From Roger Caiazza,
All indications are that Joe Biden is doing everything possible to address the climate crisis. I don’t think a lot of people understand what climate change advocates are really up to to achieve net zero goals. The New York Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) has a net-zero target by 2050. Over the past year, New York’s strategies for implementing this legislation have begun to take shape and offer some clues as to what to expect when these plans come your way.
The New York City CLCPA sets goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, increasing electricity generation from renewable sources and improving energy efficiency. It was described as the most ambitious and comprehensive law on climate and clean energy in the country when Cuomo signed the law. I’ve summarized the schedule and implementation components and provided links to the legislation itself under the CLCPA Summary Implementation Requirements. On my blog, I covered many other aspects of the law.
implementation
When a climate protection plan comes under your responsibility, expect an impressive-sounding implementation process. The CLCPA established the New York State Climate Action Council (CAC) to develop a master plan that would “set out the recommendations for meeting statewide greenhouse gas emission limits” to reduce emissions to over 85 percent, net zero Emissions economic sectors. In order to “give the Council recommendations on specific topics, on the preparation of the scope plan and on preliminary updates of the scope plan as well as on the fulfillment of the current tasks of the council”, the CAC (§ 75-0103, 7) “convenes advisory bodies that have special expertise require, and set up at least advisory bodies for transport, energy-intensive and trade-endangered industries, land use and local government, energy efficiency and housing construction, power generation, and agriculture and forestry. ”
What we got were appointed people who were chosen who they know, not what they know. The CAC itself consists of 22 members: twelve agency heads, two governor-appointed non-agency expert members, six members appointed by the majority leaders of the Senate and the Assembly, and two members appointed by the minority members of the Senate and the Assembly. Since there is a majority of the governor-appointed members, all decisions are ultimately made by the governor’s staff, which means that political expediency will guide the decisions.
The members of the New York Advisory Board are supposed to provide technical support to the CAC: “This membership must be represented at all times by people who are directly involved in matters or who have expertise that should be dealt with by the advisory boards.” However, this mandate has been pushed aside. Background experience and relevant training were not core competencies for the panel members. The social justice concerns of many, including the vocalists, in the panels are more important than affordable and reliable power. For example, the Power Generation Advisory Board has 14 non-governmental members: three members work for generation companies, two for renewables and one for fossil fuels; One member is from the New York Independent System Operator, the state network operator. One member is a consultant for energy and sustainability issues. One comes from an advocacy group for interest payers, and the remaining seven members come from advocacy organizations representing renewable technologies, environmental advocacy or trade unions. The Risk Monger best described them as: “Millennial militants who preach their purpose from the pulpit of politics, listen to a closed group of activists and signal sustainability ideologues in narrowly limited consultation channels”.
What they say and what you will get
Don’t expect the net zero plan to focus solely on solving this problem, despite the rationale that climate change is an existential threat. New York’s climate leadership is tied to protecting the community. In this case, community protection is aimed at “disadvantaged communities who bear environmental and socio-economic pressures and the legacy of racial and ethnic discrimination”. The law states that “government agencies, agencies and institutions, in consultation with the Environmental Justice Working Group and the Climate Protection Council, as far as practicable, invest or direct available and relevant programmatic resources in such a way that a goal is achieved for which disadvantaged communities receive forty Percent of total benefit from spending on clean energy and energy efficiency programs, projects or investments in housing, human resource development, pollution reduction, low-income energy aid, energy, transport and economic development. “To break that down, two groups of motivated advocates will stand over the shoulders of decision makers to make sure they get their share of the pie. I personally doubt that the efficiency of cost reduction plays a role when investing in a climate plan because of such conditions.
In addition, the “climate crisis” is used as a justification for other measures. For example, because New York’s existing permitting process was holding back wind and sun development, another law was passed by Governor Cuomo at the height of the COVID-19 uncertainty crisis last April. The Accelerated Growth of Renewable Energy and Nonprofit Act provides a permitting process that overrides house rules, streamlines the review to allow meaningful environmental impact analysis, and includes “benefits” that would be referred to elsewhere as Payola. The ultimate problem is that New York’s rapid rush for a renewable energy future does not consider the possibility that the implications of the implementation plan could be greater than the alleged effects of climate change.
It is promised that the implementation plan process will be open and transparent. The New York Climate Act website contains links to advisory bodies, the Climate Action Council, the Climate Justice Working Group, resources and events. Materials included include meeting presentations and meeting notes. However, links for submitting comments are buried and there is no way to view public comments. Public comments are posted on a SharePoint site but are not aggregated for panel members, so they may not be aware of the content. I don’t think this process is open and transportable.
Implementation includes workshops to train participants such as the New York Deep Decarbonization Workshop, referenced under the link on Climate Act events. Rather than providing background information to the Council and Advisory Panel members that could be used to inform them about the implementation process, five speakers spoke about their particular interests related to the task at hand but not the New York situation were aligned. As a result, the decarbonization workshop misled people that there were readily available solutions to problems. Nothing in the workshop indicated that the technologies described may not be readily available. Proven technologies that can replace fossil fuels, let alone the fact that nothing described could completely resolve the multi-day winter lull when renewable energy sources are essentially zero.
These periods of very low renewable energy sources are the biggest implementation problem for any decarbonization program. Two studies in New York described this problem. Both have a generic energy supply category, one as a fixed, zero-emission resource and the other as a dispatchable and zero-emission resource, which is a marker for an unspecified but essential energy resource. The potential resources that meet these criteria are limited to magical thinking. Unfortunately, there is no indication that the New York Climate Action Council or advisory bodies understand the daunting challenge of addressing this problem and even fewer have offered plans to address it. Instead, expect there to be fuzzy slogans in response. For example, in response to questions about reliability: “We can manage reliability and stop producing fossil fuels. This should be our north star. “And” We now have a lot of good technology that just needs guidelines to scale. There is no reason to be pessimistic and we have a story that makes us optimistic. “None of these plans provide unequivocal evidence of their plans, only slogans and promises. Of course, if it doesn’t work and the power supply is no longer reliable, proponents are not responsible for the mistakes.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the problem is that the New York CLCPA and Biden initiatives embody the idea that only political will is required to implement measures to meet tough greenhouse gas reduction goals. I believe that all proponents of this policy accept this without question. Explain that there is no evidence to suggest that this is the case, that they do not consider all aspects of the technological challenges and that the costs will in any case be enormous, none of them stand a chance to change the opinion of proponents. However, when the cost of affordability and reliability comes home I’ll be shocked if there isn’t a huge setback.
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Roger has written extensively on the implementation of the CLCPA and other energy and environmental issues in New York at Pragmatic Environmentalist in New York. He has described the CLCPA in general, assessed its feasibility, estimated the cost, outlined supporting regulations, listed the strategies of the scoping plan, summarized some of the meetings, and complained that its proponents keep confusing weather and climate. This is his opinion and not the opinion of any of his previous employers or any other company he has been associated with.
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