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The Empire State just passed legislation to try to live up to its climate goals. Will other states follow?
The Empire State took a big leap toward a carbon-free future this week.
Late Tuesday night, after more than a month of negotiations, the New York state legislature passed a $229 billion budget, enacting three major climate policies in the process. The legislation will not only give teeth to ambitious emissions targets the state established four years ago, but it also forms a sort of blueprint for state-level clean energy transitions around the country.
New York passed a law setting up targets to cut emissions across its economy back in 2019 when Andrew Cuomo was governor. But it didn’t stipulate how the state was supposed to achieve them. Instead, the law set in motion a multi-year process for state leaders and appointed advisors to work out the best path forward. The group’s findings were finally published in December, and two of the climate policies enacted this week — a ban on natural gas in new buildings and a cap-and-invest program — are key recommendations from that document. The third, which creates a new avenue for publicly-owned renewable energy projects, was not part of that plan, but was born out of a vigorous, four-year grassroots campaign by the Democratic Socialists of America.
New York’s budget deal won’t fill in all the gaps in its strategy to decarbonize. But it does accomplish a number of big and essential first steps, like limiting the growth of natural gas and developing sources of funding to pay for the transition. About half of the country has enacted greenhouse gas reduction targets, but few states have put in place the policies to achieve them.
Below, a look at New York’s three big climate moves and why they could be a model for other states looking to live up to their own climate goals.
Buildings are by far the largest contributor to climate change in New York, accounting for 32% of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions. They are also an exceedingly hard source to tackle, as those emissions come from a bunch of long-lived appliances like natural gas heating systems, stoves, and clothes dryers. But electric alternatives, which can be powered by renewable energy, are readily available. One easy first step any state can take is to stop the problem from getting worse by requiring that new buildings forego fossil fuels.
A few municipalities in the Empire State, like New York City and Ithaca, have already enacted bans on fossil fuel-burning appliances in new buildings. Now, Governor Kathy Hochul is set to pass a similar state-wide ban that will begin to go into effect in 2026. This is a year later than what was recommended by the state’s climate plan. But it will still send a powerful message that gas is no longer a growth industry in one of the biggest economies in the U.S.
“It is very, very clear now what the direction of travel is,” Pete Sikora, climate and inequality campaigns director of New York Communities for Change, a grassroots organization, told me. “That’s a monumental shift, as I see it, from an earlier environment, where Democrats were mouthing that ‘gas is a bridge fuel to the future.’ We’ve blown up that bridge. That bridge is collapsing into a ravine.”
While a few other states, like California and Washington, have effectively done the same thing via changes to their building codes, New York is the first state to build enough political support to cut off gas growth through its legislature. Jonny Kocher, a manager for the Carbon-Free Buildings Program at the clean energy group RMI, told me he anticipates that New York’s approach will have fewer exemptions than other states, and expects California and Washington to follow suit with legislation in order to strengthen their own policies. Washington State is currently facing a lawsuit for sidestepping the legislature.
Kocher said a gas ban isn’t necessarily a step that all states need to take in order to limit emissions from new buildings. The latest electric appliances, like heat pumps, are more efficient than gas-burning boilers or furnaces, and all-electric new construction will save consumers money in many parts of the country, so many states will move in this direction anyway. “We believe that states with existing (or new) energy efficiency goals will inevitably shift towards an all-electric code because it is simply the least expensive pathway to reach those energy efficiency goals,” he said in an email.
Implementation of New York’s climate plan has been somewhat piecemeal to date. Like many states, New York has a clean energy standard that requires utilities to buy an increasing amount of renewable energy each year. It also participates in a regional effort to cut emissions from power plants. That program raises some money for clean energy programs, like energy efficiency and electric vehicle rebates.
But while these policies are serving to clean up New York’s grid, they leave out other parts of the economy that also produce emissions, like fuel suppliers, natural gas utilities, and industrial facilities. The state has also failed to figure out how to pay for its energy transition, which is estimated to cost some $300 billion over the next 30 years. To address both of these gaps, Hochul announced in January that New York will establish a cap-and-invest program like those used by California and Washington State. The legislation passed this week fleshes out the “invest” side of the plan.
Cap-and-invest is similar to a price on carbon, and is often called a “polluter pays” program. Companies with big carbon footprints will have to purchase permits to pollute, and the number of permits available will shrink over time to ensure that the state hits its emissions targets.
These programs are complex and notoriously hard to implement well. Policy experts and environmental justice advocates have criticized California’s program for giving companies too much leeway to purchase carbon offsets instead of reducing their pollution, and for auctioning off more permits than needed.
Many of the details in New York have yet to be worked out. But the budget deal ensures that at least 30% of the proceeds raised by the program will be returned to New Yorkers to offset higher costs that may result from it. The rest will go into a climate action fund to pay for all kinds of clean energy projects and incentives.
A growing number of climate advocates are starting to unite around a more radical vision for the transition to clean energy — a shift toward publicly-owned power. Some consider it a key tenet of the Green New Deal, others just see it as a way to bring more accountability to energy companies. Utilities have historically been some of the biggest obstructors of climate action. Proponents argue that publicly-owned utilities would be better equipped to usher in the energy transition since they aren’t beholden to shareholders and can prioritize clean energy and equity over profit.
“If you’re leaving it up to the market, you can create incentives, but you have less power over where this energy is sited, who is benefitting,” said Johanna Bozuwa, executive director of the Climate and Community project.
In New York, advocates discovered that they had a “sleeping giant” in the New York Power Authority. The state-owned utility operates several big hydroelectric dams and a number of fossil fuel power plants, but its ability to build and operate solar and wind projects was severely curtailed under statute. After a four year push, and the election of a slew of DSA candidates into the legislature, the public power movement successfully pressured Hochul into changing that.
The budget deal mandates strong labor standards for any new generation built and also instructs NYPA to retire its fossil fuel plants by 2030, five years earlier than previously planned.
It remains to be seen whether authorizing NYPA to build will actually result in it using that authority. But the odds are better than they were a year ago, thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act. The law made a key change to the country’s clean energy tax credits, allowing public institutions and nonprofits to claim them for the first time. Bozuwa told me that this means other states will be looking at what happens in New York and could follow its lead.
“Not every state has a NYPA, but I think that people will look to NYPA and say, ‘oh, my gosh, we could be doing that too,’” she said. “Because there’s so much money flowing in, this is the perfect time for states or even municipalities to start to develop a renewable energy generation fleet.”
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Current conditions: In the Atlantic, the tropical storm that could, as it develops, take the name Jerry is making its way westward toward the U.S. • In the Pacific, Hurricane Priscilla strengthened into a Category 2 storm en route to Arizona and the Southwest • China broke an October temperature record with thermometers surging near 104 degrees Fahrenheit in the southeastern province of Fujian.
The Department of Energy appears poised to revoke awards to two major Direct Air Capture Hubs funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in Louisiana and Texas, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reported Tuesday. She got her hands on an internal agency project list that designated nearly $24 billion worth of grants as “terminated,” including Occidental Petroleum’s South Texas DAC Hub and Louisiana's Project Cypress, a joint venture between the DAC startups Heirloom and Climeworks. An Energy Department spokesperson told Emily that he was “unable to verify” the list of canceled grants and said that “no further determinations have been made at this time other than those previously announced,”referring to the canceled grants the department announced last week. Christoph Gebald, the CEO of Climeworks, acknowledged “market rumors” in an email, but said that the company is “prepared for all scenarios.” Heirloom’s head of policy, Vikrum Aiyer, said the company wasn’t aware of any decision the Energy Department had yet made.
While the list floated last week showed the Trump administration’s plans to cancel the two regional hydrogen hubs on the West Coast, the new list indicated that the Energy Department planned to rescind grants for all seven hubs, Emily reported. “If the program is dismantled, it could undermine the development of the domestic hydrogen industry,” Rachel Starr, the senior U.S. policy manager for hydrogen and transportation at Clean Air Task Force told her. “The U.S. will risk its leadership position on the global stage, both in terms of exporting a variety of transportation fuels that rely on hydrogen as a feedstock and in terms of technological development as other countries continue to fund and make progress on a variety of hydrogen production pathways and end uses.”
Remember the Tesla announcement I teased in yesterday’s newsletter? The predictions proved half right: The electric automaker did, indeed, release a cheaper version of its midsize SUV, the Model Y, with a starting price just $10 shy of $40,000. Rather than a new Roadster or potential vacuum cleaner, as the cryptic videos the company posted on CEO Elon Musk’s social media site hinted, the second announcement was a cheaper version of the Model 3, already the lower-end sedan offering. Starting at $36,990, InsideEVs called it “one of the most affordable cars Tesla has ever sold, and the cheapest in 2025.” But it’s still a far cry from Musk’s erstwhile promise to roll out a Tesla for less than $30,000.
That may be part of why the company is losing market share. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported, Tesla’s slice of the U.S. electric vehicle sales sank to its lowest-ever level in August despite Americans’ record scramble to use the federal tax credits before the September 30 deadline President Donald Trump’s new tax law set. General Motors, which sold more electric vehicles in the third quarter of this year than in all of 2024, offers the cheapest battery-powered passenger vehicle on the market today, the Chevrolet Equinox, which starts at $35,100.
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Trump’s pledge to revive the United States’ declining coal industry was always a gamble — even though, as Matthew reported in July, global coal demand is rising. Three separate stories published Tuesday show just how stacked the odds are against a major resurgence:
As you may recall from two consecutive newsletters last month, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said “permitting reform” was “the biggest remaining thing” in the administration’s agenda. Yet Republican leaders in Congress expressed skepticism about tacking energy policy into the next reconciliation bill. This week, however, Utah Senator Mike Lee, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, called for a legislative overhaul of the National Environmental Policy Act. On Monday, the pro-development social media account Yimbyland — short for Yes In My Back Yard — posted on X: “Reminder that we built the Golden Gate Bridge in 4.5 years. Today, we wouldn’t even be able to finish the environmental review in 4.5 years.” In response, Lee said: “It’s time for NEPA reform. And permitting reform more broadly.”
Last month, a bipartisan permitting reform bill got a hearing in the House of Representatives. But that was before the government shutdown. And sources familiar with Democrats’ thinking have in recent months suggested to me that the administration’s gutting of so many clean energy policies has left Republicans with little to bargain with ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
Soon-to-be Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi.Yuichi Yamazaki - Pool/Getty Images
On Saturday, Japan’s long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party elected its former economic minister, Sanae Takaichi, as its new leader, putting her one step away from becoming the country’s first woman prime minister. Under previous administrations, Japan was already on track to restart the reactors idled after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. But Takaichi, a hardline conservative and nationalist who also vowed to re-militarize the nation, has pushed to speed up deployment of new reactors and technologies such as fusion in hopes of making the country 100% self-sufficient on energy.
“She wants energy security over climate ambition, nuclear over renewables, and national industry over global corporations,” Mika Ohbayashi, director at the pro-clean-energy Renewable Energy Institute, told Bloomberg. Shares of nuclear reactor operators surged by nearly 7% on Monday on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, while renewable energy developers’ stock prices dropped by as much as 15%
Researchers at the United Arab Emirates’ University of Sharjah just outlined a new method to transform spent coffee grounds and a commonly used type of plastic used in packaging into a form of activated carbon that can be used for chemical engineering, food processing, and water and air treatments. By repurposing the waste, it avoids carbon emitting from landfills into the atmosphere and reduces the need for new sources of carbon for industrial processes. “What begins with a Starbucks coffee cup and a discarded plastic water bottle can become a powerful tool in the fight against climate change through the production of activated carbon,” Dr. Haif Aljomard, lead inventor of the newly patented technology, said in a press release.
Last week’s Energy Department grant cancellations included funding for a backup energy system at Valley Children’s Hospital in Madera, California
When the Department of Energy canceled more than 321 grants in an act of apparent retribution against Democrats over the government shutdown, Russ Vought, President Trump’s budget czar, declared that the money represented “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left's climate agenda.”
At least one of the grants zeroed out last week, however, was supposed to help keep the lights on at a children’s hospital.
The $29 million grant was intended to build a 3.3-megawatt long-duration energy storage system at Valley Children’s Hospital, a large pediatric hospital in Madera, California. The system would “power critical hospital operations during outage events,” such as when the California grid shuts down to avoid starting wildfires, according to project documents.
“The U.S. Department of Energy’s cancellation of funding for [the] long-duration energy storage demonstration grant is disappointing,” Zara Arboleda, a spokesperson for the hospital, told me.
Valley Children’s Hospital is a 358-bed hospital that says it serves more than 1.3 million children across California’s Central Valley. It has 28 neonatal intensive care unit beds and nationally ranked specialties in pediatric neurology, orthopedics, and lung surgery, among others.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright has characterized the more than $7.5 billion in grants canceled last week as part of an ongoing review of financial awards made by the Biden administration. But the timing of the cancellations — and Vought’s gleeful tweets about them — suggests a more vindictive purpose. Republican lawmakers and President Trump himself threatened to unleash Vought as a kind of rogue budget cutter before the federal government shut down last week.
“We don’t control what he’s going to do,” Senator John Thune told Politico last week. “I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut,” Trump posted on the same day.
Up until this year, canceling funding that is already under contract with a private party would have been thought to be straightforwardly illegal under federal law. But the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has allowed the Trump administration to act with previously unimaginable freedom while it considers ruling on similar cases.
Faraday Microgrids, the contractor that was due to receive the funding, is already building a microgrid for the hospital. The proposed backup power system — which the grant stipulated should be “non-lithium-ion” — was supposed to be funded by the Energy Department’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, with the goal of finding new ways of storing electricity without using lithium-ion batteries, and was meant to work in concert with that new microgrid and snap on in times of high stress.
That microgrid project is still moving forward, Arboleda, the hospital’s spokesperson, told me. “Valley Children’s Hospital continues to build and soon will operate its microgrid announced in 2023 to ensure our facilities have access to reliable and sustainable energy every minute of every day for our patients and our care providers,” she added. That grid will contain some storage, but not the long-term storage system discussed in the official plan.
Faraday Microgrids, formerly known as Charge Bliss, didn’t respond to a request for comment, but its website touts its ability to secure grants and other government funding for energy projects.
In a statement, a spokesman for the Energy Department said that the grant was canceled because the project wasn’t feasible. “Following an in-depth review of the financial award, it was determined, among other reasons, that the viability of the project was not adequate to warrant further disbursements,” Ben Dietderich, a spokesman for the Energy Department, told me.
The children’s hospital, at least, is in good company. On Tuesday, a Trump administration document obtained by Heatmap News suggested the Energy Department is moving to kill bipartisan-backed funding for two direct air capture hubs in Texas and Louisiana. And although California has lost the most grants of any state, the Energy Department has also sought to terminate funding for new factories and industrial facilities across Republican-governed states.
Rob and Jesse break down China’s electricity generation with UC San Diego’s Michael Davidson.
China announced a new climate commitment under the Paris Agreement at last month’s United Nations General Assembly meeting, pledging to cut its emissions by 7% to 10% by 2035. Many observers were disappointed by the promise, which may not go far enough to forestall 2 degrees Celsius of warming. But the pledge’s conservatism reveals the delicate and shifting politics of China’s grid — and how the country’s central government and its provinces fight over keeping the lights on.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk to Michael Davidson, an expert on Chinese electricity and climate policy. He is a professor at the University of California, San Diego, where he holds a joint faculty appointment at the School of Global Policy and Strategy and the Jacobs School of Engineering. He is also a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and he was previously the U.S.-China policy coordinator for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: Your research and other people’s research has revealed that basically, when China started making capacity payments to coal plants, in some cases, it didn’t have the effect on the bottom line of these plants that was hoped for, and also we didn’t really see coal generation go down or change in the year that it happened. It wasn’t like they were paying these plants to stick around and not run. They were basically paying these plants, it seems like, to do the exact same thing they did the year before, but now they also got paid. And maybe that was needed for their economics, we can talk about it.
Why did coal get those payments and not, say, batteries or other sources of spare capacity, like pumped hydro storage, like nuclear? Why did coal, specifically, get payments for capacity? And does it have to do with spinning reserve? Or does it have to do with the political economy of coal in China?
Michael Davidson: When it came out, we said exactly the same thing. We said, okay, this should be a technology neutral payment scheme, and it should be a market, not a payment, right? But China’s building these things up little by little. Over time we’ve seen, historically, actually, a number of systems internationally started with payments before they move to markets because they realize that you could get a lot more competitive pressure with markets.
The capacity payment scheme for coal is extremely simple, right? It says, okay, for each province, we’re going to say what percentage of our benchmark coal investment costs are we going to subsidize. It’s extremely simple. It does not account for how much you’re using it at a plant by plant level. It does not account for other factors, renewables, etc. It’s a very coarse metric. But I wouldn’t say that it had had some, you know, perverse negative effect on the outcome of what coal generation is. Probably more likely is that these payments were seen, for some, as extra support. But then for some that are really hurting, they’re saying, okay, well then we will maybe put up less obstacles to market reforms.
But then on top of that, you have to put in the hourly energy demand growth story and say, okay, well you have all these renewables, but you don’t have enough storage to shift to evening peaks. You are going to rely on coal to meet that given the current rigid dispatch system. And so you’re dispatching them kind of regardless of whether or not you have the payment schemes.
I will say that I was a skeptic, right? Because when people told me that China should put in place a capacity market, I said, China has overcapacity. So if you have an overcapacity situation, you put in place a market, the prices should be zero. So what’s the point? But actually, when you’re looking out ahead with all of this surplus coal capacity that you’re trying to push down, you’re trying to push those capacity factors of those coal plans from 50%, 60%, down to 20% or even lower, they need to have other revenue schemes if you’re not going to dramatically open up your spot markets, which China is very hesitant to do — very risk averse when it comes to the openness of spot markets, in terms of price gaps. So that’s a necessary part of this transition. But it can be done more efficiently, and it should done technology neutral.
And by the way that is happening in certain places. That’s a national scheme, but we actually see that the implementation — for example, Shaanxi province, we have a technology neutral scheme that would include other resources, not just coal.
Mentioned:
China’s new pledge to cut its emissions by 2035
What an ‘ambitious’ 2035 electricity target looks like for China
China’s Clean Energy Pledge is Clouded by Coal, The Wire China
Jesse’s upshift; Rob’s upshift.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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A warmer world is here. Now what? Listen to Shocked, from the University of Chicago’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, and hear journalist Amy Harder and economist Michael Greenstone share new ways of thinking about climate change and cutting-edge solutions. Find it here.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.