Empire Center says N.Y.’s Climate Act needs “green guardrails”

ALBANY — The sweeping climate law that New York State passed in 2019 to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions through bans, regulations, and taxes is “deeply flawed” and needs the state legislature to reassert its authority over climate policymaking to avoid “costly and economically destructive mistakes.” That’s according to a recent report from the Empire Center for Public Policy. In the report, called “Green Guardrails: Guiding New York’s Drive to Lower Emissions,” Ken Girardin, the Empire Center’s director of research, analyzes the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) that the state passed about five years ago and makes recommendations for changes. Girardin says that the CLCPA — which mandates an electric grid that uses only “zero emission” technology by 2040 and an economy that has effectively zero emissions by 2050 — “leaves the bulk of the decisions about how emissions will be reduced to state agencies under direct control of the governor, vesting them with policymaking powers that are supposed to be reserved for New York’s senators and assemblymembers.”

He contends that the process that has played out since the law’s adoption “has been marred by a lack of transparency, with state officials failing to issue legally required cost estimates and crucial studies designed to guide state energy policy.” He believes that the evidence is growing that the state “will be unable to achieve its goals without significantly affecting the cost of living and doing business in New York and harming the reliability of its electric grid.” Girardin concludes that he is not calling for “abandoning the state’s climate goals,” but instead recommending “open discourse, informed by the policy lessons and scientific advances of the past five years, [that] can and will result in better climate policy for New York.” You can read Girardin’s full analysis of New York’s CLCPA at: https://www.empirecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/green-guardrails.w.pdf. The Empire Center, based in Albany, describes itself as an independent, not-for-profit, non-partisan think tank dedicated to promoting policies that can make New York a better place to live, work, and raise a family.