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And it’s blocking America’s economic growth, argues a former White House climate advisor.
Lawmakers today should study the Energy Security Act of 1980.
Why America’s environmental institutions should embrace a solutions mindset
If it turns out to be a bubble, billions of dollars of energy assets will be on the line.
The president of the Clean Economy Project calls for a new approach to advocacy — or as she calls it, a “third front.”
One of the world’s leading climate scientists agrees with Gates in spirit, but thinks we can go much further in practice.
The New York mayoral frontrunner has an opportunity to shift the left’s increasingly nonsensical position on a critical carbon-free energy source.
Tuesday, November 4, New Yorkers go to the polls to elect their new mayor. They face a three-way choice — Democratic candidate, state assemblyman, and suddenly prominent democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani; Republican candidate and battery foe Curtis Sliwa; and independent candidate and former governor Andrew Cuomo.
While Mamdani’s surprise win in June’s Democratic primary electrified New Yorkers of all political persuasions, this cycle has been a relatively sleepy one for climate issues. Neither of the two frontrunners, Mamdani and Cuomo, has been keen to draw much attention to himself on clean energy.
At a televised debate two weeks ago, however, things got interesting.
“New nuclear power plants can help bring down the rising cost of utilities in New York State, yes or no?” asked moderator Brian Lehrer. “Upstate? They’re already starting, yes,” answered Sliwa, referring to Governor Kathy Hochul’s landmark announcement in June that she was ordering the New York Power Authority, the state’s public power utility, to develop a gigawatt of new nuclear energy-generating capacity upstate. Couched in atomic-powered abundance, the plan distinguishes her from Democrats nationwide primarily because she has the largest state-owned utility at her disposal, whereas other governors, from both parties, merely intimate that private developers should really get started.
To the untrained ear, Mamdani’s answer at the debate was anodyne: “I think it’s something worth exploring.” Prompted by Cuomo about whether that constituted “a yes,” Mamdani confirmed, “yeah,” to which Cuomo evinced surprise and then a “yes” of his own. On the surface, all three candidates agreed.
But in affirming the role of new nuclear plant construction to meet the state’s energy needs, Mamdani put himself at odds with a number of environmental justice nonprofits that have become fixtures of the city’s progressive left — that is, his own political home base.
“We unequivocally oppose any new nuclear facilities in New York State.” So begins a letter signed by 153 environmental justice groups, issued following Hochul’s “Future Energy Economy Summit” last fall, where she first raised the prospect. The signatories include chapters of prominent activist Bill McKibben’s advocacy groups Third Act and 350.org, Bezos Earth Fund awardee WE ACT for Environmental Justice, Food and Water Watch, chapters of the Sierra Club, and solar industry boosters Vote Solar, among many others.
When the governor advanced her nuclear plan this year, environmental organizations responded with anger. NY Renews — a coalition of groups that successfully lobbied for the state’s landmark climate law, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019, which was signed by Governor Cuomo — issued a statement opposing “the expansion or further investment in nuclear energy production.” An op-ed from the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance and New York Lawyers for the Public Interest called Hochul’s proposal a “dangerous distraction” from building renewables. In a separate comment issued alongside these same groups, decades-old Brooklyn Latino community organization UPROSE urged the state to avoid the “expensive and unrealistic” path of nuclear development.
The political appeal of nuclear today is undeniable. Six in ten Americans want more nuclear energy, according to a recent Pew poll. Not only is it the energy source with the smallest divide in enthusiasm between the parties, including both clean and fossil-fueled sources, the most common reason respondents gave Pew for supporting nuclear was its decarbonization potential.
New York’s nuclear energy “provide[s] reliable, continuous, predictable, emissions-free supply and must remain online to maintain electric system reliability,” according to a recent filing from the New York Independent System Operator, which manages the state’s grid. Since it takes up less land and requires fewer transmission lines than purely renewable alternatives, it could mitigate a fiery political tension in New York and elsewhere. And it’s almost universally held up as essential by industrial labor unions, for the clean, firm power it produces, and for the high-paying careers it supports. “Nuclear energy, being the cleanest, zero-emission, and most efficient way to produce energy, should be a no-brainer,” Frank Morales, the president of New York’s Utility Workers Union of America Local 1-2, which represents thousands of ConEd utility workers in the city, told me by email.
And yet despite his statement during the debate, nuclear’s decarbonization bona fides, its strong bipartisan appeal, and its acclaim from labor unions, Mamdani — a democratic socialist champion of public power and the clean energy transition — still hasn’t endorsed the governor’s plan for public nuclear power development.
This tracks an ideological inconsistency within the environmental left that has become less tenable as the need for clean power has grown more urgent. “It’s a belief system that these nonprofit groups have wrapped themselves in, and one that they have not yet been motivated to seriously reexamine,” Charles Komanoff told me. He’s the director of the Carbon Tax Center and a decades-long stalwart of New York City progressive activist groups, spanning environmental and transportation causes, among others.
Komanoff has had to reexamine his own beliefs on nuclear. During the 1970s and ’80s he opposed nuclear power, primarily for its past operational inefficiencies. He spoke before a crowd of thousands at an antinuclear protest in Washington in 1979, after the Three Mile Island incident. The premature closure of New York’s Indian Point nuclear power plant in 2021, however, finally tipped him into public nuclear advocacy. The “true Indian Point disaster,” he wrote in an analysis earlier this year, is that “emissions are mounting, and in New York City and other downstate areas formerly supplied by Indian Point, electricity is getting costlier and less dependable.”
Ben Furnas, the former director of the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Sustainability under Bill de Blasio — himself an iconic New York City progressive — has experienced this inconsistency firsthand. (De Blasio also cut his teeth in the antinuclear movement, telling The New York Times in 2019 that he’d marched against Three Mile Island in his youth.) “A lot of the old guard antinuclear activism sits uncomfortably in a broader, clear-eyed climate coalition,” Furnas told me. Mamdani, however, appears to take a “more expansive view of what a decarbonizing energy system looks like,” he said.
As a member of New York’s State Assembly, Mamdani backed a campaign to cancel the repowering of an ancient, highly-polluting gas peaker plant in Astoria, Queens, squarely in his district, that was slated to retire. He also aligned himself with the effort by Public Power NY, a coalition between the Democratic Socialists of America and environmental groups, to “build public renewables.” Both maneuvers eventually paid off — in 2021 the state denied the repowering project’s permit, and the old power plant later closed down for good; and in 2023 Hochul signed into law a (heavily rewritten) version of the Build Public Renewables Act, turning activist goals into implementable policy for NYPA.
Two years later, NYPA has made remarkable progress building state capacity in renewables. Its development pipeline of wind, solar, and battery projects now amounts to about 7 gigawatts, though most of that is still in very early stages. But Public Power NY has spent that time dismissing the progress from the sidelines, charging Hochul with “refusing to lead on climate.” While it’s true that Hochul is far overdue on implementing parts of the 2019 climate law, a huge political challenge as energy affordability becomes a top concern, Public Power NY has responded by demanding that the governor ramp up NYPA’s renewables development to a staggering 15 gigawatts deployed by 2030. Mamdani spoke at a rally for that demand just a month into his mayoral campaign last November.
Neither energy nor public power, however, has been at the forefront of his campaign, especially in these closing months. Instead, Mamdani’s laudable message discipline has been trained on affordability in New York City: free childcare, free buses, city-owned grocery stores, and temporarily freezing the rents of the city’s nearly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments. He’s even taken a decidedly pro-abundance position on housing in interviews with the Abundance co-author Derek Thompson and on the Odd Lots podcast.
It would be reasonable to ask, Even if Mamdani had aggressively talked up nuclear, what would he be able to do about it as mayor? As it turns out, there are a few routes that a Mayor Mamdani could take to influence nuclear development.
First and foremost, for half a century, the “governmental customers” of New York City have been critical sources of revenue for NYPA. The city government, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, and the New York City Housing Authority, for example, remain NYPA’s largest customers, dating back to when the state acquired Indian Point Unit 3 from ConEd during the 1974 financial crisis. While the MTA is infamously not under the mayor’s purview, at least two of those major customers are — and their power contracts are set to expire at the end of 2027, during the next mayor’s term. That’s both a bargaining chip for the next mayor and a potential avenue for the city government to subsidize, at least in part, the cost of a new, NYPA-developed nuclear plant.
Second, de Blasio already set a precedent for applying the city’s progressive tax base to help shoulder the cost of statewide clean power initiatives. To help solve an imbalance in renewable energy deployment upstate and downstate, the state created the “Tier 4 Renewable” program in 2020, at the urging of the de Blasio administration, to subsidize transmission projects that would deliver renewable energy into New York City. The enormous cost of the program, however, fell on the backs of ratepayers statewide, in proportion to their electricity consumption.
Seeing the unevenness in a program that largely helps the city, the de Blasio administration struck a deal in 2021 with the state’s clean energy procurement agency, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, to purchase far more Tier 4 renewable energy certificates than would have otherwise been allocated to the city based on its electricity demands via its utility, NYPA. As a result, the rest of the state’s ratepayers would save, in the city’s calculation, a few billion dollars. It’s not hard to imagine a similar possibility for the next mayor to advance the state’s nuclear policy, especially when it’s being led by NYPA.
Finally, the city’s Local Law 97 — a comprehensive law passed in 2019 requiring large buildings to meet escalating greenhouse gas emission limits or else face fines — presents another opportunity. Mamdani has spoken during the campaign about the need for the city to procure heat pumps for landlords to install in compliance with the law. But landlords also have to decarbonize their utility electricity supply, which they can do by purchasing RECs. With the recent cancellation of one of two projects that would have supplied said RECs, the real estate industry will soon be hungry for more supply.
That’s where nuclear could come into city policy. The city council could amend Local Law 97 so that nuclear energy likewise delivered into the city — from either existing or solely new sources — could be used to comply, as well. That would put landlords in a position of subsidizing a new state nuclear project, just like the Tier 4 program put them in a position to subsidize new state transmission projects. That could be a way for a Mayor Mamdani to throw them a bone amid his attacks on unaffordable housing prices.
The mild nuclear support at the debate was encouraging, Komanoff, the longtime progressive activist, told me. But “it would’ve been huge-er if Mamdani had said something specific and favorable about Governor Hochul’s gigawatt announcement over the summer.” The governor, who in September endorsed Mamdani in the race, is presumably thinking the same thing, having made NYPA — the same public power authority behind the Build Public Renewables campaign that Mamdani championed — the centerpiece of her nuclear plan.
NYPA’s vice president of corporate communication, Lindsay Kryzak, told me by email that the authority has “seen widespread support for this critical technology,” and that it’s looking forward to “ensuring the benefits of advanced nuclear energy reach our customers in all five boroughs.”
Mamdani has been a staunch proponent of public clean energy in the legislature, and he’s apparently open to new nuclear for decarbonizing the state. That he hasn’t yet embraced this public power nuclear plan illustrates the strong gravitational pull of the environmental left coalition that surrounds him, one rooted in antinuclear politics.
Across progressive and democratic socialist media, multiple activists who’ve worked on the public power campaign have revealed their personal and professional ties to nonprofits like the Alliance for a Green Economy, New York Energy Democracy Alliance, and the Sane Energy Project, all of which have firmly rejected Hochul’s nuclear plans.
As for the Public Power NY coalition itself, it wants the state to build public renewables, not public nuclear. In a statement following the governor’s nuclear announcement, it argued that the plan “shows just how unserious she is about New Yorkers’ energy bills and climate future.” According to the organization’s website, 12 of the coalition’s 16 partner organizations, excluding DSA chapters, have publicly opposed new nuclear power since the governor kicked off discussions last year. Public Power NY did not respond to requests to comment on this story.
When the New York Independent System Operator, which manages the state’s grid, warns of the dire reliability-related need for “dispatchable emissions-free resources,” a technical term whose only existing commercial realization is nuclear, one would think building more nuclear power is actually the serious thing to do. That conviction isn’t just coming from the governor’s office; it’s shared by major industrial unions like the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the UWUA, the Laborers’ International Union of North America, the state Building Trades Council, and the state AFL-CIO, as I reported this summer for Jacobin.
What does labor think of Mamdani’s recently expressed openness to nuclear? Vinny Albanese, executive director of the New York State Laborers’ Political Action Fund, says over email that his union, LIUNA, is “encouraged to see Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani express openness to nuclear energy, which currently provides half of New York’s carbon-free electricity.”
“With potential energy shortfalls projected to affect New York City as early as next year,” he wrote, “we must act decisively to bring more reliable, clean generation online.” The Laborers, like many unions, endorsed Cuomo in the primary, but haven’t endorsed anyone in the general election.
Morales, the UWUA Local 1-2 president, told me over email that Mamdani’s remark in favor of nuclear energy is “definitely a step in the right direction.” And yet Local 1-2 nonetheless endorsed Cuomo. That’s despite the fact that as governor, Cuomo was directly responsible for shutting down Indian Point, destroying hundreds of Local 1-2 members’ jobs.
Without the antinuclear baggage of his coalition, Mamdani could have pounced on Cuomo for having closed the plant — as Sliwa did at the debate and throughout his own campaign — in order to show solidarity with the union workers and to demonstrate a more responsible energy policy for New York City. In doing so he could have pinned the blame on his opponent for rising power prices and worsening air quality in his own district.
A 2023 public letter on South Bronx air pollution from various city environmental groups admits only obliquely, in the title of one of its charts, that Indian Point’s shutdown “expos[es] area residents to even more pollution.” Assemblyman Mamdani, like several other local elected officials, signed the letter, seemingly his only public engagement with Indian Point’s closure. But some of the nonprofit signatories actually championed the end of the plant, a situation that rules out a more explicitly recognized tradeoff between nuclear energy and air pollution.
If Mamdani wins the mayoral election, as polls indicate he is likely to do, he will take on the tremendous responsibility of governing a major world city. That city is one whose power grid is facing reliability concerns alongside costly maintenance and infrastructure needs, all on top of a popular push to electrify buildings and reduce air pollution. As mayor, he’d have limited levers to address these problems. But with the backing of the governor and the public power authority, he stands a chance. He should embrace Hochul’s public nuclear power plan, and with it nuclear’s potential to help advance New York City’s climate goals.
If he can buck the trend of the environmental left’s hostility to nuclear, he could demonstrate to New York City — and to democratic socialist supporters nationwide, who already view him as a likely successor to (notoriously antinuclear) Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders — that the left can think rationally about the energy system, its affordability, and the wide scope of the climate problem. That would truly be charting a new path.
Editor’s note: This author’s bio has been updated to clarify that he writes under a pen name.
The country’s underwhelming new climate pledge is more than just bad news for the world — it reveals a serious governing mistake.
Five years ago, China’s longtime leader Xi Jinping shocked and delighted the world by declaring in a video presentation to the United Nations that his country would peak its carbon emissions this decade and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. He tried to rekindle that magic late last month in another virtual address to the UN, announcing China’s updated pledge under the Paris Agreement.
This time, the reaction was far more tepid. Given the disastrous state of American climate policy under President Donald Trump, some observers declared — as the longtime expert Li Shuo did in The New York Times — that China is “the adult in the room on climate now.” Most others were disappointed, arguing that China had merely “played it safe” and pointing out the new pledge “falls well short” of what’s needed to hit the Paris Agreement’s targets.
Yet China’s dithering is more than just an environmental failure — it is a governing mistake. China’s weak climate pledge isn’t just bad news for the world; it shows an indecisive leadership that is undermining its country’s own competitiveness by sticking with dirty coal rather than transitioning rapidly to a cleaner future.
The new pledge — known in UN jargon as a nationally determined contribution, or NDC — reveals a disconnect between the government’s official position and the optimistic discourse that now surrounds China’s clean energy sector. China today is described as the world’s first electrostate; it stands at the vanguard of the solar and EV revolution, some say, ready to remake the world order against a coalition of petrostate dinosaurs.
The NDC makes it obvious that the Chinese government does not yet view itself in such a fashion. China might look like an adult, but it more closely resembles a gangly teenager who is still getting used to their body after a growth spurt. As the analyst Kingsmill Bond recently put it on Heatmap’s podcast Shift Key, Chinese clean tech manufacturers have unlocked a cleaner and cheaper path to economic development. It isn’t yet clear that China is brave enough to commit to it. If China is the adult in the room, in other words, we’re screwed.
Let’s start by giving credit where due. For a country that had never offered an absolute emissions reduction target before, Xi’s promise — to cut emissions by 7% to 10% by 2035 — is a kind of progress. But observers expected China to go much further. Researchers at the University of Maryland and the Center for Research on Clean Air, for example, each suggested that emissions could decline by roughly 30% by that year. Only a reduction of this magnitude would actually keep the planet on a trajectory sufficiently close to the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius.
Many inside China’s policy apparatus considered such ambitious cuts to be infeasible; for instance, Teng Fei, deputy director of Tsinghua University’s Institute of Energy, Environment and Economy, described a 30% reduction as “extreme.” Conversations with knowledgeable insiders, however, suggested a headline reduction of up to 15% was viewed as plausible. In that light, the decision to commit a mere 7% to 10% can only be seen as disappointing.
The NDC obviously represents a floor and not a ceiling, and China has historically only made climate promises that it knows it will keep. But even then, China’s leadership has given itself tremendous wiggle room. This can be seen in part by what is not in Xi’s pledge: any firm commitment about when, exactly, China’s emissions will peak. (His previous pledge only said that it would happen in the 2020s.) While it’s quite possible that 2024 or 2025 will end up being the peak, as some expect, the new pledge creates a perverse incentive to delay and pollute more now. The speech also contained little on non-CO2 greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide — which, given China’s previous commitment to reach net zero on all warming gases by 2060, seems like a significant blind spot.
Other commitments are only impressive until you scratch the surface. Xi pledged that China would install 3,600 gigawatts of solar and wind capacity by 2035. That may sound daunting: The United States, the world’s No. 2 country for renewables capacity, has a combined 400 gigawatts of solar and wind. But China already has about 1,600 gigawatts installed. So China’s promise, in essence, is to add around 200 gigawatts of solar and wind each year until 2035 — and while that would be a huge number for any other country, it actually represents a significant slowdown for China. The country added 360 gigawatts of wind and solar combined last year, and has already installed more than 200 gigawatts of solar alone in the first eight months of this one. In this light, China’s renewables pledge seems ominous.
More distressingly for climate action, it is unclear if this comparatively slower pace of clean electricity addition will actually allow China’s electricity sector to decarbonize. As the electricity analyst David Fishman has noted, China’s overall electricity demand grew faster than its clean electricity generation last year, leaving a roughly 100 terawatt-hour gap — despite all that new solar and wind (and despite 16 gigawatts of new nuclear and hydroelectric power plants, too). Coal filled this gap. Last year, China began construction of almost 100 gigawatts of new coal plants even though its existing coal fleet already operates less than half of the time. These new plants represented more than 90% of the world’s new coal capacity in 2024.
China’s climate strategy — like every other country’s — requires electrifying large swaths of its economy. If new renewables diminish to only 200 gigawatts a year, then it seems implausible that its renewable additions could meet demand growth — let alone eat away substantial amounts of coal-fired generation — unless its economic growth significantly slows.
Yet the news gets worse. Taken alone, the NDC’s weakness may speak of mere caution on China’s part, yet a number of policy changes to China’s electricity markets and industrial policy over the past year suggest its government is now slow-walking the energy transition.
In 2024, for instance, China started making capacity payments to coal-fired power plants. These payments were ostensibly designed to lubricate a plant’s economics as it shifted from 24/7 operation to a supporting role backing up wind and solar. Yet only coal plants — and not, for instance, batteries — were offered these funds, even though batteries can play a similar role more cheaply and China already makes them in scads. Even more striking, coal plants have been pocketing these funds without changing their behavior or even producing less electricity
At the same time, China’s central leadership has cut the revenues that new solar and wind farms receive from generating power. New solar and wind plants are now scheduled to receive less than the same benchmark price that coal receives — although the details of that discount vary by province and remain uncertain in most of them. Observers hope that this lower price, along with a more market-based dispatch scheme, will eventually allow renewables-heavy electricity systems to charge lower rates to consumers and displace more expensive coal power. However, there’s little clarity on if and when that will happen, and in the meantime, new renewables installations are plummeting as developers wait for more information to emerge.
Chinese industrial policy is exacerbating these trends. The world has long talked about Chinese overcapacity. Now even conversation in the Western media has progressed to discussing “involution” — a broader term that centers on the intensive competition that characterizes Chinese capitalism (and society). It suggests that Chinese firms are competing themselves out of business.
The market-leader BYD, for instance, has become synonymous with the Chinese battery-powered auto renaissance, but there are fears that even this seeming titan might have corrupted itself on the way. The company has larded an incredible amount of debt onto its books to fuel its race to the top of the sales charts; now, murmurs abound that the firm might be “the Evergrande of EVs” — a reference to the housing developer that collapsed into bankruptcy earlier this decade with hundreds of billions of dollars in debt. In recent months, BYD’s engine seems to be sputtering, with sales dropping in September 2025 compared with last year.
As such, the government has come in to try to negotiate new terms of competition so that firms do not end up doing irreparable harm to themselves and their future prospects. It is doing so in other sectors as well: In solar, it has tried to create a cartel of polysilicon manufacturers, a solar OPEC of sorts, to make sure that the pricing of that key input to the photovoltaic supply chain is at a level where the producers can survive.
This may all seem positive — and there is certainly an argument that the government could play a role in helping these new sectors negotiate the difficult waters that they find themselves in. But I interpret these efforts as further slow-walking of the energy transition. A slight reframing can help to understand why.
What is literally happening in these meetings? The government is bringing private actors into the same room to bang their heads together and deal with the reality that the current economic system is not working, largely because of intense competition — a problem likely best solved by forcing some of the firms and production capacity to shrink. Firms are unprofitable because exuberant supply has zoomed past current demand, and the country’s markets and politics are not prepared to navigate the potentially needed bankruptcies or their fallout. So the government is intervening, designing actions to generate the outcomes it desires.
Yet there is something contradictory about the government’s approach. A decarbonized world, after all, will be a world without significant numbers of internal combustion vehicles, so traditional automakers will eventually need to shut down or shift into EVs — yet their executives aren’t being dragged in for the same scolding. Likewise, a decarbonized world will be a world without as many coal mines and coal-fired power plants. Firms in the power sector should be scolded for continuing coal production at scale.
These are problems of the mid-transition, as the scholars Emily Grubert and Sara Hastings-Simon have described decarbonization’s current era. But China is further along in this transition than other states, and it could lead in the management and planning required for the transition as well.
China is stuck. For four decades, China’s growth rested on moving abundant cheap labor from low-productivity agriculture to higher productivity sectors, often in urban areas. The physical construction of China’s cities underpinned this development and became its own distorting bubble, launching a cycle of real-estate speculation. The government pricked this bubble in 2020, but since then, Chinese macroeconomic strength has failed to return.
Despite the glimmering nature of its most modern cities, China remains decidedly middle income, with a GDP per capita equivalent to Serbia. Many countries that have grown out of poverty have reached this middle income territory — but then become mired there rather than continuing to develop. This pattern, described as “the middle income trap,” has worried Chinese policymakers for years.
The country is obviously hoping that its new clean industries can offer a substitute motor to power China out of its middle-income status. Its leadership’s apparent decision to slow walk the energy transition, however, looks like a classic example of this “trap.” The leadership seems unwilling to jettison older industries in favor of the higher-value added industries of the future. The fact that the government has previously subsidized these industries just shows the complexity of the political economy challenges facing the regime.
The NDC’s announcement could be seen as an easy win given Trump’s climate backwardness. Clearly that’s what Xi was counting on. But China is too important to be understood only in contrast to the United States — and we should not applaud something that not only fails to recognize global climate targets, but also underplays China’s own development strategy. The country is nearing the release of its next five-year plan. Perhaps that document will incorporate more ambitious targets for the energy transition and decarbonization.
This summer, I visited Ordos in Inner Mongolia, a coal mining region that is now also home to some of China’s huge renewable energy megabases and a zero-carbon industrial park. Tens of thousands still labor in Ordos’ mines and coal-hungry factories, yet they seem like a relic of an earlier age when compared to the scale and precision of the new green industrial facilities. The dirty coal mines may still have history and profits on their side, but it is clear that the future will see their decline and replacement with green technology. I hope that Xi Jinping and the rest of the Chinese political elite come to the same conclusion, and fast.
