More NY ‘Climate’ Lunacy
Gov. 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” for emissions and added new requirements of their own.
That’d make it 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 renewableenergy projects, Senate legislation would force the agency to shut down all its fossilfuel-burning energy plants and build or buy power only from renewable sources by 2030, just seven years away.
Yet 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.
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. As Bjorn Lomborg notes, the average person in 2100 would be “only” 434% better off if the world does nothing more, instead 450%.
That’ll be something fun to think about when the lights go out.