Let’s land this bill of rights
If there is beauty in simplicity, then a proposed environmental bill of rights facing New York voters this coming November is nothing short of drop dead gorgeous, since it is also virtuous.
The 15-word amendment to the state constitution on the ballot reads, “each person shall have a right to clean air and water, and a healthful environment.”
Whether upstate or down, red or blue voters, rural, suburban, urban, polling across the board has been overwhelmingly positive so we have every hope to anticipate passage. Critics, the few I’ve seen, are concerned about the lack of specificity and detail leading to ambiguity. But like our federal Bill of Rights, there is strength and resiliency over time in such a direct and seemingly simple assertion.
Each generation can and will set new limits, qualifications and direction as to what it will actually mean in practice through legislation, popular practice, and ultimately the courts. That’s a plus, not a minus.
This constitutional amendment matters. It’s time has finally come. The late and much missed Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, who died at 73 of a heart attack a year ago, was among the first to promote such an amendment as a basic right back in the ’90s. Typically Richard saw the need for this before many others did.
“It’s a value statement,” notes Peter Iwanowicz, executive director of Environmental Advocates of New York. “It says, this is where we are as a government and as a state. This is what we believe.”
The assertion of a basic right potentially changes a great deal, but at the least serves as a lens that has to be glimpsed through, by developers, by lawyers, by regulators and those issuing state permits and the like.
It’s the logical next step after the passage of clean air and water acts on both the state and federal level. We would be the third state to incorporate similar language in a constitution. Pennsylvania and Montana preceded us by a nearly a half century, and it is not wasted irony that Pennsylvania nevertheless courted a host of environmental problems to air and water by the wide use of hydrofracking, and Montana is legendary for its contaminated mining sites.
But these are different times. We are already well into experiencing the effects of climate change and the relatively new but already potent movement called environmental justice, ensuring the weight of environmental fallout doesn’t fall unequally on the Black, the brown, the poor, the powerless. Climate change and environmental justice are both addressed by the proposed amendment.
Consider how the hellacious
environmental debacle in Hoosick Falls could have been altered if clean air and water was an established basic right, not just legally protected, sort of. Both the town, which failed to bring succor to their own, and the state, with its pathetic initial response to a spectacular public health crisis, would have been held to a higher standard. Not to mention the added legal exposure for the polluter, St. Gobain, particularly if, as new evidence recently published indicates, more potent pollutants may have found their way into the town drinking water than previously thought.
Two weeks ago, the Biden administration announced breathtaking new goals to address global warming, in what amounts to a huge gamble that government can wrench us into a fossil fuel-free economy well before mid-century, and cut climate warming additions in half in eight and half years. Those are probably aspirational benchmarks rather than realistic ones, but let’s see what the president puts in play.
Here in New York, by year’s end the terms of the 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act dictate a scoping or implementation plan be made public on how we are to meet our own ambitious greenhouse gas emission objectives.
The statute dictates we are to reduce our emissions by 40 percent in eight and half years, and 85 percent by 2050.
The path forward is more complicated than we could ever have imagined even a few years ago. Consider, by prime example, what the long anticipated shutdown of the Indian
Point nuclear reactor downstate really means.
Those reactors, even as they were being phased out by popular and political demand, were providing nearly a third of the state’s electricity, free of greenhouse gas emissions.
The slack is to be taken up, also anticipated, by natural gas plants. Natural gas is cheap, better than coal in terms of carbon dioxide emissions, but high in methane emissions, the other greenhouse gas biggie. Now, a report just released by the United Nations states than methane is far more harmful for the environment than previously thought.
But the good news is that methane breaks down in the atmosphere within a decade whereas carbon dioxide takes centuries.
So reducing methane is the darling of emissions reductions in a hurry to meet new political benchmarks —just as New York is getting into more electrical generation with natural gas. How big a step backward this is for our state is yet to be assessed.
No, it’s not going to be easy.