In 2019, New York passed a sweeping law that promised to drastically reduce emissions and make New York an example for the nation.
But the measure also served another purpose: helping New York’s pugnacious governor, Andrew M. Cuomo, stick a thumb in the eye of President Donald J. Trump, whose administration was striving to dismantle environmental regulations and expand fossil fuel production.
“Trump ignores climate change because it is not politically convenient to acknowledge it,” Mr. Cuomo said at the signing of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.
Five years later, the landscape has shifted: The state’s current governor, Kathy Hochul, is less eager to provoke Mr. Trump, who will return to the White House after growing his margin of victory nationwide — including in deep blue New York City.
And while New York once appeared on track to meet the first of its major climate goals — drawing 70 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2030 — that now seems a distant possibility, after supply chain disruptions and rising inflation derailed several key offshore wind projects.
All of which leaves Ms. Hochul in a difficult position of delivering progress on environmental issues for New Yorkers, 89 percent of whom consider them somewhat or very important, without putting the state in the cross hairs of the notoriously retaliatory president-elect.
Ms. Hochul has been a prominent surrogate for President Biden and the Harris campaign. Even so, she has signaled that she intends to take a less adversarial approach to Mr. Trump than Mr. Cuomo.
Ms. Hochul also has her own political future to consider: Despite some statewide successes, the Buffalo Democrat has received poor reviews from New Yorkers in polls, energizing rivals on both sides of the aisle. And with the election for governor on the horizon in 2026, she will have to weigh the benefits of showing strong leadership on climate concerns with the political cost of any policy that exacerbates the state’s affordability issues.
Publicly, Ms. Hochul has embraced the mantle of climate leader, even serving as a chair on the U.S. Climate Alliance, a network of governors committed to reducing domestic emissions. But she has also been known to weaken or even veto environmental initiatives, including congestion pricing and a bill aimed at fighting deforestation, if they were thought to lead to an increase in consumer costs.
Already pressure is building on Ms. Hochul to make decisions.
“My job is to bring resources back to New York,” she said at a summit with business leaders last week, identifying infrastructure, economic development and heat assistance subsidies as programs that rely on federal support. “You would not believe the number of programs that we get federal dollars for, that we supplement, but we really need them. So it’s about having a relationship that’s going to work.”
The election of Mr. Trump, who has dismissed the risks of climate change, seems likely to throw a wrench into the works of many long-planned climate initiatives, including offshore wind projects and the installation of charging stations for electric vehicles.
Already, officials are girding for conflict with the White House over Ms. Hochul’s recent revival of congestion pricing, which Mr. Trump has promised to “TERMINATE.” The tolling plan will fund crucial upgrades to the city’s subways by charging drivers entering Manhattan.
State Senator Liz Krueger, who chairs the influential Finance Committee, argued that Mr. Trump’s posture on climate made it all the more urgent that New York take action.
Before the end of the year Ms. Hochul will need to decide the fate of the Climate Change Superfund Act. The proposal would require polluters to pay roughly $3 billion each year for the harm they have done to New York’s environment between 2000 and 2018. The money — a projected $75 billion over 25 years — would then be used to pay for damage that extreme weather events have wrought to roads, bridges and homes. That cost currently falls on New York taxpayers. Opponents worry that the tax will be passed on to consumers — a premise that some economists have said is unlikely.
Ms. Krueger said that her communications with the executive chamber made her “cautiously optimistic” that Ms. Hochul would sign the bill, similar versions of which were just passed in Vermont and are under consideration in California, Maryland and Massachusetts.
At the same time, Ms. Hochul is mulling the specifics of a key piece of the 2019 climate law that is yet to be instituted. Known as Cap and Invest, the program was created to raise revenue in support of the seismic changes to infrastructure that would be required to avoid the most catastrophic — and costly — effects of climate change.
Under the initiative, New York would set a limit each year on greenhouse gas emissions for the state and companies would pay for exceeding that benchmark. The details of the program could be released before the year is out.
But both critics and proponents acknowledge that some portion of the costs born by companies would be passed on to consumers, leading to higher prices at the gas pump and elsewhere.
Similar programs exist in California and Oregon — both of which have survived efforts to repeal them over price concerns.
Andrew Rein, the president of the nonpartisan Citizens Budget Commission, supports the plan, but says that it is crucial for New York to provide details about the economic and environmental effects of any proposal before it is adopted.
“We really need to go in eyes wide open,” he said. “You know, this is going to be one of the biggest not only environmental, but economic programs that we implement.”
He also has an eye on the state’s looming 2030 climate goal, as well as a somewhat unorthodox suggestion about how to meet it.
“Right now we have goals that are so out of reach that they can be aspirational but not practical,” Mr. Rein said. He suggested that New York abandon the methodology for calculating emissions that had made its law the most aggressive in the country, bringing its goals within reach. Such a shift would not only address the psychic and political tolls of failure, but he argued, would better equip New York to work with other states.
Environmental advocates are predictably unhappy with this kind of thinking. Marc Weiss of the group New York Renews argued that the state should not retreat. “There are all sorts of ways in which, if New York really stepped up to the plate in a vigorous way, it could have a big ripple effect, not just in the United States but around the world,” he said.
Last week, roughly 200 people showed up at a hearing in New York City to urge the New York Power Authority to boost the construction of renewable projects from a planned 3.5 gigawatts to 15 gigawatts, which would put the state back on target to meet its 2030 goals.
One of those speakers was Catherine Du, a ninth grader at Hunter High School in Manhattan who berated the board, and the broader adult world, for prioritizing costs over climate.
“Lowering the cost may be good, but if you are trading off lives and our future, that is unacceptable” she said.
In an interview, Justin Driscoll, the president and chief executive of the power authority, called the 15 gigawatt target a “tall task.”
But was it possible?
Mr. Driscoll paused for the tiniest fraction of a second. “I guess I would say that we are going to do as much as we can to fill as much of the gap as we can,” he said.
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