The Democratic base in New York State and some party leaders nationwide are charting a path toward a greener future. New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, meanwhile, is choosing billionaires and polluters.
During Donald Trump’s first term, as the Republican president laid waste to environmental regulation, New York state fought back, passing ambitious climate goals in 2019 that laid the foundation for the state to pass the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA) four years later, a framework for building publicly funded renewable energy led by democratic socialists.
This time is different. Trump’s back in office, doing far worse damage to environmental regulation than he did in his first term. But Governor Kathy Hochul is even less willing to meet the moment than her predecessor Andrew Cuomo.
Hochul just spent the last few weeks signaling that she might eviscerate the 2019 law, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), which had set a deadline of a 70 percent zero-emission grid by 2030 and 100 percent by 2040, a situation first reported by Politico. While the thirty-day budget amendments she submitted last Thursday do not scrap the 2019 law after all, she still may attempt to weaken it during the coming months of budget negotiations. In any case, the threat itself shows how little regard the governor shares for the growing grassroots desire for anti-oligarchic, pro-planet policy.
Hochul signaled this week that she would leave the CLCPA intact for now. Environmentalists breathed a sigh of relief — but only briefly. Alex Patterson of the campaign Public Power New York said in a statement, “Governor Hochul isn’t gutting New York’s climate law just yet, but she’s also not doing anything to reach the legally mandated targets of the CLCPA and deliver on her promise of energy affordability. Hochul’s energy plan doubling down on expensive fracked gas . . . will only send unaffordable bills even higher. Building affordable, public renewables is the only way to lower energy bills, reduce pollution, and ensure a livable New York.”
New York is far behind on the goals set out in the CLCPA, but that’s not a reason to scrap the law. Rather, it should spur Hochul to action. Left environmentalists point to another law intended to help meet those goals: the BPRA, which requires the state to build publicly funded renewable energy if the market is failing to build enough to meet the CLCPA’s targets.
But Hochul is breaking that law too. Her current executive budget proposal fails to add the necessary $200 million for public renewables, and her public power authority recently backtracked on its plans to implement the BPRA, instead cutting 1.5 gigawatts from the amount of the renewables it plans to build. Not only will these failures put her government on the wrong track on climate, but she is also failing the millions of New Yorkers who need public power sources because their energy bills are too high.
Business interests and Republicans are constantly pressuring her to ditch the state’s climate laws, citing costs and grid reliability. With no left challenger in the gubernatorial race now that Antonio Delgado has dropped out, she may be looking to make friends on her right.
It gets worse. Not only is Hochul failing to comply with BPRA and failing to follow the CLCPA’s decarbonizing deadlines, she’s hypercarbonizing by adding a massive amount (3 gigawatts) of fracked gas to the New York City grid, taking New York even further from its democratically mandated climate laws.
It’s also bad news for affordability: not only will our energy bills reflect the marketing and operating costs of companies that need to make a profit, consumers will also be exposed to exorbitant gas prices and an unpredictable natural gas market. The gas plants will also add to the pollution faced by residents of working-class New York City neighborhoods, which already suffer disproportionately from asthma, heart disease, and other health problems related to carbon emissions.
Hochul is so bad on these issues that it’s hard to keep track of all her failures once we start listing them. In November, Hochul also delayed the implementation of the state’s all-electric building law, which passed in 2023 and was supposed to begin last month, designed to ban gas appliances from most new buildings. This measure would have improved public health — indoor air pollution from gas stoves is a huge health problem — and helped to advance the state’s progress toward the decarbonization deadlines in its climate law.
Hochul is up for reelection this year, but as with her refusal to tax the rich, she seems to care more about catering to the donor class than about making broadly popular policy. The fossil fuel lobby has been spending big to lobby her and to help buy her reelection. She’s not alone. Other centrist darlings — including Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, Illinois’s J. B. Pritzker and California’s Gavin Newsom, all considered presidential material for 2028 — are also failing to meet the climate moment due to their cozy relationships with fossil fuel donors.
Democrats like Hochul are ignoring the grassroots outrage on climate and oligarchy in their own party. Nationwide, many Democrats are anticipating the destructive effects of Trump’s rampage against climate policy and at least trying to meet the moment. Many communities, disgusted with artificial intelligence, the tech oligarchs, and our federal government’s environmental nihilism, are fighting AI data centers. Just this week, the New Brunswick, New Jersey, city council voted to scrap plans for a data center and create a public park instead.
Meanwhile, Democrats in state governments nationwide are trying to counter Trump’s anti-regulatory madness through decarbonization policy of their own, the New York Times reported this week, with an array of state legislative proposals that include easing the approval process for solar farms in Virginia to discounts on electric vehicles in Colorado to making fossil fuel polluters pay the higher home insurance costs caused by climate disasters like wildfires in California.
Trump’s decision to no longer attempt to regulate harmful pollution that poses a danger to human life is a catastrophe. But it does offer a political opportunity for Democrats and leftists to differentiate themselves from the Trump administration on issues people care about: the survival of children, affordability, and the excessive power of corporations and oligarchs. Instead of joining this pro-future movement, Governor Hochul is throwing her lot in with Trump himself and the worst of the corporate Democrats, pandering to her fossil-fuel-industry friends by going all in on a suicidal agenda that only a billionaire or an AI bot could love.
This work has been made possible by the support of the Puffin Foundation.
