New York At The Green Energy Wall -- What Is The Exit Strategy?

When New York passed its utopian Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act back in 2019, it set mandatory targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from the state’s energy consumption.  But none of the mandates were scheduled to take effect prior to 2030.  The earliest mandates were:  70% of electricity from “renewables” by 2030, and 40% overall reduction in GHG emissions by the same year.  (Still more ambitious mandates were also set for 2040, followed by a “net zero” mandate for 2050.).  These dates all seemed so terribly far away — plenty of time for somebody to invent some new gizmos in the off chance that new technology might be needed to hit the goal.

Our legislators, innumerate to a person, had bought into the fantasy — peddled by lightweight academics like Mark Jacobson and Robert Howarth, and by grifting promoters like the American Wind Energy Association and investment bank Lazard — that wind and solar were now the cheapest way to make electricity.  To abolish the evil fossil fuels, all that was needed was some political will.

The legislators definitely did not pay the slightest attention to the Manhattan Contrarian.  Beginning in 2016, and consistently from then until the CLCPA was enacted in mid-2019, this site published one clear warning after another that the costs of a wind/solar energy system that would work full time would inevitably be a large multiple of those claimed by the promoters.  If you want to entertain yourself for a while on this subject, you might be interested in my series “How Much Do The Green Energy Crusaders Plan To Increase Your Cost Of Electricity?” Part I (August16, 2016), Part II (August 20, 2016), and Part III (November 29, 2018).  Well, I tried.

There actually was one other important deadline in the CLCPA, which was not a deadline for emissions reductions themselves, but rather a deadline for the state Department of Environmental Conservation to publish regulations to direct how the mandated emissions reductions would be achieved.  The text from the CLCPA setting this deadline was codified in Section 75-0109 of the state’s Environmental Conservation Law.  It states that DEC “shall . . . promulgate rules and regulations to ensure compliance with the statewide emissions reductions limits.”  The deadline to promulgate these regulations was January 1, 2024.

January 1, 2024 came and went, and then another year went by, and still no regulations, nor any indication of when or whether they would be forthcoming.  A reasonable inference would be that Kathy Hochul (who had taken over as Governor in 2021), or more likely some people on her staff, had figured out that this was not going to work.  But they also knew that saying that out loud would be political suicide.  Thus, silence.