Governor Kathy Hochul stood in the well of a national convention four years ago and told the country New York would lead. It would cut its poison gases by 85 percent before mid-century. It would hold the people she and her colleagues put in office accountable for meeting that mark.
New York passed a law, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, and the law was the strongest of its kind anywhere.
Now Hochul wants to break it.
The governor who built her reputation on climate action is backing away from the only law that makes that action real. The CLCPA, as it is known, is not a suggestion. It is a mandate. It requires an 85 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. It requires the state to actually do the thing it said it would do. And a growing body of research shows that fully implementing it would reduce energy costs, generate tens of thousands of jobs, and save households more than $1,000 a year while creating more than 300,000 jobs by 2035.
But the dirty energy interests hate it. They have always hated it. And now they have found a friend in the governor’s office.
The evidence is not subtle. A fracked gas pipeline called the Northeast Supply Enhancement Project, or NESE, had been rejected three times for violating the CLCPA. Three times. It is suddenly back on the table after Hochul cut a deal with Donald Trump. A climate law you cannot get around is inconvenient when you are trading the future of New Yorkers for a seat at a president’s table.
Recently, 18 activists from a group called Climate Defiance were arrested in Albany, for confronting Hochul.
Those activists said she is gutting the one law standing between New Yorkers and the flooding, the hurricanes, and the heat that is already killing people. Political staffers and armed police pulled them away from her.
“While she is playing footsie with fossil fools and backtracking every climate commitment that matters, we are all choking on the consequences,” the group said in a statement.
“The climate activists are the heirs of the abolitionists, the labor organizers, the suffragists, and the civil rights workers,” said New Jersey progressive Democrat Lisa McCormick. “They have arisen to force the order to reckon with the bill it has refused to pay. Whether they prevail may matter more than the outcome of any other political contest, because the stakes are not merely the distribution of a society’s wealth but the habitability of its world.”
The governor’s office says it remains committed to climate action. But the actions tell a different story. Over a million New Yorkers are two or more months behind on their utility payments, with $1.8 billion in unpaid bills.
The CLCPA, if executed effectively, would address that. It would break the status quo that created today’s energy affordability crisis. Instead, Hochul is turning her back on the law’s mandates and prioritizing the profits of corporate polluters over the needs of the communities she was elected to serve.
Earthjustice, the environmental law firm, says New York must stay on course, especially now, as dependence on volatile global oil and gas markets puts the state and every wallet in it in peril. The CLCPA is helping New York transition out of dependency on gas and a fossil-fuel-reliant grid into a fairer energy system that is efficient, clean and affordable. That is the law’s promise. The governor appears to have other plans.
If she succeeds, the damage will not stop at the Hudson River. New York’s law is the strongest in the country. Every other governor watching gets the green light to do the same. New Jersey has already started.
Governor Rebecca ‘Mikie’ Sherrill, who took office promising a new direction, has issued a series of executive orders that environmentalists say represent the most comprehensive rollback of environmental standards the state has ever seen.
Her transition reports, according to the former New Jersey Sierra Club director Jeff Tittel, read as if they were written by the New Jersey Builders Association and the state Business and Industry Association.
There is not one meaningful mention of clean water, clean air, or safe drinking water. Instead, the focus is on fast-tracking permits and issuing waivers to get around the protections that already exist.
“Privatization is not efficiency,” Tittel wrote. “It is environmental destruction.”
Sherrill has frozen new regulations, including critical rules on PFAS cleanup standards, real flood-protection rules, and toxic site remediation. She has created a permitting czar in the governor’s office, a lobbyist for polluters and developers whose role is to push through permits while rolling back rules and regulations. Permitting, standards, and oversight are taken out of the hands of scientists and placed in a political office where speed matters more than protection. This is not science. It is political science.
She has also signed legislation accelerating progress toward clean energy goals while simultaneously promoting nuclear power, the most expensive and dangerous way to boil water, and natural gas infrastructure that locks the state into fossil fuels for decades. The executive orders raid clean-energy funds to provide short-term bill relief, selling the future to cover the present while utilities continue to post record profits.
Sherrill, to her credit, did rejoin the U.S. Climate Alliance, the bipartisan coalition of governors committed to state-led climate action. But the alliance’s own targets require reducing net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50 percent by 2030 and achieving net-zero by 2050. The actions taken so far in Trenton move in the opposite direction.
“Sherrill’s was the first New Jersey gubernatorial transition in decades to not establish a dedicated, standalone environmental transition committee,” said McCormick. “When she was told that her predecessor set ambitious goals for renewable energy, aiming for 100% clean energy by 2050, and asked what her energy goals are, Sherrill immediately said, ‘I will put consumers first and take on anyone — from special interests to my own party — to drive utility costs down.’ Affordability is a hot topic in politics, but amid the Sixth Mass Extinction, energy is not a matter of price, but of the cost to our planet.”
New Jersey is the most densely developed state in the nation, denser per square mile than China or India. It ranks near the top nationally for building in flood-prone areas and for federal flood-insurance payouts.
Only one of its watersheds meets the Clean Water Act’s highest standards. It faces rising seas, worsening air quality, and growing public health risks. And the new governor’s first moves have been to make it easier to build in harm’s way, not harder.
The pattern is the same in both states. Affordability is the new buzzword. It is used to justify weakening environmental protections.
The danger is even greater when Democrats do it, because Democratic governors are assumed to be pro-environment. That assumption makes the rollbacks harder to challenge and easier to normalize.
Governor Hochul and Governor Sherrill are not Donald Trump, but the outcome of their policies may be the same: weaker oversight and greater risk to public health and the environment.
The activists in Albany were arrested. The activists in Trenton are being ignored. The governors say they are listening. But the people who watch what governors do, not what they say, have seen this before. Freeze the regulations. Raid the funds. Fast-track the permits. Call it efficiency. Call it affordability. Call it whatever you like.
The planet does not negotiate. It only records the result. And the result, if this course holds, is more flooding, more heat, more hurricanes, and a state that promised to lead but chose instead to follow the money.
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