It’s time for bold and affordable climate action in NY, not baby steps | Opinion
Four Earth Days after New York passed the landmark Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, or CLCPA, the state’s leadership may finally take some of its first legislative steps to implement it. The climate proposals on the table in the current budget negotiations include some that would tighten the spigot on the state’s largest source of climate pollution – our homes and buildings. If done right, these would also go a long way in protecting New Yorkers from spiraling heating costs and the health hazards of burning fuels in spaces where we live and work.
Let’s hope that our leaders don’t conflate first steps with baby steps. Last month’s IPCC report warned in no uncertain terms that the time for baby steps is over and that there aren’t many Earth Days left for meaningful action to avoid triggering monumental climate tipping points with centuries-long irreversible impacts.
There are frightening parallels between the climate crisis and another recent fiasco. On Feb. 26, 2020, President Trump proclaimed that the mere 15 total cases of COVID-19 in the US would soon go down to zero. Within five weeks, however, the entire country was practically shut down with more than 30,000 new daily cases. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that we are similarly underestimating the climate threat. Two degrees of warming isn’t just twice as bad as one degree, it’s more like ten times worse in impacts. And three degrees could be another ten times more devastating.
The human mind’s inaptitude at grasping exponentially growing phenomena has been expertly exploited by the fossil-fuel industry for unending procrastination on meaningful climate action. This struggle to curtail fossil fuels is now on full display in New York with raging misinformation and lobbying campaigns by gas utilities and their front groups.
The CLCPA created a Climate Action Council comprising experts, scientists, industry and labor representatives, environmental justice leaders, and state agency heads to develop a Scoping Plan with specific recommendations for implementation. After rigorous analyses, extensive public comments, and thousands of hours of cumulative work by the Council, its advisory panels, and state agency staff, the Scoping Plan was approved with a 19-3 vote last December. Every expert and agency head reporting to Governor Hochul voted in favor. Nay votes by the three fossil-fuel representatives lent it further credibility; who’d trust a climate plan reminiscent of foxes guarding the henhouse? The president of NYS AFL-CIO wrote, “New York’s approach to climate policy is both sensible and effective.”
Bills for timely elimination of emissions from new buildings and repealing ratepayer-funded gas infrastructure investments, if included in the budget legislation, would implement some of the key recommendations of the meticulously crafted scoping plan. The fate of these bills could also expose the hypocrisy of the fossil-fuel industry and status-quo politicians who often wield the affordability excuse to slow-walk climate action.
Many New Yorkers are unaware that gas hookups worth thousands of dollars each are given away at no or minimal cost to new customers and existing customers pick the tab that grows by about $200 million each year. Dug up streets for gas pipe replacement add several times more, even though there are better alternatives, and the new pipes laid at the cost of $6 million per mile will be mostly empty in just a couple of decades.
The NY HEAT Act would relieve gas customers from costly, unconscionable obligations to subsidize gas utilities. A reluctance to support this common-sense climate and energy affordability legislation would be a clear indication of beholdenness to special interests because virtually no New Yorker anywhere on the political spectrum is asking their representatives to be forced to pay for other people’s gas hookups.
New Yorkers would also be remiss not to recognize the clear and present danger from fossil-fueled climate breakdown, which isn’t just the scientists’ and environmentalists’ problem, much like the pandemic wasn’t just the doctors’ and nurses’ problem. Any semblance of success in the fight for our children’s future will require all of us to stay informed and demand accountability from our elected representatives.
The fossil-fuel industry is using our atmosphere as a free dumping station, their lobbyists and misinformation campaigns are bamboozling us and our legislators, their pollution is sickening us, and burning cash to burn their gas is stealing our children’s future. The science is clear, the technology is ready, the economics are favorable, all New York needs is for its leaders to muster the courage to kick fossil fuels out of its politics and buildings now.
Edwin A. Cowen is a professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University and a former faculty firector for Energy at Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability. Anshul Gupta is a steering committee member of the New York Climate Reality Chapters Coalition and Senior Policy Analyst with New Yorkers for Clean Power.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: NY Heat Act needs support
