NY's climate is changing fast — so must Albany

After bouts of smothering smoke from Canadian wildfires fueled by heat and drought, the climate crisis came knocking at New York’s door again last month in the form of a stunning once-in-a-thousand-year deluge in the Hudson Valley. Our legislators appeared shocked and blindsided; many took to social media to commiserate. Gov. Kathy Hochul urged New Yorkers to use every bit of our power to fight the ravages of climate change.

But none of this should be surprising, let alone shocking. It’s not that climate scientists haven’t been warning us about this for decades. And that is exactly why New York passed the landmark Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act in 2019 with emissions reduction targets modeled after the 2015 Paris Agreement adopted by 196 countries to limit human-caused climate damage, primarily from burning fossil fuels.

Pursuant to the CLCPA, a Climate Action Council including state agency heads, climate scientists, and industry leaders was convened to prepare a Scoping Plan with a blueprint for the state to meet the law’s emissions targets. So at this point, New York doesn’t really need the politicians’ platitudes. All we need is for our leaders to fund and implement the CLCPA in a timely manner.

And how are we doing with that?

Meh.

With much fanfare, the state passed a law to eliminate fossil fuels from new buildings, albeit with a two-year implementation delay over the Climate Action Council’s initial recommendation. New York’s climate scoping plan also recommends a strategic downsizing of the polluting and expensive methane gas distribution system while slowly transitioning existing buildings to healthier and superior electric appliances. Methane — a potent greenhouse gas 83 times more powerful than carbon dioxide — is the principal component of the fuel marketed as “natural gas” that leaks everywhere from drilling to distribution to domestic appliances. But far from downsizing, the state is actually spending billions of dollars of utility ratepayers’ money in expanding, enhancing, and refurbishing the ruinous methane gas network despite the fact that there is a popular active bill in the legislature to implement the Scoping Plan’s recommendation.

The New York Home Energy Affordable Transition, or NY HEAT Act accelerates the transition off the climate-destroying methane by aligning utility regulations with the state’s climate law, all while saving ratepayers money on energy bills by capping them at 6% of incomes. The bill passed in the state senate, but despite the unfathomable incongruity of continuing to invest in fossil-fuel infrastructure amid a raging climate crisis, it neither gained the governor’s support, nor did it get Speaker Heastie’s nod for a vote in the state assembly.

Meanwhile, every day without NY HEAT makes meeting our climate and energy affordability goals harder and costlier in the future. This isn’t just a hypothesis, but a conclusion that utility experts have arrived at after rigorous analysis. Moreover, delaying the passage of NY HEAT keeps more New Yorkers tied to pricey gas, whose suppliers will then need to purchase more carbon allowances under Hochul’s signature cap-and-invest emissions reduction program and raise its costs.

There’s other common-sense climate legislation that the governor and the Assembly failed to support. The climate disasters that we are witnessing aren’t natural disasters; these are premeditated crimes. The fossil-fuel industry knew decades ago that their products cause grave harm and chose to spend billions of dollars to lie to the public and lobby the politicians to block climate action – a practice that the industry continues unabated to date. The Climate Change Superfund Act would hold the largest historic climate polluters accountable and would require them to pay to help partly shield New York tax payers from the tens of billions of dollars that the state will end up spending in the coming years to fund disaster recovery, remediation and resilience. So far only the state senate has been able to muster the political courage to pass this bill.

As Hochul urges New Yorkers to get used to the new climate normal, Albany must adapt too and recognize that the business-as-usual of passing one or two major climate bills every few years is neither an adequate response to the rapidly worsening climate crisis, nor will it be enough to implement the state's climate goals. And Albany lawmakers’ thoughts and prayers in the wake of climate disasters while mollycoddling the fossil fuel industry ring just as hollow as our federal lawmakers’ thoughts and prayers in response to incidents of gun violence. We don’t need thoughts and prayers. We need strong climate legislation.

Anshul Gupta is a senior policy analyst with New Yorkers for Clean Power and a steering committee member of the New York Climate Reality Chapters Coalition.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Albany must move faster to address climate change in NY