Affordability Politics Took On New York’s Climate Law — and Won

When New York passed its first major climate law in 2019, climate advocates hailed the work as a milestone: The Empire State vowed to cut its carbon emissions by 40% by 2030, as compared to their 1990 levels, giving it some of the world’s most ambitious subnational climate policy. But last week, Governor Kathy Hochul and the state legislature moved to rewrite key provisions in that law, weakening deadlines and redefining its emissions math.

What happened? And would New York have ever been able to hit its 2030 goal? On this episode of Shift Key, Rob is joined by Emily Pontecorvo, a founding staff writer at Heatmap. They discuss how New York has changed its targets, why it has altered its approach to natural gas, and whether state-level climate goals can survive an age of affordability politics.

Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News.

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Here is an excerpt from their conversation:

Robinson Meyer: The other thing they did was this accounting change around how the state law considers methane. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Emily Pontecorvo: So, one of the things that made the New York climate law especially ambitious was they created in the law this rule that they were going to account for methane very differently than the way that almost any other state and most of the rest of the world does. And I’m sure listeners know, but methane is another greenhouse gas. It’s much more powerful than carbon dioxide, but it doesn’t stay in the atmosphere as long. It breaks down more quickly.

And so when you’re trying to kind of convert all greenhouse gases into one number, a carbon dioxide equivalent, there’s different ways to do that. You can measure methane on its effect on the atmosphere on warming over a 20-year period, which will make it look very, very strong because it’s strongest during that period. Or you can measure it over a 100-year period. These are the two common ways of doing it. And while much of the rest of the world uses the 100-year global warming potential of methane, New York was using the 20-year, which meant that all of New York’s methane emissions from landfills, from natural gas, those emissions had a much bigger effect on the state’s overall emissions. So it made the overall emissions seem higher on paper than if New York had used this other, 100-year global warming potential.

And there was actually a second thing that New York did that was unique, which is the state said, we’re not just going to account for the methane emissions that happen within our economy, within our borders. We’re also going to take ownership and take responsibility for methane from upstream from the natural gas that we use. So New York gets a lot of its natural gas from Pennsylvania, from West Virginia. And so New York is keeping on its own books the methane that’s leaks out of the drilling and pipelines and other infrastructure in those other states.

And so the big change in the budget deal was one, that New York was no longer going to include those emissions upstream in its own ledger. And two, that it’s going to switch to this 100-year accounting global warming potential. And so those two things combined, it really just takes a lot of carbon dioxide equivalent, or it takes a lot of methane off of New York’s books and makes the distance between now and the 2030 goal look a lot smaller.

Meyer: Stepping back, methane, as we’ve been saying, is a short-lived greenhouse gas. It’s extremely potent when it’s first released into the atmosphere, and then it quickly breaks down into carbon dioxide. And what’s interesting about it is that if you look at a molecule of methane, it is actually going to trap far more heat.

So methane, CH4, it will eventually oxidize down and break down into CO2. A singular molecule, the carbon in a molecule of methane, is going to trap more heat over its lifetime as an emission in the atmosphere in its CO2 form than in its CH4 form. And that’s because CO2 is extremely long-lived in the atmosphere. Basically, methane lasts 20 years in the atmosphere or so. It has this somewhat unstable and changing rate of decay in the atmosphere, but it’s not going to last longer than 100 years. And then CO2 will last roughly 1,000 years in the atmosphere. It essentially has a geological time scale in the atmosphere.

So methane’s going to matter way more later on as CO2. But as the U.S. energy system has come to rely more on natural gas, and therefore, as methane emissions have gone up, because methane is the largest component of natural gas, there was an effort to basically ... I don’t want to say make the methane emissions look worse, but like, try to capture — I think the counterargument here was that a lot of short-term warming seems to be coming from methane, and so therefore we should make methane look worse in the accounting than it might if we took a totally kind of apolitical, long-termist, geological accounting scale.

You can find a full transcript of the episode here.

Mentioned:

How New York Is Weakening Its Climate Law, by Emily Pontecorvo

LA Times: After heated debate, California updates key climate limit. Critics say it’s a retreat

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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.