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

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Robinson Meyer:

Hello, it’s Tuesday, June 2, and three makes a trend in journalism, but two is a pattern. And two of the country’s most liberal states just watered down their state-level climate policy. Last week, New York announced that it would rewrite parts of its state climate law, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, or CLCPA. That law was originally passed in 2019, and it sought to turn New York State into a North American climate leader on par with California or British Columbia. It set very ambitious goals, including a headline target of cutting New York’s emissions by 40% by 2030, as compared to their 1990 levels. But those goals have now changed. New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, has successfully watered down key provisions in the law as part of a budget deal with the state legislature. You’ll hear more about those changes in a moment. Just a few days later, California, one of those North American climate leaders, also altered its state-level climate policies. On Friday evening, the state’s Air Resources Board voted to change how the state’s cap-and-trade program works. Under the new change, industrial facilities such as oil refineries will get access to a big pot of up to $4 billion in free carbon credits if they invest in emissions-cutting projects within the state.

Robinson Meyer:

Environmental groups have been critical of both the New York and California changes. And now I realize that depending on where you live, these changes might sound like maybe fairly technical reforms to laws that only apply to just over one in six Americans and an even smaller share of U.S. emissions. I realize we’re not talking about U.S. climate policy in this episode, but I think these two changes reflect a deeper division among climate advocates and among Democrats about just how stringently to enforce climate policy during this period. You know, in the next few years, climate targets set half a decade ago or a decade ago are coming due. And a lot of those climate targets were going to be enforced by raising fossil fuel prices. But at the same time, Democrats have become more politically committed to low prices and cutting costs than they’ve been at almost any point since the global financial crisis in 2008. Cheap prices, affordability and cheap energy prices specifically has become key to Trump era democratic policymaking. So how are Democrats navigating this era of affordability in climate policy? That’s what we’re going to talk about today.

Robinson Meyer:

My guest today is Emily Pontecorvo. She’s a founding staff writer here at Heatmap News and an expert on all things state climate policy. She’s been covering recent changes to New York’s policy here at Heatmap. We’re going to talk about how New York’s laws have changed, why the state failed to meet the targets that it initially set in 2019, and whether the new targets are defensible, and what any of this means for the future of blue state climate policy. I should say we don’t get to California in this discussion because the changes came in too late for this conversation, but I’m sure we’ll talk about them soon and cover them on Heatmap. I’m Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News, and it’s all coming up today on Shift Key.

Emily, welcome to Shift Key.

Emily Pontecorvo:

Hey, Rob. Good to be here.

Robinson Meyer:

Emily, you wrote a great story for Heatmap this week about this budget deal between the governor and the statehouse that, in our word, kind of weakened or reformed parts of the CLCPA. And I have to say it’s a funny lot to me because when it passed, there was a sense that New York was now joining California in having extremely robust and ambitious state-level climate policy. And in some ways, New York’s climate policy was now more ambitious than California’s and we should really put New York first. Since then, I don’t know that we really heard about this law. Certainly, it doesn’t seem to play the same role in New York level governance

Robinson Meyer:

that like California’s climate laws seem to play in California’s governance. And at the same time, I think why we’re suddenly talking about it being weakened is maybe a little unclear. So can we just start by talking about like what has been happening in this law for listeners who are like me, who maybe remember when it was passed or maybe don’t remember when it was passed? What has happened with this law since 2019? And why did this year become the moment when Governor Kathy Hochul happened to move to try to weaken it and has now successfully done so?

Emily Pontecorvo:

It’s a really, really good question. And I think the answer has a lot to do with why we haven’t heard about it as much as we’ve heard about like California’s climate policymaking, for example. And I’m excited to be here and talk about it because I just think everything that’s happening around New York’s climate law is really interesting and really relevant to the kind of broader climate policy conversation right now. But, yeah, so after New York passed this law in 2019, what was unique about New York’s approach to climate policymaking is instead of passing a law that said our, you know, environmental department is going to make X, Y and Z regulations or this is how we’re going to go about trying to cut emissions, the law just basically set these high level targets. Yeah.

Emily Pontecorvo:

Cut economy-wide emissions 40% by 2030, and then cut emissions 85% by 2050. It’s kind of high-level targets. And then it created a new body called the Climate Action Council to basically meet for like three or four years and study New York’s economy and study all of the options for decarbonization and make a series of recommendations to the state about how to achieve those targets. So there was this like multi-year delay built into the law. I don’t know of any other states that have kind of gone about it that way. And so that’s what happened. I mean, the Climate Action Council, it was this group of scientists and environmental groups and industry representatives and state representatives, and they met for years. They came up with something called the Scoping Plan, which had a series of recommendations that they gave to the state. That happened in 2022. The Scoping Plan came out in 2022.

Robinson Meyer:

Did that Scoping Plan then have to be legislated or did it instantly become law or instantly kind of have regulatory force?

Emily Pontecorvo:

Yeah, it had no force. So it was just a series of recommendations that then it was the state and the legislature’s job to kind of take or leave and decide what to do with. And it didn’t it did turn into, you know, policy like it turned into bills and policies. So, for example, like the New York all electric buildings law that passed, I believe, last year. And that is one example where that law has now been delayed because there were a series of lawsuits and Kathy Hochul has sort of agreed to delay that law. But that was one of the recommendations that came out of the scoping plan. Another recommendation that came out of the scoping plan was a cap and invest program. And this is very similar to what California has, where they cap emissions across the economy and it sort of puts a tax on emissions above the cap. And then that revenue is kind of funneled back into the economy, back into clean energy programs. It’s a way to raise money for clean energy programs.

Robinson Meyer:

Okay, so basically what happened is New York set very high level targets for itself, which was very in vogue in the late 20-teens. It set up a blue ribbon commission to tell us how to meet those targets. And then it sounds like some policies came out of those targets. And we were approaching crunch time for those policies, if we had not technically

Robinson Meyer:

legally already passed crunch time. So before we get into the conversation, let me just ask one more question, which is so New York set this climate law in the CLCPA of cutting its emissions economy wide by 40% by 2030 relative to 1990 levels. Can you give us a sense of like how have emissions changed since 1990? How close is New York State to the 40% goal?

Emily Pontecorvo:

So in 1990, New York’s emissions were around 400 million metric tons of carbon. And today they’re, you know, they’ve fallen slightly. The most recent report from 2023 had emissions at about 350 million metric tons. And the 2030 target is much closer to about 250. So we’ve made a tiny bit of progress, but we’re still a ways to go. So if you look at New York State’s own dashboard on all of the kind of goals in the climate law, that first 2030 target, we’re only about a third of the way there.

Robinson Meyer:

I mean, it sounds like maybe our emissions have come down like 15% since 1990, but they are nowhere, we’re nowhere close to cutting them by the third or 40% that we would need to cut them to comply with the law. In some ways, that might just answer this question for me. But like,

Robinson Meyer:

why did the governor move to change these targets now? Why was 2026 the year when the governor and the statehouse decided to weaken these goals?

Emily Pontecorvo:

Kathy Hochul has talked about this in terms of the targets being unrealistic and not achievable. And to some degree, that may be true. But I, you know, based on my reporting, it seems like the real reason the governor has pushed to change the targets is more to do with a lawsuit. You know, another part of the climate law was ... said that New York had to put regulations into place by 2024 that would help the state achieve these targets. So that was supposed to be sort of after the scoping plan was out and after it gave these recommendations, the state would then have sort of a limited period of time, about two years, to actually enact regulations to achieve the goals. And the state began to do that. It started to put together this cap and invest program that I was talking about earlier. But then all progress on that just kind of stopped. In 2024, the state was behind.

Emily Pontecorvo:

They kept kind of pushing it down the road. And then eventually Kathy Hochul started to say, this is going to be too expensive. It’s, you know, we’re in an affordability crisis. This is going to hurt New Yorkers’ wallets. And this is not the right time to enact this policy. And when she basically said she wasn’t going to do it, a bunch of environmental groups sued because that was literally written in the law that those regulations needed to be in place and they won. And so it was after that that the governor started to propose to change the targets because changing the targets would then enable her to also get more time for those regulations.

Robinson Meyer:

Well, it’s funny because it does seem like the CLCPA was written almost knowing that these moments when politicians care about emissions are brief and fleeting. And so therefore, deadlines and traps and doodads need to be built into the law itself in order to actually get the politicians to do things when we’re not in a moment when climate change seems like a very urgent issue. And to some degree, it sounds like the history of this law so far has been Democratic politicians basically writing them into the law, and then as they begin to come across them, like furiously writing them out of the law. So there are two big changes that happened in the deal.

Robinson Meyer:

And let’s break them out. So the first is around the state has now set a new target for its, to reduce its carbon emissions. The old target, as we’ve been talking about, was this 40% by 2030 goal. What is the new goal?

Emily Pontecorvo:

So that 2030 goal is actually still in place, but it no longer really has any teeth. And what the budget deal did was create a new interim target for 2040 to cut emissions by 60%. And it also created a new deadline for those regulations that we’ve been talking about, this most likely cap and invest program, that now has to be in place by the end of 2028.

Robinson Meyer:

Do we think the state is going to meet that target? I mean, it seems like it’s already kind of moved the deadline for itself. It’s part of the idea here that that will be in a new presidential year and, I guess, kind of offset from any gubernatorial election, I guess. And so therefore, the state will heroically actually commit itself to implementing the cap and invest plan that year.

Emily Pontecorvo:

That’s an impossible question, of course. But first of all, the state already has a blueprint. I mean, they were working on the cap and invest program for several years. And whether or not they actually get it across the finish line is a matter of how much pressure they’re facing from the environmental community. How the affordability landscape changes, the political landscape changes. In 2028, is worrying about affordability going to be as politically salient as it is at this moment? Will climate feel more urgent then or less? It’s hard to imagine less, but who knows?

Robinson Meyer:

Is there a date they have to get it up by in 2028? Is it literally December 31?

Emily Pontecorvo:

It’s December 31. So it’s 2029, essentially. Yeah.

Robinson Meyer:

And I would actually say that to some degree, Kathy Hochul’s already solved this problem once of, when do you implement a new tax that you have to implement? Because it’s a very similar story with congestion pricing, right? Like congestion pricing was supposed to go into effect in June of 2024. In some ways, she began soft peddling the cap and invest program at the same time she began soft peddling congestion pricing. There was way more uproar about soft peddling, congestion pricing, and ultimately it was implemented in that period of time between the end of a presidential election cycle and the inauguration of a new president. You know, downtown congestion pricing went into effect on January 3, 2025.

Emily Pontecorvo:

Right.

Robinson Meyer:

And if we assume that the cap and invest kicks in on December 31, 2028, the new statutory deadline, that would be very, very close to kicking

Robinson Meyer:

in basically during the exact same political window. So they moved the deadline. That’s one thing. 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:

Yeah. 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 like 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 sort of 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 sort of 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,

Emily Pontecorvo:

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.

Robinson 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 kind of 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 want to say make the methane emissions look worse, but like.

Robinson Meyer:

Try to capture, I think the counter argument here was that like 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 here. Because like what we want to do is make near-term methane emissions really painful, right?

Emily Pontecorvo:

Yeah, I think there’s two things. I think one is that it puts more urgency around near-term reductions because they can really go quite a ways in mitigating warming. I think also in New York, it was a choice around really wanting to focus on natural gas and getting natural gas out of New York’s economy. You know, New York is one of band fracking in 2014. Like it has this history of really strong activism against natural gas. And when you measure methane on a 20-year global warming potential, that really makes actions like, you know, switching to electric heating and electric stoves, like things like that, it makes them look, you know, way more powerful as options and builds more kind of political will around those types of actions.

Robinson Meyer:

In some ways, it basically builds into the law itself a higher tax rate for natural gas than for other forms of carbon emissions. And really, really presses harder on natural gas. I guess the risk here is that it winds up having climate policy do something that isn’t quite what climate policy is maybe necessarily designed to do, in that if you adopt GWP-20, my sense is it makes coal.

Emily Pontecorvo:

And now New York’s not at risk of building a coal plant soon,

Robinson Meyer:

But it makes coal look in some cases better than gas.

Emily Pontecorvo:

I think that there are tradeoffs. And, you know, if it’s a political choice to focus on natural gas mitigation. But, you know, the alternative that, you know, I wrote a story about this actually a couple of years ago because Kathy Hochul tried to do this in 2023. And there was a big uproar about it and it didn’t end up happening. But at the time when I spoke to folks about it, one thing that came up was like when you, you know, when methane doesn’t look as urgent or pressing, the state might focus on something like transportation. Right now in New York, buildings are like the biggest source of carbon emissions. After this accounting change, transportation will look like the biggest source of carbon emissions. So maybe there’ll be a big push to try to electrify vehicles and build more public transit. And in the long run, you know, mitigating those carbon emissions could be better because those will be in the atmosphere much longer than the methane. So, you know, there’s those trade-offs.

Robinson Meyer:

I’ve seen coherent philosophical arguments that when you judge natural gas on the basis of these extremely short-term warming effects versus how natural gas emissions net out long-term compared to carbon dioxide emissions, you wind up, is downplaying basically anthropogenic climate change itself. Because you go, you wind up shifting from a system where you’re saying what matters is CO2 driven warming over the long term to a system that says what matters is eliminating this one source of very potent oil and gas emissions and trying to drive them out of the system. And now there might be political economic reasons to want to fight near-term emissions from the domestic fossil fuel industry. But that is not the same thing as actually going out and trying to reduce carbon emissions.

Robinson Meyer:

And in some ways, it confuses the two tasks, perhaps.

Emily Pontecorvo:

I’ve spoken to scientists and other policy experts who would argue that we should have separate targets, that we shouldn’t just have one CO2 equivalent target for 2030, that we should have, we should look at like, you know, the timeline for reducing methane, the timeline for reducing CO2. I do want to just note this group at NYU did an interesting analysis of this change, the global warming potential change. And they looked at, you know, I think one of the reasons the governor wanted to do this is that it would kind of give New York a little more time. It would look like they were further along. It would maybe make mitigation look more affordable, what they found was that Even though this change reduces the distance between today and the 2030 target, it doesn’t necessarily mean meeting that target is cheaper because it all depends on like the marginal cost of abating each greenhouse gas and kind of how efficiently the policies are at doing that.

Robinson Meyer:

And so in other words, basically, it sounds like you could take the revenue from New York City’s cap and invest under the old system and go spend it entirely on mitigating upstream emissions basically in Pennsylvania. Where we get a lot of our gas from. And that would pay out really well. But now, am I interpreting this right? But now basically what has to happen is the state has to go in and use its revenue from its cap and invest program to like change this deep, industrial stock in the state, be it buildings or transportation or the power system. And because the state is kind of grading its report card accurately, it actually has to go where the carbon emissions are. And where the carbon emissions are is always going to be or often going to be like a very expensive change to the actual fixed investment in the state.

Emily Pontecorvo:

Yeah. I mean, I think the report didn’t come down, you know, definitively. It said like, you know, more data would be needed to know this for sure. But because methane has such a bigger effect, mitigating it also has a bigger effect. And so, you know, you would have gotten more bang for your buck with a focus on methane, potentially, than with a focus on carbon.

Robinson Meyer:

What’s your read about these two big changes? I mean, you’ve been covering, now, New York’s state-level climate law for a long time. These are two pretty significant changes to how the law works, although it sounds like a lot of the skeleton of the legislation has maybe been left intact. What have you taken away from covering this? And what relevance do you think New York’s experience has for other states or other countries that are trying to regulate carbon emissions?

Emily Pontecorvo:

In some ways, I feel like I have been kind of waiting and wondering if this moment would come for years now. I’ve covered state climate policy in a lot of different states over the past several years and none of them are on track. I mean, none of them, you know, are really going to hit their targets. And

Emily Pontecorvo:

I’ve been curious, you know, when those deadlines were nearing, would states move the targets? Would they speed up their, you know, policymaking? Would they wave the targets away and say, well, the numbers don’t matter as much as the fact that we’re doing something like I was curious to see how that would be handled. And so, you know, it’s not it’s not entirely surprising, but it is so the way that everything went down in New York is so tied to this particular moment we’re in where, I mean, the Trump administration has really taken away the option of building more renewable energy quickly. And that has made it very, very difficult for New York to make progress toward these targets and made the prospect of doing so more expensive. And so it’s partly the Trump administration. It’s partly just the huge political anxiety around affordability right now that have all kind of created these changes. You know, when I talk to people from my most recent story, there were some who were glad that there was at least new deadlines, like new, you know,

Emily Pontecorvo:

New York would have to get these regulations in place by 2028. The budget agreement does specifically note that cap and invest should be considered as part of that. Whereas, like, you know, the original climate law doesn’t say anything about cap and invest. That kind of came out of the scoping plan. So I think people are optimistic that things will happen. There’s plenty of other things that New York could be doing. There’s other types of laws New York could pass or regulations New York could do in the meantime.

Robinson Meyer:

You mean to reduce its emissions?

Emily Pontecorvo:

To reduce its emissions, to speed up permitting, to get more batteries on the grid. New York has been really, really slow with storage deployment. And so I’ll be looking to see... Are we just going to basically pause all climate policymaking until 2028? Or are they going to be able to get some things done in the meantime?

Robinson Meyer:

Well, and not only that, but there was a recent transmission reliability report from New York, New York’s ISO, our state level grid, that basically said, starting potentially quite soon, but starting officially on paper, I think, as soon as 2029, that New York City doesn’t have enough capacity to meet its security margin, basically the amount of electricity that it projects it might need in an emergency to meet a summer weather event. And what this means is like what we’re going to be pulling up with barges connected to the grid that have diesel gensets on them on the hottest days of the year.

Emily Pontecorvo:

Well, what it really means is I think that some diesel gensets that were supposed to be retired by then will be kept online longer. So yeah, that’s not ideal. But I mean, there has been a proposal in New York for a long time to replace some of those peaker plants with batteries, with storage. And that has really not gone anywhere. So I think there is potential to get at that reliability need another way, but we’ll see if that happens.

Robinson Meyer:

Last question. This is not the only energy news to emerge from the New York State House this week. I think there were a few utility level changes or changes to utility level regulation that were passed in the state budget deal. Can you describe them to us really quickly?

Emily Pontecorvo:

Yeah, there were a couple other things. So the governor has this ratepayer protection plan where she included a bunch of policies to try to reform utilities and put a much bigger focus on affordability in the whole rate making process. So this includes like tying executive pay at utility companies to new affordability metrics, some reforms to the process of when utilities ask for rate hikes and requiring added justification over the necessity of those hikes, more scrutiny over the way that they’re spending money on lobbying and PR campaigns and things like that. And then there’s this new energy affordability index where the state is going to sort of benchmark its performance against other states. And, you know, kind of any time a utility asks for a rate hike, look at how that would impact the state’s index.

Robinson Meyer:

Well, we look forward to following that more. Well, you know, two more years until the state begins to enforce its cap and invest rules, allegedly now under the law. That means we have two more years to keep having these conversations, Emily. Thank you so much for joining us on Shift Key. I’m looking forward to them.

Emily Pontecorvo:

Thanks for having me.

Robinson Meyer:

Thanks so much for listening we’ll be back soon with a new episode of Shift Key. Until then, Shift Key is a production of Heatmap News. Our editors are Jillian Goodman and Nico Lauricella. Multimedia editing and audio engineering is by Jacob Lambert and by Nick Woodbury. Our music is by Adam Kromelow. Thanks so much for listening, we’ll see you soon.