Could New York go carbon free by 2050?
The Climate and Community Protection Act could transform New York’s energy market.
By Susan Arbetter | December 12, 2018 | Excerpt
The Climate and Community Protection Act, sponsored by state Sen. Brad Hoylman and Assemblyman Steve Englebright, is an expansive bill that requires New York state to generate 50 percent of its electricity from renewable energy by 2030. By 2050, the bill would require the elimination of all greenhouse gas emissions.
The bill is process-oriented. Baked into the plan is a climate action playbook that proponents say will guide the state from its current level of fossil fuel use down to zero.
For workers who may be displaced by the proposed transition to renewables, the bill includes prevailing wage standards and addresses the needs of environmental justice communities where many fossil fuel plants are currently located. The bill is, in one activist’s words, “a B-12 shot for the state’s renewables.”
Currently, New York only uses 3 percent wind energy and less than 1 percent from solar energy. “This is the most important issue on Earth,” said Englebright, who chairs the Assembly Committee on Environmental Conservation. “States now have to pick up the slack that has been created by the inaction of the federal government.”
State Sen. Todd Kaminsky, who was recently tapped to chair the state Senate’s Environmental Conservation Committee starting in January, agreed. “There is no doubt we need to take aggressive steps to address climate change,” he said. “This bill will be the central vehicle by which we will accomplish that.”
Peter Iwanowicz, executive director of Environmental Advocates of New York, said the state needs a strong foundation for setting its clean energy goals in law. “Right now the goals don’t exist in law,” he said. “They are at the whim of the executive.”
Iwanowicz is referring to an executive order Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed in 2017, as well as the state’s 2015 Energy Plan, both of which articulated New York’s aspirational goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by 2030 and 80 percent by 2050 from 1990 levels.
“Because the goals don’t exist in law, it’s hard for businesses to write a plan of how to create opportunities,” Iwanowicz said. “Surety in law is surety to businesses.”
Other states have already provided the business community with that certainty.
In September, California enshrined a commitment to move to 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2045, something the state has been working toward since 2002. In 2008, Massachusetts enacted the Global Warming Solutions Act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“When other states have passed similar laws it reorients all state decision-making to be consistent with achieving these goals,” Iwanowicz said. “You don’t have the schizophrenic nature of state government that you have in many of these places where they end up approving dirty projects when they should be aligned towards clean.”
New York is showing signs of that schizophrenia. In 2017, the same year Cuomo issued an executive order aspiring to a carbon-free future, the New York Power Authority, whose trustees are appointed by Cuomo, requested proposals for a natural gas turbine project to power the state Capitol complex. This year, the state Department of Environmental Conservation indicated it will likely approve the burning of plastics and other solid waste at a cement plant in Glens Falls, just north of Albany.
If the Climate and Community Protection Act is passed as currently written, those projects would not get state approval.
The section of the article dealing with the Climate and Community Protection Act is shown above. To read the full article, visit City&StateNY.com
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