With the blood, sweat, and tears of climate scientists and advocates, and the vision and wisdom of some of our leaders, New York passed its landmark Climate Act in 2019. The fossil-fuel industry immediately launched an intense disinformation and lobbying campaign to derail it and recently, almost won over Governor Hochul as an ally as her administration enlisted the Senate and Assembly’s Energy Committee chairs to introduce a last-minute bill to gut the state’s climate law amid intense negotiations towards finalizing the state’s budget.

The state’s climate law created a Climate Action Council comprising scientists, experts, industry and labor representatives, and state agency heads to develop a Scoping Plan with specific recommendations for its implementation. After rigorous analyses, extensive public comments and thousands of hours of cumulative work by the Council, its advisory panels and state agency staff over three years, the Scoping Plan was approved with a 19-3 vote.

Every expert and agency head voted in its favor and the president of NYS AFL-CIO wrote “New York’s approach to climate policy is both sensible and effective.” The three nay votes by the fossil-fuel industry executives lent further credibility to the plan; who would trust a climate plan reminiscent of foxes guarding the henhouse?

The new bill proposes to discard the results of this entire effort in one fell swoop and replace the approach used and approved by the experts with one favored by the fossil-fuel industry, purportedly to improve affordability. The centerpiece of the bill is to use a lenient accounting methodology for the state’s methane pollution to make it easier to “meet” the climate goals. This is akin to “improving” public safety by giving the police departments weekends off to reduce costs and counting the crimes committed on weekdays only.

Methane, marketed as natural gas, traps dramatically more heat than the familiar climate culprit, carbon dioxide, but stays in the atmosphere for a mere decade. The fact that it causes its climate damage in the few years following its inevitable leakage from drilling, distribution and domestic appliances is accurately reflected in the current law. The new bill seeks to spread out and dilute methane’s global warming potential over 100 years so that it appears more benign – an approach favored by gas utilities.

While cost concerns have been cited among the justifications for this bill, it has been reported in the news media that this whole effort was the brainchild of fossil-fuel lobbyists, who appear to hold quite a bit of sway over the governor.

The Department of Environmental Conservation and the state’s energy agency, NYSERDA, have broad flexibility in designing the details of Governor Hochul’s cap-and-invest market-based emissions reduction approach to minimize or eliminate price shocks.

The program would also return money to New Yorkers as rebates to compensate for the increase in the price of carbon-based energy. An honest, undiluted accounting for pollution will raise more fees, but will also enable larger rebates, whose size the administration controls.

The new bill inexplicably includes loopholes to enable burning chopped forests and the stupendously expensive “renewable” natural gas from out-of-state livestock manure. The latter will enable the gas utilities to extract top dollar from hapless ratepayers when New Yorkers are already footing increasing bills for the expansion of the gas network. The costs of connecting new customers to the gas system are passed off to all ratepayers with markup-up for a guaranteed profit for the utilities, and every year, this climate-destroying expansion of the gas network adds roughly $200 million to New Yorkers’ future energy costs. Replacing a mile of leaky gas pipeline costs customers an average of $6 million when all the costs are included. This works out to an average of $60,000 for each customer on that line.

The Senate has proposed to relieve gas customers from costly obligations to fill the gas utilities’ coffers. The Senate has also proposed a timely transition to the less expensive all-electric new construction. Any weakening or delays will tie more New Yorkers to expensive gas, whose suppliers will then need to purchase more carbon allowances under the cap-and-invest program and pass the costs to all gas customers – hardly an affordable proposition.

If the governor is serious about delivering climate action and affordable energy, then there is no better way to do that than to endorse the Senate’s proposals on gas transition and electrification of new buildings in the state budget without delays or loopholes.

Given that California and Colorado have already repealed gas hookup subsidies, that Washington state is years ahead of New York in new-building decarbonization, and that her predecessor stood up to the gas industry by banning fracking, accepting the Senate’s proposals shouldn’t be too high a bar for the governor to clear.

Janet Lenichek is the Chair of the Sierra Club Niagara Group; Anshul Gupta is a steering committee member of the New York Climate Reality Chapters Coalition.