Gov. Kathy Hochul on Friday moved to alter and delay the implementation of New York State’s landmark 2019 climate law, which calls for gradually decreasing greenhouse gas emissions by certain deadlines.
Those proposed adjustments include delaying issuing the regulations for enforcing the law — already two years late — until 2030 and amending how certain emissions are measured.
“We need more time,” Ms. Hochul wrote in an editorial that was published on Friday morning in The Empire Report, a news site that covers state politics. “So much has radically changed since the Climate Act was enacted, necessitating common-sense adjustments.”
The proposal, anticipated by lawmakers in Albany, comes late in the budget negotiation process. Although Ms. Hochul has considerable leverage to push for her agenda during this time, members of the Legislature will need to approve the final budget, which would include changes to the climate law.
Ms. Hochul said that supply chain issues brought on by the pandemic, as well as inflation, tariffs and the Trump administration’s opposition to offshore wind and solar power, all factored into her decision. And she cited how the ongoing energy affordability crisis, which has been exacerbated by skyrocketing oil and gas prices stemming from President Trump’s war on Iran, has resulted in pocketbook issues across the state.
“I cannot deal in hypotheticals and aspirations when I have to govern a state where my people are suffering, and I have to alleviate that pain,” Ms. Hochul, who is seeking re-election, said at an event sponsored by Politico, the news organization, earlier this month.
Since the unrest in the Middle East began on Feb. 28, gas prices in New York have increased about 21 percent, while diesel prices have increased about 28 percent, according to a statement provided by Ms. Hochul’s office. While the Climate Act is not the cause of the high utility rates that consumers are facing, energy prices will continue to soar if the law is not amended, the governor said.
Activists and a growing number of legislators are alarmed by the governor’s decision, which has the potential to delay notoriously sluggish budget negotiations even more than usual. They argue that China and Pakistan — and even some U.S. states, including Texas — are ramping up renewable energy projects because they are cheaper and faster to develop than fossil fuel ventures and can serve as a bulwark against fluctuating gas and oil prices.
Ms. Hochul, whose move has the support of some moderate Democrats and business corporations, said that she needed more time to tweak the law for the realities of 2026.
When the climate law became official in 2019, it directed the state to issue regulations on reducing emissions by January 2024. The rules never surfaced, prompting climate groups to sue the state. Regulations are the engine of the Climate Act, said Rachel Spector, the deputy managing attorney for Earthjustice, an environmental nonprofit that is representing plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
“It is what gives teeth to the law,” she said. “Without it, there is no meaningful way to ensure emissions reductions.”
Last fall, the climate groups won their lawsuit against Ms. Hochul, who was told by a judge to publish the rules by February. She has appealed that decision, now hoping to extend that deadline by four more years. If the governor is successful, the 2019 law will not be enforced until 2030, the same year the state was supposed to have reduced emissions 40 percent.
In defending her proposed changes to the climate law, the governor cited a memo from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, a state agency she oversees. If the state began penalizing polluters, the memo said, the cost of those fines would be passed on to oil and gas customers, with some paying about $4,000 more in utility bills each year.
Earthjustice disputes the estimates that appeared in the memo, saying in a statement that the figures “do not reflect the costs for any realistic policy that the state would actually pursue,” which should include rebates and subsidies for energy customers. The nonprofit added that the state used an exaggerated figure for penalizing polluters — $120 per ton of carbon that is discharged — while California, which has implemented a climate law, charges about $35 a ton.
A core idea of the law as it stands, and one that many argue is central to its success, is to charge polluters for excess emissions, with the proceeds paying for renewable energy and energy-efficiency projects, as well as programs that help energy customers pay their bills.
But the governor is concerned that the costs of these polluter fines could be passed onto consumers unfairly, so she is moving to change how emissions are counted from methane, a primary component of natural gas, which is the state’s largest energy source.
Methane, a potent gas, traps exponentially more heat than carbon dioxide over a shorter time, but it also disappears from the atmosphere faster, within a few decades. Carbon dioxide, in comparison, can linger for thousands of years.
The law stipulates that methane emissions be measured every 20 years, before they mostly vanish from the atmosphere. Ms. Hochul would like to extend this timeline to every 100 years, which means that much of the methane could go undetected, experts say. The governor attempted to make this change three years ago, but backtracked after being met with an outcry. This month, more than 65 scientists from around the world cried out again, in the form of a letter that did not mince words.
The 100-year time frame “does a terrible job of representing the climatic damage caused by methane,” the letter said. Methane is more than 80 times more destructive than carbon dioxide over 20 years, the scientists said. But over 100 years, they continued, methane’s presence in the atmosphere — and the damage it creates — is not as easy to detect.
Ms. Hochul said that no state other than Maryland had such strict rules on methane and that New York could not afford to be a trailblazer in this regard. “No matter what we do, we’re always going to fail because we jacked up the standards so high on ourselves,” the governor said.
But the scientists had a message for Ms. Hochul: “This is not the time for New York to back down.”
Hilary Howard is a Times reporter covering how the New York City region is adapting to climate change and other environmental challenges.
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