New York Gov. Kathy Hochul wants to scale back a landmark climate law once hailed as one of the nation’s strongest, arguing it’s necessary to deal with the “economic and political challenges” facing the state.
In an op-ed Friday, Hochul laid out a handful of significant changes she’s urging lawmakers to make to the state’s landmark 2019 climate law, which requires New York to slash its greenhouse gas emissions 40% by 2030 and 85% by 2050 – goals the state is already on track to miss.
That includes punting the regulations for the state’s emissions-cutting program for another four years to the end of 2030, a move that would effectively nullify that year’s mandate. Hochul then would add a new benchmark for 2040 and keep the 2050 mandate while changing the methodology used to calculate emissions, a move that would effectively make it easier for the state to meet its benchmarks.
The op-ed, published on the Empire Report, a news aggregation site, comes after Hochul has hinted for weeks that she wants to roll back the law known as the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, which she once enthusiastically supported as a way to combat the negative effects of climate change.
Now, Hochul says she still supports the overall spirit of the law, but claims the state can’t meet the 2030 mandate without imposing major costs on utility customers.
“While I am still committed to working toward our targets, with all the stress our residents are under, New Yorkers expect their elected officials to prioritize affordability,” Hochul wrote in her op-ed. “They are suffering from high costs every single day and I for one will not ignore their cries for relief.”
Hochul’s proposals are sure to anger environmental advocates, who have brought a lawsuit seeking to force the governor’s administration to finalize climate regulations it has delayed for more than a year. They say the climate law’s benefits more than cancel out any costs.
But business groups and labor unions have cheered her push to scale back the law, saying that the potential short-term costs are too much to bear. That includes the cost of a proposed “cap-and-invest” program, which would set a cap on emissions and require polluters who exceed the cap to pay for “allowances” that would be used to fund climate-friendly projects.
The governor is up for re-election this year and has centered her campaign on affordability.
“These are reasonable and necessary corrections that will avoid onerous and costly mandates based on impractical emission-reduction targets,” said Heather Mulligan, president and CEO of The Business Council, the state’s largest business organization.
Hochul wants to include the changes in a final state budget agreement, which is due in less than two weeks. Some state lawmakers had grown frustrated with Hochul failing to provide specifics.
Assemblymember Deborah Glick, a Manhattan Democrat who chairs the environmental conservation committee, signaled she’s open to negotiating changes to deadlines for the state’s emissions targets.
But Glick said she’s not open to making changes to the accounting methodology, which would measure the global warming impact of emissions on a 100-year scale rather than a 20-year scale — a move that would make it easier for the state to make its goals on account of methane emissions.
“You can change the deadlines, but you can’t change the accounting and you can’t change the science,” Glick said. “Because the accounting methodology is based on the science of which emissions are most damaging to the environment.”
On the Senate side, 29 Democrats sent a letter to Hochul earlier this month vowing to resist any substantive changes to the climate law.
Hochul, meanwhile, has argued New York is an outlier in relying on measuring greenhouse gas impacts on a 20-year scale. The Paris Agreement, for example, relies on a 100-year measure.
“These proposed changes preserve the intent of the law while realistically recognizing the economic and political challenges we face,” she said.
The state budget is due by April 1, though Hochul and lawmakers have missed that deadline each year since she took office in 2021.