Climate news has been mighty grim for the past few years. But Thursday there was some excellent news from the Empire State. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the aggressive Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, calling his decision “the most consequential of my administration.” Late last month, the Democrat-controlled New York legislature passed the bill, known widely as the state’s Green New Deal, which is designed to slash greenhouse gas emissions and accelerate the replacement of fossil fuel power plants with renewable sources.
A 22-member Climate Action Council will be established and spend the next three years developing a "scoping plan" to recommend regulations, incentives, and other measures to meet the law’s mandates. One of the council’s objectives will be to integrate and expand the state’s existing climate and clean energy programs.
Former Vice President Al Gore was on hand for the signing, calling it “the most ambitious, the most well-crafted legislation in the country."
Cuomo had previously labeled the bill a “political placebo” with unrealistic goals. But, after four years failing to get the bill passed through a legislature in which a gang of eight renegade Democrats in the state Senate had enabled Republicans, grassroots activism coordinated by New York Renews—a 180-member coalition of environmental and other groups—finally succeeded in seeing a bill pass as a result of tossing six of those Democrats out during the 2018 primaries. But ultimately, passage required Cuomo to present his own, weaker bill.
While the law puts New York ahead of the other 49 states in mandating renewables, it follows in the footsteps of eight pioneers that pushed aggressive moves to curb emissions and spread renewables—California, Colorado, Hawai’i, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington. Seven of those states have called for 100% clean energy in the next few decades, but New York will get there first if the mandates in its law are attained.
The New York plan exceeds the goals of other states by calling for 70% renewables by 2030, decarbonization of the state’s electricity system by 2040, and decarbonization of the state’s whole economy—or close to it—by 2050. Last year, renewables provided 26.4% of New York’s electricity. In addition, the law mandates slashing the state’s greenhouse gas emissions to 85% below 1990 levels by 2050. The other 15% will be dealt with by planting trees and sequestering carbon underground.
The law also requires that 35% of clean energy funding will be invested in low-income communities disproportionately affected by pollution. But the original proposal called for 40%. And Cuomo’s version cut out provisions in the original for workers. Christopher Robbins at Gothamist writes:
"This is really a partial victory. We have so much work ahead of us to make sure this is true climate justice," said Annel Hernandez, the associate director with the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance. "When we saw that the governor had weakened the 40 percent language [for funding to disadvantaged communities] to be more vague, to have less strength to have less teeth to it, we were really disappointed." [...]
"This bill does reduce emissions significantly to 85 percent and it promises to provide some ill-defined advantages to disadvantaged communities," Manhattan State Senator Robert Jackson said. "But these provisions on racial and economic justice are watered down in ways that will leave the most vulnerable among us behind. I hope we can come together in January 2020 in order to fill these gaps."
Two other problems, as Food and Water Watch points out: There is no ban on new fossil fuel projects, and the deadlines are too far in the future. A study published in Nature last month concluded that if existing fossil fuel infrastructure is allowed to continue operations through its expected lifespan, the world will blow past the Paris climate accord goal of keeping temperature gains no higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100. The study’s authors say no new infrastructure should be built.
Whatever their flaws, the moves by New York and other states toward a more sustainable, climate-friendly energy system are especially crucial given that the federal government is controlled by a cabal of climate-science deniers intent on doing everything they can to prop up the fossil fuel industry and undermine efforts to reduce emissions. These states can point the way. While smarter climate and energy policies are obviously needed at the federal level, too, the actions by California and New York alone are huge, since these two rank as the No. 1 and No. 3 state economies, with $4.63 trillion in gross domestic product last year, nearly a fourth of the nation’s total.
Vice President Gore was also at the governor’s side Thursday when he announced that two companies had been chosen to build what he labeled the largest U.S. renewables project so far, two offshore wind farms with a total capacity of 1.7 gigawatts. Given that new offshore wind turbines run about 50% of the time, they can generate enough juice to power around 700,000 average homes, depending on how one does the calculations. Adequate energy storage in batteries or by other means would boost the number of homes that could be powered. Detailed contracts are yet to be negotiated, with completion of the wind farms slated for 2024.
If the two wind farms can overcome the likely political opposition, which is expected to be vigorous, they would vastly increase the number of offshore wind installations in the United States, which have lagged well behind those of the U.K. and other European nations. Currently, the only operational U.S. offshore wind farm is the 30-megawatt Block Island Wind Farm off Rhode Island, although several other projects are in the planning stages. The New York law calls for 9 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2035, 6 gigawatts of solar capacity by 2025, and 3 gigawatts of energy storage capacity by 2030.
Mary Esch at the AP reports that critics say the move to renewables will be too expensive, but that’s not the view of others, even though they agree the effort will require a heavy lift:
Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, said the costs of wind and solar installations have been dropping. "It's much more economical to build large amounts of wind and solar energy than even three or four years ago," he said.
Mark Jacobson, an energy expert at Stanford University, led a 2013 study outlining how New York could transition to 100% renewable energy by 2030. It envisioned 4,020 onshore wind turbines spread across 1.5% of the state's land area — 818 square miles (2,119 square kilometers). And solar farms would cover 463 square miles.
Steps forward. Much more needed.