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This episode of Shift Key is brought to you by heatmap Pro. You already rely on heatmap for daily reporting and commentary on the energy transition. That's why you listen to this show. Well, Heat Map Pro brings all of our research, reporting and insights down to the local level. It's a software platform that tracks all local opposition to clean energy projects and data centers. It forecasts community sentiment and it guides data driven engagement campaigns. Go to heatmap News Pro to book a demo and see the premier intelligence platform for project permitting and community engagement. That's heatmap News Pro. 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 policies 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 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. 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 1 in 6Americans and an even smaller share of US emissions. I realize we're not talking about US 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 and 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. 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 Rob Simire, the founding executive editor of Heat Map News, and it's all coming up today on Shift Key. Emily, welcome to Shifty.

B

Hey, Rob, good to be here.

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Emily, you wrote a great story for

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Heat Map this week about this budget deal between the governor and the State House that in our word kind of weakened or reformed parts of the clcpa.

A

And I have to say it's a

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funny lot to me because when it

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passed, there was a sense that New

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York was now joining California in having extremely robust and ambitious state level climate policy policy. And then 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've

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really heard about this law.

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Certainly it doesn't seem to play the same role in New York level governance that like California's climate laws seem to play in California's governance.

A

And at the same time, I think

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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

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me, who maybe remember when it was

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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?

B

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 is climate policy making, 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. So 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 and 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.

A

Did that scoping plan then have to

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be legislated or did it instantly become law or instantly kind of have regulatory force?

B

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 did, 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.

A

Okay, so basically what happened is New York set very high level targets for itself, which was very in vogue in

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the late 2000 and tens. It set up a blue ribbon commission to tell us how to meet those targets.

A

And then it sounds like some policies

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came out of those targets and we were approaching crunch time for those policies if we had not technically legally already passed crunch time.

A

So before we get into the conversation,

C

let me just ask one more question

A

which is, so New York set this

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climate law in the CL CPA 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?

B

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. 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.

C

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

B

Kathy Hochul has talked about this in terms of the targets being unrealistic and not achievable. And, 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 it 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. 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.

A

Well, it's funny because it does seem

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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.

A

So there are two big changes that

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happened in the deal, and let's break them out. So the first is around the state has now set a new target for its to. 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?

B

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 that now has to be in place by the end of 2028.

C

So 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 as 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 cabinet vest plan that year?

B

That's an impossible question, of course. But first of all, the state already has a blueprint. I mean, they were working on the Capita 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. You know, 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?

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

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It's December 31st. So it's 2029, essentially, yeah.

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And I would actually say that to

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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. Congestion pricing was supposed to go into effect in June of 2024. In some ways, she began soft peddling the Cabinet Invest program at the same time she began soft pedaling congestion pricing. There was way more uproar about soft pedaling 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.

B

Right, right.

C

If we assume that the Capita Invest kicks in on December 31, 2028, the new statutory deadline, that would be very, very close to kicking in, basically during the exact same political window.

A

So they moved the deadline.

C

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?

B

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 hundred 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, 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, 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 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, you know, 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.

C

You know, 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, 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, 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 as a C like later on as CO2, but as the US 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, like there was an effort to basically, basically, I don't want to say make the methane emissions look worse, but like

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try to capture,

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I think the, 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?

B

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 banned fracking in 2014. Like it has this history of really strong activism against natural gas. And when you measure methane on a 20, 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.

C

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.

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I guess the risk here is that

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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 GWP20, my sense is it makes coal. And now New York's not at risk of building a coal plant soon, but it makes coal look in some cases better than gas.

B

I think that there are trade offs and you know, if it, it's, 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 it, it, 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, when one thing that came up was like when you, you know, when, 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, there's those trade offs.

C

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 downplaying basically anthropogenic climate change itself.

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Because you go, you wind up shifting

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

B

I've spoken to scientists and, you know, other kind of 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 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.

A

And so in other words, basically it

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sounds like you could take the revenue from New York City's capital 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.

A

But now, am I interpreting this right?

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But now basically what has to happen is the state has to go in and use its revenue from its capital 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.

B

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 ethane 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.

C

What's your read about these, 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, and what relevance do you think New York's experience has for other states or other countries that are trying to regulate carbo?

B

In some ways, I feel like I have been kind of waiting and wondering if this moment would come for years now. You know, 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 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, 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.

C

You mean to reduce its emissions?

B

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 policy, all climate policy making till 2028 or are they going to be able to get some things done in the meantime?

C

Well, and not only that, but there was a recent transmission reliability report from New York, New York's ISO, our, 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 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 gen sets on them on the hottest days of the year.

B

Well, what it, 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, but I mean there has been a proposal in New York for a long time to replace some of those peakers plants with batteries with storage. And that has really not gone anywhere. So I think there is potential that to, you know, to, to get at that reliability need another way. But we'll see if that happens.

A

Last question.

C

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?

B

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 anytime a utility asks for a rate hike, look at how that would impact the state's index.

C

Well, we look forward to following that more.

A

Well, you know, two more years until

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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 Shipke. I'm looking forward to them.

B

Thanks for having me.

A

Thanks so much for listening.

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We'll be back soon with a new

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episode of Shift Key. Until then, Shift Key is a production of Heatmap News. Our editors are Jillian Gubin and Nica Loricella. Multimedia editing and audio engineering is by

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Jacob Lambert and by Nick Woodbury.

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Our music is by Adep Kramelau. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you soon.