NY’s Carbon Insanity

Gov. Hochul has fully embraced one of the very worst obsessions of her disgraced predecessor: a war on carbon emissions.

The centerpiece is the Climate Leadership and Climate Protection Act that then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo got passed in 2019 in a blatant bid to boost his chances of winning some future Democratic presidential nomination. This required New York to cut economy-wide greenhouse-gas emissions (from 1990 levels) by 40% by 2030 and 100% by 2040.

Worse, it gives unelected state bureaucrats massive power to cripple fossil-fuel companies and ram through pricey alternative-energy projects over any and all opposition — which allows massive amounts of pay-to-play favoritism.

Worst, the green advocates who favor the CLCP plan estimate the taxpayer cost of implementing it to be north of $300 billion, which guarantees that it will cost even more — or would, if it weren’t inevitably going to eventually fall victim to reality.

Consider: The plan centers on a mandate on ConEd and other utilities that 70% of all power come from renewables by 2030, and 100% by 2040. The 2030 goal alone is impossible, since it requires roughly tripling the amount of electricity generated by renewables — which means vast increases in wind and solar power, since 80% of the state’s current renewable power is hydropower, which reached its maximum decades ago.

That is, the plan pretends that sources that now account for less than 6% of the state’s electricity will somehow produce much more than half of it within eight years.

Not. Going. To. Happen. But New York is going to try, forcing local communities to accept vast wind and solar farms and sending electric bills soaring to pay for it all.

Hochul, of course, prefers to talk about fuzzysounding stuff like her new plan to make highrises in New York carbon-neutral within the next 15 years. The claim is that more than 70% of the city’s carbon emissions now comes from buildings, though that’s mainly because 1) the city has no manufacturing left, and 2) most of its power is generated outside the five boroughs.

And forcing expensive retrofitting to turn buildings “green” is likely to just force them to close, especially since commercial real estate faces a dire shortage of demand thanks to the rise of work-from-home in the wake of the pandemic.

Other parts of Hochul’s CLCP agenda will add more trouble in coming years:

● No natural-gas connections in newly constructed buildings after next year.

● No new gas service to existing buildings, also starting 2024.

● Banning gasoline-automobile sales by 2035. Meanwhile, Hochul (like Cuomo) has vetoed carbon-energy projects on the theory that giving New York other options imperils the green dream.

All this, when the state accounts for roughly 0.4% of global carbon emissions, while the countries that spew the most (China and India) won’t even pretend to do more than start reducing their own emissions sometime after 2030. This is vast pain for trivial gain.