizona Democrat Ruben Gallego saying “I appreciate your enthusiasm for nuclear energy.”
The Energy and Natural Resources Committee is also stocked with Senators who represent states where the DOE has a substantial presence, including New Mexico, California, Utah, Idaho, Colorado, and Washington, which can lead to more collegial hearings if the nominee, as Wright does, affirms the importance and value of the Department’s national laboratories. Agencies that spend money broadly across the country tend to be popular with lawmakers.
But Wright is just the first nominee for a major energy and environment related post to face the Senate. Other nominees, including Doug Burgum for Secretary of the Interior and Lee Zeldin for Environmental Protection Agency administrator, may endure more contentious hearings, as they will likely face questions on issues that are sharply divisive, like opening up public lands for fossil fuel extraction and rules on power plant and tailpipe emissions.
