Gov. Kathy Hochul is moving full-steam-ahead with her predecessor Andrew Cuomo’s insane anti-carbon energy plan, yet the Legislature wants to make it worse.
In their one-house budget bills this week, lawmakers took Hochul’s plan to cap greenhouse-gas output and require companies to buy “allowances” (indulgences?) for emissions and added new requirements of their own.
That’d make even harder for companies to meet standards, stay under the caps and/or pay for those allowances — more poison for the state’s business climate.
The added costs will also bring higher prices for consumers: added, New York-only “inflation.”
And where Hochul would allow the New York Power Authority to build renewable-energy projects, Senate legislation would force the agency to shut down all its fossil-fuel-burning energy plants and build or buy power only from renewable sources by 2030, just seven years away.
Uh, sorry, but that won’t speed the transition to renewables. As the Empire Center’s James Hanley points out, public agencies have no superpowers to complete projects faster than the private sector. Indeed, NYPA’s boss has testified that his agency lacks the resources to meet the requirements.
Anyway, developing that much renewable energy by then is near-impossible for anyone. Nothing like this renewable capacity is even on the drawing boards.
The Senate also calls for a new “climate-change superfund” to charge fossil-fuel companies an estimated $3 billion, on average, based on their greenhouse-gas emissions in the past. That means more price hikes for average New Yorkers.
Oh, and kiss gas stoves good-bye: Hochul failed to get lawmakers to ban gas hook-ups in new buildings last year, but they now appear on board. The Senate would even move up the starting date to as early as 2025.
Let’s face it: The Cuomo plan was always ridiculous, and pursuing it only causes New Yorkers pain while hiking electricity prices and inviting regular blackouts.
But even if the state martyrs its citizens to somehow meet the plan’s absurd goals — 100% renewable energy for electricity by 2050, for example, at a cost of as much as half a trillion bucks — it’d barely jiggle the global needle, as countries like China and India will be spewing out (literally) tons of greenhouse gases to bolster their economies.
Nor does climate change mean anything close to the apocalypse greenies warn of, even if no one lifts a finger to fight it. As Bjorn Lomborg notes, using UN figures, the average person in 2100, in that case, would be “only” 434% better off, instead 450%.
That’ll be something fun to think about when the lights go out.
