Green Party Slams Governor Hochul’s Retreat on Climate

Ahead of Gov. Kathy Hochul’s energy summit in Syracuse on September 5, the Green Party of New York urged state lawmakers to speed up the transition to zero emissions and 100% clean renewable energy. Hochul convened the summit after admitting that the state was failing to meet its clean energy goals, prompting business leaders to urge her to weaken the climate laws.

The Green Party pushed for a climate law far stronger than the CLCPA (Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act) adopted 5 years ago. Since 2010 it has called for an ecosocialist Green New Deal in New York, with a ten-year timeline to 100% renewable energy and zero emissions, combined with a comprehensive economic Bill of Rights. The Party also urged lawmakers to implement the congestion pricing program for NYC that Hochul has halted.

“Hochul and other Democrats, including Kamala Harris, continue to appease the fossil fuel industry and their campaign donors.  We need the Democrats to reject false climate solutions such as nuclear power, hydrogen, biofuels, fracking, natural gas, and carbon capture and sequestration. We need to create energy and economic systems that are publicly owned and democratically controlled that focus on preventing climate collapse and promote the common good, not wasting money on greening capitalism and the 1%,” said Gloria Mattera, co-chair of the Green Party. The Party faulted Hochul for slow-walking implementation of the Build Public Renewables Act and for failing to sign the legislation to block the use of carbon dioxide for fracking.

The Green Party strongly supports the principle of making polluters pay for the damages from burning fossil fuels. New Yorkers pay an estimated $50 billion a year ($2,500 per person) just to deal with health care costs from burning fossil fuels; the estimated annual cost to repair damages is $100 billion. The Greens urged Hochul to sign the Climate Superfund Act to raise $3 billion annually from the largest greenhouse gas emitters.

While the Party supports a carbon tax rather than the cap-trade-and-invest program pushed by the Hochul administration, it said the floor for the carbon permits needed to be closer to the $121 a ton that the state estimates as the social cost of carbon rather than the $23 presently being proposed. (EPA estimated $190 in 2020.) The higher price would also allow for a much larger rebate to New Yorkers to offset the rise in fossil fuel prices. The Party also urged lawmakers to pass the NY Heat Act, both to more strongly align state agencies’ actions with the CLCPA but also to cap utility bills for low-income consumers.

“For the last year Governor Hochul has sought to weaken the state’s already anemic efforts to address the climate crisis. While Hochul argues that changes are needed to reflect how science has changed since the CLCPA was adopted 5 years ago, what scientists and the UN are saying is that politicians like Hochul are moving far too slowly to avoid climate collapse, with global warming already hitting the 1.5 degree C target,” said Peter LaVenia, the other state party co-chair.

The Green Party criticized the upcoming energy summit for largely excluding the climate movement while providing a platform to promote the fossil fuel and nuclear industries. The Greens had opposed the $7.6 billion public subsidy pushed through by Governor Cuomo to bail out three failing upstate nuclear plants that its owners had wanted to close. The state payments for these small plants has exceeded its funding for renewable energy, one of several reasons New York lags so far behind in meeting its renewable goals compared to other states.

Nuclear power poses significant environmental threats, is far too expensive, and takes far too long to build for new plants to have any meaningful impact on keeping global warming below targeted levels. The highly radioactive uranium is often mined on Native lands, and after a half century no progress has been made in figuring out how to store the dangerous waste for tens of thousands of years.