Update On New York Climate Act Negotiations: Details Starting To Emerge

We’re now more than three weeks past the mandatory April 1 deadline for New York’s annual state budget.  So far, few details have emerged about the reasons for the delay.  Negotiations are supposedly taking place among the Governor and the leaders of the two houses of the State Legislature.  But what are the sticking points?

It is likely that by far the biggest, if not the only significant sticking point is what to do about the impending deadlines of the troublesome Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019, or CLCPA.  This Act sets required “renewable” energy and emissions reductions targets, with the earliest deadlines for those things in 2030.  The Act also set a separate deadline in 2024 for issuing certain regulations.  The latter deadline has been completely blown off.  Emissions reduction deadlines and related regulations may seem non-germane to the budget, but then this is New York.  The budget process gives the politicians a way to conclude a must-pass deal behind closed doors without having to hold annoying public hearings that would be flooded by angry activists.

With the regulations long overdue, and an impossibly short four years to go to meet the first emissions reduction targets, one might think we are at a dead end.  Over the past couple of years, knowledgeable bureaucracies like the Public Service Commission and the NY Independent System Operator have begun issuing veiled but unmistakable warnings that the Climate Act targets cannot be met at any remotely reasonable cost while also maintaining system reliability.  And the Governor has gotten the message.  About a month ago (March 20), Governor Hochul published a piece in something called Empire Report publicly disclosing that she intended to use the budget process to try to implement extensions of the most immediate CLCPA deadlines:

[D]espite supporting the intentions of the Climate Act, I am pushing changes to the law as part of our budget discussions with the Legislature. This is solely out of necessity – to protect New Yorkers’ pocketbooks and economy. . . .  We need more time, and so I am proposing we amend the law to require regulations to reduce statewide greenhouse gas emissions to be issued at the end of 2030. We are seeking to change what emission limits the regulations are tied to – including a new 2040 target as well as the existing 2050 statewide emission limits.