New York Governor Kathy Hochul is trying to delay or roll back the state’s landmark climate law in the name of affordability. I’m joined by activist Pete Sikora to discuss the governor’s claims, what would actually serve affordability, and the larger politics behind this puzzling own-goal of a fight.
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David Roberts
Hi, everyone. This is Volts for March 20, 2026: “The high-stakes battle over energy affordability in New York.” I’m your host, David Roberts.
New York passed its big climate law in 2019: the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, or CLCPA. It was, at the time, one of the most ambitious pieces of climate legislation anywhere in the country: it set hard emissions targets, laid out a path to net zero by 2050, and enshrined environmental justice as a core principle rather than an afterthought.
Six years later, Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul wants to roll it back.
The stated reason is affordability. The administration has pointed to a memo suggesting that complying with the law’s 2030 targets could cost some households upward of $4000 in annual energy costs, a number Hochul has leaned on heavily. Critics argue that the scenario the memo models does not represent the policy anyone is actually pursuing — and that the state was falling behind on implementation long before this supposed crisis.
The legal picture is messy too. A court ruled last year that the state was violating its own climate law, the state appealed, and the whole fight is now tangled up in budget negotiations with a March 31st deadline. About two-thirds of Democratic state senators say they oppose any changes to the law.
My guest today is Pete Sikora, a senior advisor for the nonprofit New York Communities for Change and a longtime state activist. We’re going to talk about what Hochul is actually proposing, how advocates think about the affordability challenge, and what all of this means for state-level climate ambition at the exact moment the federal government has gone full climate nihilist.
With no further ado, Pete Sikora. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Pete Sikora
Thank you so much. I listen all the time and this is, for me, like being on the Super Bowl of podcasts. It’s exciting.
David Roberts
I should have some Seattle Super Bowl joke ready to go, but I’m—
Pete Sikora
Oh, God, it’d be lost on me. I barely watch it.
David Roberts
I know exactly. We’re like two illiterates. Pete, before we get to the mishegoss in front of us, let’s do a brief history review here. In 2019, the big New York bills passed the CLCPA. As far as I can tell, from the jump, New York was falling behind, maybe even before stated targets, and has been falling farther and farther behind. Maybe just give us a brief capsule history of what’s happened since the bill was passed. I know they’ve been falling behind, there’s been some fights in the legislature about it. Give us a little potted history here before we talk about the present.
Pete Sikora
Our governor at the time was Andrew Cuomo, and Cuomo was very Machiavellian, power-oriented. He and the legislature shaped this. The legislature wanted to pass a bill like this and the governor wanted to weaken it. That was the fundamental dynamic at the time. You probably remember the Green New Deal was popping, California wildfires, UN report, big activism. There was a lot of pressure to do something. What popped out of the system was the CLCPA, which was based on legislation called the CCPA. Funny thing here, the governor changed the name to put a stamp on it in a very clear way. That’s the kind of guy he was.
David Roberts
Not full Trump, though. It’s not “CLCPA, brought to you by Andrew Cuomo.”
Pete Sikora
No, no, no. Not “gold lacing and marble,” but the Andrew Cuomo equivalent.
David Roberts
Yes.
Pete Sikora
The bill passes, and effectively it’s a bill that sets requirements for the state government to reduce pollution at a pace and speed that matches the Paris Climate Agreement, the “science” here, to avoid global catastrophe, or at least give us a good chance of that, and also sets a process in place and gives the governor a lot of regulatory power.
The process is essentially convening a Climate Action Council with representation set by the governor and the legislature, who then do a lot of deliberation. They create a plan, then the governor is charged to implement that plan and has regulatory discretion to do a great deal of it by regulation.
That’s effectively it. It says, go hit these targets, and they’re not targets, they’re laws. There’s a process set, and it says, do this process to achieve these targets, take into account all these different factors and do it by 2024, and then go hit those metrics.
David Roberts
Why is New York failing? This is probably a whole separate pod, but the distributed solar stuff, for instance, is going very well. As I understand it, the utility-scale renewables are going very slowly. There’s a lot more red tape and difficulty than we thought. Is there a capsule explanation for why New York is so far behind so soon in the process?
Pete Sikora
The governor just took everything that the Climate Action Council came up with—her own appointees—and ignored it. That’s the capsule summary. They didn’t do the policies, they didn’t do the regulations, they didn’t do the things that would have implemented the law. They did a few things here and there, but by and large, nothing that would have implemented the law correctly was done. Little bits and pieces. For example, the state passed ending oil and gas in all new construction. That’s fantastic. That’s really good.
As you pointed out, distributed solar is a real bright spot. The numbers are moving there. It’s good. The CHPE project is about to connect. That’s a big transmission project from Canadian hydropower to New York City. Very cool too. There’s good things happening. But by and large, the long list of things in the climate plan was not done—90% of it not done. The centerpiece was Cap and Invest. The governor pulled that back at the last second the same way she did on congestion pricing. It’s in this weird limbo where it’s paused now.
David Roberts
That’s what she just did.
Pete Sikora
She did that a little while ago.
David Roberts
As I understand, just to give listeners a little background here, New York’s been falling behind on these targets pretty substantially. There was a lawsuit, the judge said yes, in fact New York is falling behind on these statutory standards and they’re statutory, so you have to do it. What the administration has done, because a big piece of the policy, as you say, was Cap and Invest, which they have not yet put in place, they have not yet designed and put in place.
But what the governor’s office is saying is, “Look, if we had to meet this 2030 target, 40% economy-wide reductions by 2030 after having fallen so far behind, we would have to do a bunch of reductions really quick. We would have to design a Cap and Invest program that was quite severe to get these now quite substantial reductions in a very short amount of time. And doing that,” they say—they released this memo—”doing that would jack up household prices at a time when energy is already getting more expensive.”
A couple of questions about that. One question is they haven’t actually designed and released a Cap and Invest program yet. We don’t know what it looks like yet. They’re telling us that it’s going to be very expensive. But what are you supposed to do with that without being able to see the details of the program that they’re talking about? What is going to be expensive?
Pete Sikora
There are so many layers of flimflam here. The governor’s stated rationale is Trumpy. It’s what the Republicans do to try and jury-rig numbers that show the result they’d like to scare people into. Stepping back for a moment. Bills are going up in New York and pollution has been going down a little bit, but not fast enough. Bills are going up because of the legacy costs of the system and oil and gas prices spiking. Distribution costs are going up.
David Roberts
Is there analysis of this? The administration says one thing, the environmental community says another, another community says another thing. Has someone done a report or an analysis or something that explains why New York energy prices are going up, backed by data and analysis? Do we have a good answer to why prices are going up in New York?
Pete Sikora
The New York ISO has an analysis and the climate plan included tons of analysis. In fact, the regulatory analysis was done for Cap and Invest. The state government modeled out all sorts of scenarios, did very thorough analysis as part of its process. Under the CLCPA, the regulatory structure is ready to go. It’s like the cameras being in place for congestion pricing and then at the last second they say, “No, we’re not turning them on.”
That’s where Cap and Invest was at that point. Everybody was ready to go. There were agencies of people high-fiving each other and then weird internal conference calls and agencies where the chamber, the second floor, the governor’s office says, “We’re not doing this right now, it’s going on hold,” and everybody freaks out.
That’s what happened with Cap and Invest. That was ready to go. But in terms of why costs are rising, the ISO, which is a private entity, as you know, the industry has a very heavy influence there, but it regulates a lot of what happens here. It has, by the way, been stalling interconnection. It’s part of the reason that there hasn’t been enough solar and wind interconnection, because the ISO is bad on that process in New York.
David Roberts
The utility-scale renewable energy is moving notably slower than it would need to to hit these targets.
Pete Sikora
It’s moving slower. Although just keep in mind, CHPE is connecting. Trump has been trying to whack the offshore wind projects, but there are two huge projects under construction right now. The Trump stuff has failed. They’re building it and it’s on track to be built. Two huge offshore wind projects are going to turn on just like Revolution Wind did and Vineyard Wind just turned on. That’s happening. Some positive things are happening.
But by and large, the targets aren’t—we’re not at pace to hit those requirements under the law. The analysis that the ISO did pins the blame correctly on the costs of what’s out there already, the need to maintain it, as well as oil and gas costs, and then they pin renewables costs as very minimal, just a few percentage points. If you’re looking at what makes up the costs, it’s mostly the distribution costs, which are going up because of an aging system that needs maintenance, and the costs of the energy itself. As we know, oil and gas—you have to keep digging it up and transporting it and refining it and bringing it here and then using it.
David Roberts
Yes. And it turns out that closing the Strait of Hormuz with an ill-advised military adventure is not an affordability strategy on the oil and gas tip.
Pete Sikora
It’s a moral abomination and will raise prices enormously worldwide. It’s going to manufacture enormous profits for the oil and gas industry at terrible expense.
David Roberts
I find myself somewhat baffled by Hochul.
Pete Sikora
Same.
David Roberts
Generally, but here specifically, the law’s on the books, you have to do something. She’s got a supermajority of Dems in the legislature who don’t want to change the law. It looks like her ability to change the law is quite limited. From outside it looks like nothing’s really going to come of this. Except now we have on the record a prominent Democrat saying climate policy makes energy more expensive. And if you’re worried about affordability, cut back on climate policy. Which just seems like a disastrous thing to say now in the middle of this national fight on that very question.
It doesn’t seem like she’s actually going to get what she wants. She’s just poking her party in the eye to no purpose. What is going on, Pete? Never mind the morality of it or the substance of it, just politically, just from her own perspective, what does she think she’s doing?
Pete Sikora
It is a real puzzle. The governor is not making good decisions here politically or substantively. Say what you will about Governor Cuomo, but he was very politically astute. He is a crazy man, but politically very sharp. He would take credit for the CLCPA and do events promoting it and all of those things. He went away. Hochul came in. He appointed Hochul and to be frank, I don’t think that Andrew Cuomo wanted a rival as Lieutenant Governor. He did not want someone who was going to outshine him. She is governor now and that’s who we have—a person who has a very moderate orientation and has made a lot of baffling political moves in New York politics. This is one of them.
David Roberts
Part of why they’re baffling is that the moderation doesn’t seem coherent. It’s not a coherent policy moderation. It seems more like a tickle, or something like that. Like an itch she wants to scratch. She needs to do something moderate-feeling, seeming. The policy is neither here nor there. She just feels like she needs to periodically make noises that sound moderate. That’s what I can make of her instinct.
Pete Sikora
It’s a weird philosophy where you think that you’re doing the astute thing if both sides are saying, “This is bad.” It’s sort of laughably odd. But that is how she operates.
David Roberts
Do you think she, in her mind, is angling for bigger things and that is why she’s trying to do this, “Hey, I’m more moderate than my party” signaling? Do you think she’s angling to move on, to move up?
Pete Sikora
To take it in good faith, and I’m speculating here, I think that she believes that we need more gas supply in New York to stabilize prices and develop the economy. I think that she probably believes that. She is listening to the industry scare story of blackouts, price rises, wacky environmentalists. That is what she is buying into. There’s a lot of money behind that story. There’s been millions of dollars in ad spending over the years. There’s phony grassroots groups. There’s a complex of organizations and corporate interests who are pushing that kind of a message. There’s both sophisticated lobbying and then there’s just the moderate scare story that comes from the oil and gas industry in the corporate world.
David Roberts
Let me ask this then. Because of the larger forces you might think might be acting on Hochul, there is the industry, obviously, and money people, but there’s also the national party. As I said, right now, one of, if not the central national disputes taking place is over energy affordability. You’ve got Republicans saying this transition is going to make things more expensive. “We have to go back to fossil fuels to make things cheap.” And you’ve got Democrats saying, “No, you have to do the transition faster. The faster you get to renewables, the faster you make things cheap.” Incredibly important, pivotal national argument going on.
Pete Sikora
She’s stepping on it.
David Roberts
Here she pops up saying, “Actually...” Why does the party let her? It’s so destructive. This is what I keep coming back to. It’s so destructive to the Democratic Party. Do they not care? Do they not have any influence over her?
Pete Sikora
I don’t think they care. I don’t think they enforce discipline. The party lets people do what they want. Here she’s running a Republican set of talk points that steps on the obvious message, which is that Trump is shutting down wind and solar. That’s bad. That’s raising our bills. We need to build wind and solar. We need to do that and fight Trump.
David Roberts
If you’re responding to a crisis, come to the press conference and say, “Trump is causing a crisis.”
To respond to the crisis, we need to accelerate the path we’re on. That’s perfectly good politics.
Pete Sikora
It’s obvious and it’s substantively true. Solar is the cheapest form of new energy. Why wouldn’t you push that? She oddly will say some version of what I just said—that is, Trump is bad, he shouldn’t be shutting down the offshore wind projects—and then she’ll pivot to trying to gut the climate law, and it’s like trying to drive a car stepping on the accelerator and the brake at the same time. It’s very confused.
David Roberts
This gets to another question I have, which I’m also baffled about, which is the climate law does not have enforcement mechanisms. New York’s been behind for years and could just continue being behind. If you change the target, you’re not changing anything substantive that’s happening or any of the needs or any of the driving forces. In other words, what substantively comes from weakening the law? You already don’t have to hit the targets. There’s nothing making you hit the targets. Why change targets? I don’t even understand what substantively would come of this if they did what she wanted.
Pete Sikora
A bunch. It’s both the case that it’s a little bit of ado about nothing, but there are very serious policy consequences if the law does get weakened. Let me talk to those for a moment. First thing, this is a very serious fight. If you’re in New York and you agree that the climate law should not be rolled back, pick up the phone right now, call a state legislator that represents you and tell them to reject Hochul’s proposals. That’s really important.
This is a very serious fight. She is coming full force. She has a lot of leverage in the budget process, which happens completely out of public view. That’s why she’s using the budget process. She’s trying to do very complex policy on the fly in the budget where she has leverage and the legislature can’t argue about it publicly. Then it all gets voted on in a big must-pass bill. She has leverage in that process. The political situation in New York is that the state Senate’s leadership is solid on this issue, particularly some of its leaders have been great. The Senate is holding up right now. We want them to stay firm. Call them and say be firm if you’re represented by a Democrat.
David Roberts
Two-thirds of them are on record, their names are on a piece of paper.
Pete Sikora
Two-thirds of the Democratic caucus, which controls things here in deep blue New York. The Assembly is similarly absolutely dominated by Democrats, but it’s not as strong on these issues. It’s better on other liberal causes, but on this area, the leadership in the Assembly is not strongly ruling out changes. They’re really the body that is up for grabs here. Individual Assembly members—we have to move them right now to stand up, go to the Speaker, say we are not doing this.
To go back to your point, this is a big-time fight. Just like on laws, we have a constitution in this country, the state has a constitution. There are laws. Those things should be followed. Laws are there to be laws. They’re not options, they’re not recommendations. You’re supposed to follow them. The reality of government is that laws don’t always get followed and then people can sue to enforce them. That creates pressure or it should create pressure to follow those laws. So should democratic pressure. We all should be invested in following laws. That’s important as a society.
The governor has been disregarding the climate law and blatantly so. There’s a really nice tracker that the Columbia Sabin Center has where it goes through in detail what she’s done out of the plan and what she hasn’t done. It’s all not done. That’s where the lawsuit came from. It’s that you didn’t do what the law says, which is create a plan, then implement the regulations that are then going to achieve those kinds of results. That’s why she’s under the gun right now, because there’s a lawsuit and there’s a lower court that has ordered her to act. She’s appealed that order.
David Roberts
Can I ask about the lawsuit? I think what they’re invoking in their memo—the administration put this memo out showing that the as-yet-unimplemented Cap and Invest program would drive up prices substantially.
I think what they’re saying is that the court is going to tell them, “You have to hit the 2030 target after all.” Right now I think you’re six or seven years behind hitting that target. Hitting that target by 2030 really would require radical catch-up action. Is that a possible outcome of the lawsuit? Is there a chance that a court could tell them, “No excuses, hit the 2030 deadline by 2030?” Because that really would require a disruptive level of action.
Pete Sikora
There’s no chance that a court will say, “You must use Cap and Invest at a ridiculously jacked-up price of pollution to force the change exclusively to achieve those requirements.” There is zero chance of that. That would never—
David Roberts
That’s what the memo models.
Pete Sikora
Yes, it is a contrived scenario that no one supports. The litigants do not support, nobody supports. The governor would oppose. The court would have to go wildly crazy to issue some sort of order like that. It’s just not in the realm of reality.
David Roberts
Let’s talk about this memo and cost a little bit. After this memo came out, a group of green groups came out with their own analysis showing different results. The core of the disagreement is the memo shows the costs if you did all this through the Cap and Invest program and if you ignore the benefits of the money you raise and just model the costs, there are lots of costs. The counter paper from the green groups is saying, “There’s not just costs, there’s also dividends which you are spending and the spending is getting you various benefits.”
But then I wonder—the costs of raising the prices of fossil fuels hit basically everyone. The benefits of this dividend spending, you’re sending it to some households and funding some projects, but not everybody. This is a classic sort of “everybody’s paying and a smaller class of people are benefiting.” How confident are you that the green groups are substantively right on this affordability question?
Pete Sikora
100% confident. That’s backed up by the governor’s own analysis back when they were actually doing an analysis. They modeled Cap and Invest scenarios and at the kind of prices on pollution that they were modeling and the structure that they created and were proposing and modeling, your average New Yorker benefits. The system gets billions of dollars in spending to go towards things like energy efficiency, solar upgrades to homes, stuff that helps people. Part of the money gets back to people in their pockets in order to give them money. Working people getting money out of that—that is popular.
The idea of Cap and Invest is very wonky and nerdy and if you go into the details, you get really lost in it. We can definitely do that. But the overall picture here is that the kind of program that the agencies were on the verge of proposing, that was modeled out and thoroughly ready to go, is a modest Cap and Invest program that moves the needle towards those requirements and hitting those targets, but is not a total solution to it.
David Roberts
Can I raise a flag about this? This seems to me at least one area where the administration has a point. The modeling that New York State did of the Cap and Invest and the sort of counter modeling that the green groups have just done to counter this memo, both of those took place before Trump yanked all the IRA subsidies. Both of those included a lot of subsidies from IRA for residential electrification, EVs, etc. Yanking all that money out means that New York State will have to spend a lot more of its own money to get commensurate results, which means less going back as dividends.
This is part of a larger point that the administration makes, which is the law was passed in one world, but since then we’ve had Covid, supply chain disruptions, Trump, the OBBB, war — things have changed. Including that is no more IRA subsidies. Don’t you think that does change the financial calculations?
Pete Sikora
It does. The law was passed in 2019 in the first Trump term. The modeling began then, the consideration. New York has had these requirements as executive orders for a long time. Yes, losing the IRA subsidies for clean energy is not good. But the governor has the power to make up for that money. She does not want to. They don’t want to put in the money at the state level to backfill the loss of IRA subsidies. Full stop. That they don’t want to do. They don’t want to do it because she doesn’t want to have to raise that funding.
The most obvious way to raise that funding and a giant issue in the budget right now is to raise revenue from very rich people—to tax the rich. That is immensely politically popular and raises truckloads of money. But she’s absolutely opposed to that as well because that’s her philosophy. She does not want to raise taxes, particularly on the rich. She argues that on everybody. But the proposals are on the rich. She does not want to do a high Cap and Invest price either.
But a modest price gets you a long way. The state government can do a lot of things to hit those requirements. Cut utility bills in the process, rather than raise them. Cut them. That’s what you get from good, smart policy. Reduce pollution. We’ve got four years to 2030 where that’s the requirement. Instead of preemptively surrendering, she should go back and do the things that her own administration said we should do. They did thorough analysis on that.
David Roberts
Is the official position of the green groups in New York that Hochul should just do what she was going to do?
Pete Sikora
That is a funny way to put it. Everybody’s all over the map here. There isn’t some unified position.
I’m not speaking for the litigants. We’re not a litigant here, but we are a player in the politics of this issue. From our perspective, the requirements are there and the state should move to achieve them. There’s lots of ways for them to do that. The obvious way, the centerpiece of what was their plan, is a modest Cap and Invest program, which would move the needle enormously. Then there’s lots of other things that are not giant things individually but that add up hugely. Things like faster permitting, better interconnection, subsidies for low-income New Yorkers to go to heat pumps and energy efficiency, implementing Local Law 97. That’s a city thing, but the state can help.
There’s lots of moving parts here in a complex picture that the state can improve on. We’re going to come close to 70% renewable energy by 2030, a lot closer than we are right now because offshore wind is going to turn on. CHPE is going to connect. It’s not going to be completely out of reach. It’s going to be not that far off. The governor’s own energy plan, which frankly was written by the gas industry—I know some might take exception to that, but that’s our take. Even that plan says, “Look, we can move it out to 2033, 2034, on 70% renewables for the grid.”
We’re making progress and there’s no reason to weaken the law right now and roll it back, which would then cause some serious policy consequences, but mostly would be a big political signal to the agencies, to the courts, to everybody—undermine the Democratic Party—that New York State is pulling back because Governor Hochul has decided it. She made the legislature back down. That would be a disaster.
David Roberts
They’re pulling back because, whatever she’s actually saying, and if you parse her words, she’s mostly saying good things, but just in an order or in a way such that they amount to something bad. It’s a weird thing she does.
Pete Sikora
It’s a little baffling, but it is utterly serious. She delayed, for example, implementation of the All-Electric Building Act, which says that all new construction has to go—with some exceptions—but all new construction has to go off fossil fuels and to heat pumps. New York City, we won that law. We passed that in New York. Local Law 154, it’s been in effect for years. No complaints. It’s happening in New York City. But at the state level, Governor Hochul by fiat decided, “I’m just going to delay this a little bit.” Not much, but a little bit.
David Roberts
This is what I’m saying—whatever her actual words and whatever the actual facts in New York, the vibes-based outcome of all this is going to be, “They admitted it.”
That’s what you’re going to read in right-wing media.
Pete Sikora
Look, you’re already reading it.
David Roberts
“They admitted it,” that their climate policy is driving up prices and if you want to control prices, you trim back climate policy. That vibes-based outcome to me is almost worse than any substantive outcome in New York. That’s such a crucial fight right now. It’s such a pivotal fight right now. Let me ask you this, Pete. Here’s my real depressed—this whole issue kind of makes my stomach hurt because I know you’re confident and I know you have to be confident by the virtue of your position, but I don’t feel super confident that I know what would bring down energy prices in New York.
Here’s what I worry about. My worry is that energy prices are going up in New York for many of the same reasons they’re going up in lots of other places, which are large structural forces. The fact is, whether you cut this law off at the knees like Hochul wants to, or pursued it full bore, in either case, it’s probably the case that energy prices are going to continue going up in New York. My worry is who gets pegged with that, who gets saddled with that. My worry here is you have a Democratic administration implementing a climate law and prices are going up. It is trivially easy to tell that story.
If then the governor says, “This is too much, I want to pull back,” and the legislature forces her to not pull back and to go full bore and then prices continue rising, that’s the worst of all worlds. The terrible political story from her, terrible outcome. I almost feel like energy prices are going up regardless. At this point half the game is about who gets blamed for it. Is that too depressed?
Pete Sikora
No, this is a hard subject. It’s no fun and we all get angsty about all of this and rightly so. There’s some really big stuff going on here. Your episode on the mid-transition is instructive on this point. There’s a big problem coming here of increasing energy costs. Democrats should not fall for Republican talking points and start to blame themselves for it. That is incredibly stupid.
David Roberts
That is their nature, Pete. That is their essence. It is the essence of liberaldom to hate and self-loathe.
Pete Sikora
That’s right. We will argue against ourselves really eloquently, but the point here is that we should full force make the right argument, which is that solar and renewables and batteries are rapidly improving. The costs are dropping. They’re already price competitive, if not better. That’s where we should be going, not stopping those things. That’s what Trump is doing. Hochul is arguing the other way in part here, which is really bad.
But I’ll just say that, yes, I do feel confident that solar and batteries are going to be lowering costs. Broad brush, following the climate law tends to lower costs as opposed to increasing dependency on oil and gas and that legacy system. We have to push in that direction to lower prices and to reduce pollution and ward off global catastrophe. We want to create lots of good union jobs. There’s a lot of really good things there for a competent messenger and governor to sell. This is a big fight. What I’m definitely not confident of is us winning on the April 1 budget deadline and turning back the governor’s attack on the law.
David Roberts
This was my next question because it seems like, just from reading around on media, the Democratic legislature is pretty foursquare against Hochul on this. Am I overreading that? Do you think she could actually win this or get something out of this?
Pete Sikora
Yes, I think we’re poised on a knife’s edge right now. This is intense. Make no mistake, the Senate is in a strong position. We want to hold them in that position. The Assembly is more up for grabs. But in the end, the governor has leverage in the budget process and she holds the cards in that process. Three years ago, she made this very same move with six days of intense fighting inside of the budget where she tried to gut the climate law back then. That was a very intense fight. You remember that. That happened. We fought that off.
The royal “we” here—of all the groups, activists, legislature, it wasn’t just our organization, of course—the movement rose up and fought back. The legislature fought back an intense several days and we stopped her from amending the law at that time. Now she’s coming again with a lot more fifes and drums and preparation and advertising and foreshadowing. Now she’s coming intense. We really have to step up again and fight back.
The legislature does seem to be in a strong position writ large, but we need them to stay very strong because a two-on-one dynamic is a bad dynamic for us. If the governor is able to flip the Assembly to her position and it’s the Assembly and the governor versus the Senate, that’s not a good situation. We want it to be the Senate and Assembly standing together saying no. The first thing for them process-wise is, “You’re going to rewrite the law in the budget.” That’s crazy.
David Roberts
Can you even do that? Is that legal?
Pete Sikora
It totally is. They can do whatever they want to attach to the budget and they routinely put stuff in the budget that is really more legislative. The legislature doesn’t like that because it reduces their power because of a lot of boring reasons that we don’t want to go into. The governor has a lot of power here and the legislature doesn’t. The legislature on a process level should not want to do things hurried in the dark because that produces bad substantive results. These are highly caffeinated staffers rewriting policy on the fly. The budget is incredibly complicated. They should not add another incredibly complicated issue.
David Roberts
Do you know? Do they know? Does anyone know what exactly she wants them to do?
Pete Sikora
She has not unveiled that, but we expect that in the next couple of days. As we’re recording this, there’s a little bit of news breaking that she is going to put her proposal out there for what it will be. We don’t yet know what it’ll be, but we have some idea.
However, that’s going to be a proposal that will be in an opaque budget discussion between three leaders of three chambers who make these decisions on the fly in the context of an over $200 billion budget with incredibly complicated items. On a process level, it’s bad for the legislature to do this in the budget and politically it’s very bad for them and for us as well. They should get it out of the budget.
David Roberts
Would you venture a guess as to what she actually wants to do? Would it just be a matter of delaying targets or do you think there’s more substantive—
Pete Sikora
I think the gas industry—
David Roberts
Do you think she wants to go after the guts of the bill or the gas parts?
Pete Sikora
She probably wants to do two things. What she’ll propose, it’s unclear and it might not be what I’m speculating about here, but she may want to change the accounting of how methane is tracked, which would change the accounting to make gas a lot cleaner.
David Roberts
Because New York does things differently than other states, measures climate gases differently than other states in a way that makes its performance look worse, as I understand it. How far are you to the 40% goal—the 2030, 40% goal—depending on how you measure, it’s either like 12% there or 25% there. It’s a pretty big difference, this measuring question.
Pete Sikora
It is. We think that New York has it right and so do other places that use this accounting method. Changing the accounting method now is really just a math trick to make yourself look better. That’s the way she wants to go here—a trick that makes it look like it’s a lot cleaner than it actually is.
New York measures the impact of gas on a 20-year basis rather than 100-year basis methane. It goes away much faster than CO2. If you measure methane on a 20-year basis, it’s very polluting. If you measure it on a longer basis, it’s much less polluting. I don’t know about you, but I’m going to be around in 20 years and I think that’s a good measurement. That’s a lot of time —
David Roberts
But the substantive upshot of that is about gas. Mostly it’s about the gas infrastructure and how much it’s emitting.
Pete Sikora
Correct. That is why the gas industry is so against the law and wants to get out of it and change this accounting because it means that state policy pushes people off of gas. When we talk about gas here—your listeners know this—but we mean gas as in fracked gas or natural gas, the kind in the air, not gasoline as in for your car. That’s oil-based. Gas here is much more polluting under New York law than in other places. That is a very reasonable way to measure things.
What’s unreasonable is to change it on the fly in the budget and rewrite state policy that way. On the fly. They shouldn’t do that. That’s one way she might come after it. The other way would be that she might just change the requirements of the law and say, “We’re not going to hit the 2030 target, so let’s make it 2033 and call it even.”
David Roberts
I cut and pasted this quote from Assembly Member Anna Kelles. She said all they’re trying to do by changing the timeline is to change the psychology, not the reality. She said, “Leave the pressure on. Meet it or fail to meet it, but don’t take the pressure off just because it will make you feel better.” Changing the target to 2033 does not change anything substantively. It literally is just meant to make them feel better about how far behind they are. Doesn’t change anything else.
Pete Sikora
Democrats should not psych themselves out on this issue. Why would you play a weaker hand? Play the hand that you’ve got, which is immensely powerful, which is to lower bills through going to clean energy, energy efficiency, all of those things like distributed networks, demand response, solar—these things are great to go. Do them, do them big time.
David Roberts
About the gas, I wanted to ask you a gas question. This is more of a macro New York state question, but implied in the targets is a phase-out of the gas industry in New York. Nobody in the United States wants to talk about that, even though it is implied in several state laws.
Someone sent me a document from the Netherlands from the Dutch government where the Dutch are like, “Hey, our targets imply the phase-out of the gas industry. We have to do this, let’s do it in a planned, rational way, taking chunk by chunk, neighborhood by neighborhood, so we don’t strand people on the network,” etc. Thoughtful, above board, on purpose, eyes wide open.
I’m not naive enough to think that we can ever get there, but backing into it and just, as the mid-transition episode illustrated, just backing into it and letting the market do it seems like the worst way to get off of gas. It seems like the way to get off of gas that is going to maximize the pain and political difficulty of it. Is there a discussion either in the law or in New York generally about simply phasing out the gas network and how to do that or is everyone still in denial about that or looking away from it or talking around it?
Pete Sikora
No, it’s absolutely front burner in the policy debate in New York and has been the focal point of a fight over a bill called the New York HEAT Act, which we supported and the world of green groups supported as well. We’re a community organization, housing organization, we focus on jobs, we’re a multi-issue organization. We saw the benefit of the New York HEAT Act as exactly what you’re describing—a planned step-down transition of the gas network to benefit everybody involved and not make it an insane death spiral effect where our members in low-income communities of color who cannot afford the upfront costs of going to heat pumps and energy efficiency get stuck on a gas network that is declining in an unplanned way and costs spiral out of control.
David Roberts
Which is 100% what will happen if you just let it happen.
Pete Sikora
That’s right.
David Roberts
It’s not a possible outcome, it’s guaranteed. It’s already happening.
Pete Sikora
It’s already happening. I live in an affluent community and I can see all around me people, my neighbors are installing heat pumps and you can see it’s happening and they can afford the upfront costs of just the nicer equipment. It’s better, it’s nicer, that’s why people are doing it. It also has green benefits, people like that. The point here is that death spiral is starting of the gas network.
A rational society would do what rational societies ought to do, which is plan and think seriously about it. That’s what the New York HEAT Act would have done and the governor wouldn’t support it. That’s why it didn’t pass.
It’s Governor Hochul who is carrying the water for the gas industry to maintain its profits as long as possible. What she’s doing is stymieing things that will damage the gas industry’s profits at everyone else’s expense. That’s what is happening policy-wise and politically. Of course she dresses it up very differently.
David Roberts
As you said, maybe she’s been surrounded by these people and in the group chats with these people and has been convinced that gas is cheaper.
Pete Sikora
That very well may be the case. That’s what I do think has happened—the industry scare stories have gotten to her because that’s her world. She believes serious-minded corporate lobbyists and people that they bring to meetings and they say things like, “You must approve the Williams pipeline or New York City is going to lose power and there will be rampant blackouts.” Us nice green people dispute that, but that is a scare story that someone who is of her political persuasion is going to react to.
I think that she believes that all this green stuff is just moving a little bit too fast. We have to pause it. Everyone’s over-emotional about it, but sober people say we have to just slow the thing down. The reality is no, we don’t have to slow the thing down.
David Roberts
That is such an easy story to tell. It’s such an easy message to convey. The ground is already seeded for that. To have a prominent Democrat just watering that soil is insane. Prognosticating politically, if Dems in the legislature hang together and refuse to make changes in the law in the budget process in 2026, is that it? Or does Hochul have other cards up her sleeve that she could try to use to change the law?
Pete Sikora
She does.
David Roberts
Or do you think if they fight her off this time, will she get the picture?
Pete Sikora
It’ll be an enormous victory for our side if we fight her off. The psychology will be that she got a big rebuke from the legislature on this issue and has been told firmly to go forward. That will be very valuable. Conversely, the opposite happens if we lose.
She wants to continue to fight for the gas industry, she’s opened a Public Service Commission proceeding, or theoretically the PSC has opened it. In reality, the gas interests are attempting to get the PSC to rewrite the electric grid requirements of 70% renewables and push that off through regulation by arguing that the emergency powers that are in the law, that if the ISO and the PSC make reliability determinations, they can change those targets.
That’s going to be a very bad move and presumably will trigger litigation. I’m not an expert on that, but that’s one of the cards that she’s opened up. That would affect the electric grid renewables target, but would not affect the law’s requirements overall. The electric grid is a relatively small proportion compared to everything else of the pollution coming from New York. That’s one card that she can play.
Of course she can continue to stall everything. For example, she would not support the Clean Path transmission project, which would bring renewable energy from upstate New York into New York City where the grid is dirty—that is hugely needed. But she won’t support it.
David Roberts
Because?
Pete Sikora
Because the incumbent gas industry intervened in that process and argued forcefully against it. It also costs a lot of money to build transmission.
David Roberts
She’s not going to say the gas industry didn’t want me to build this. What does she say?
Pete Sikora
She doesn’t say that, but that’s right. She opposed it.
David Roberts
Is there a substantive, even a pretend substantive argument against it?
Pete Sikora
The governor’s people on her behalf on Clean Path will say, “We really need to consider transmission much more carefully and not impose unnecessary costs. We need some more time to model this and think it through. This is moving too fast.”
David Roberts
Transmission moving too fast.
Pete Sikora
That’s it. That’s what they’ll say. They will say costs have increased and therefore we recognize we really need to think this through. The worst thing you can do is slow down. You can’t slow down here. You have to go and actually transform the system to clean energy. That’s where the savings are.
David Roberts
Many things can be said about long-distance high-voltage transmission, but “it’s moving too quickly” is not one of them.
Pete Sikora
That’s right. They argue there’s a complicated proceeding on this. The bottom line is that us, the AFL-CIO, the green groups, the City of New York, lots and lots of entities were in support of Clean Path. It seemed to be on a glide path—no pun intended. Then, like Cap and Invest, the governor just killed it. She paused it.
David Roberts
What is this with congestion pricing too? What is that instinct? With congestion pricing, I was like —
Pete Sikora
It’s baffling.
David Roberts
The thing is already going to happen. You can’t make it not happen. All you can do is insert a bunch of messages that are bad for you and your party and your policy into the discourse and then the policy is going to happen anyway. All bad. Again I come back to, what upside? What is she getting? What is she getting from doing this over and over again? We’ll work out a big policy, she’ll come up to the brink of it and then she’ll panic and try to kill it at the last second. She looks indecisive.
It’s making liberals hate her. It’s making her own party hate her. She’s not successfully stopping any of the things. Republicans don’t love her. Who is this for? Who are you performing for? I come back to that again and again.
Pete Sikora
I don’t know. I think it’s in her head where she believes moderation on these issues is the right way to do it. I’ll just say any Democratic governor is better than any Republican governor. But Hochul is the worst of the Democratic governors.
David Roberts
It’s like she has a Washington Post centrist columnist — in her head.
Pete Sikora
Yes.
David Roberts
Following her around, telling her that the way you appear serious in US national politics, the way to establish seriousness and grown-up-ness is to punch the left. To tell the left they can’t have something that they want. That is a conviction these people carry around that is borderline theological, I think. It’s immune to empirical analysis.
Pete Sikora
That’s right.
Let me add some hard politics also to this. Ron Lauder spent $11 million in a super PAC buy against her in her last governor election. He supported Lee Zeldin. He spent those $11 million—conservative, activist, billionaire type—and he spent them for Zeldin and against Hochul. That damaged her quite a bit. It’s a lot of spending. He did it in large part—and there’s reporting on this—because he was really angry about the South Fork offshore wind project that’s now up and running off Long Island. He has a mansion, there’s some construction that happened near him. He can’t even see the turbines. The cable construction just—
David Roberts
It’s always dumber.
Pete Sikora
It’s always dumber than you think. There’s a nonzero chance here that Kathy Hochul is thinking, “I don’t want Ron Lauder to spend $15 million against me,” number one. Number two, she paused Cap and Invest right after the New York Post got wind of the fact that it was about to happen. They put it on their cover. They lampooned her. She immediately pulled it back after it was the New York Post cover. That’s the right-wing media outlet that’s the strongest in New York. It’s like an unregulated super PAC. That whole world is part of her world in a way that doesn’t make sense for a Democrat, particularly in a blue state. What do you care what the Post says?
David Roberts
I know, it’s crazy. She’s not in a garage in middle Pennsylvania, dealing with the mythical swing voters.
Pete Sikora
She defeated Zeldin by over six points in the end. It wasn’t close. Now Trump’s in office. Democrats are super mobilized. She’s going to annihilate Bruce Blakeman.
David Roberts
Everybody wants someone to fight Trump. Everybody. Here’s a place where you already have the weapons in your belt. You already have the law. He’s jacking up prices. You have the tool to fight that and keep them down. Instead of that obvious fight, the Washington Post columnist in her head is telling her, “Just being a Democrat and fighting for Democrats against Republicans is boring. Nobody cares. That’s the—no one in D.C. cares about that predictable, boring story of just doing a good thing that you were elected to do.” “You have to be counterintuitive,” and it’s all so dumb.
Pete Sikora
That’s right. I think that Democrats win when they show fight and backbone and that’s the way that they ought to fight and present themselves, that’s the best way to go.
David Roberts
The polls on that question—do you want fighters—are unambiguous. Maybe 10 years ago, 20 years ago, but now, that’s what everybody wants.
Pete Sikora
There is no median voter that you somehow get by turning the dial slightly more to the right. Whatever you gain from some mythical median voter who is paying attention to exactly how you’re parsing your beltway speech, you lose because people like you and me are like, “What is going on here? I can’t believe this.”
David Roberts
I’m picturing the rural mechanic swing voter being like, “Oh, well, 2033. Oh, well, yeah, now I’m voting for you. Okay, then, yeah, 2030 was—”
Pete Sikora
What happens is, you don’t actually get Republican votes, even if—and you don’t need them, not in New York—but you don’t actually get those votes by stepping on your own message. They go for the real thing. They’re going to vote for the Republican. They’re not going to vote for Kathy Hochul. They want the real thing. That’s what those people want.
David Roberts
I could yell about this with you for many more hours. Final question. If she fails at this and doesn’t manage to change the law, you’re still in a position where you’re way behind. New York State is way behind its climate targets. Even if you go forward with the law, that’s not a particularly good advertisement for climate policy either. If she’s forced to live with the law, do you think she will finally turn to doing the things that would make the law a reality? The things that she has not been doing? Do you think there’s a prospect of catching up if the law stays intact?
Pete Sikora
Yes. We would be able to catch up because we would avoid the very dark scenario of falling behind even more. I do think that it would be a very strong signal from the political system to the governor that she should get cracking. There’s a court case, and that court case is going to be decided after the legislative session is over. If the legislature amends the law, I can’t imagine that a court wouldn’t see that and start to consider that maybe we should pull back. That will be avoided at a minimum.
The forces that are there for more clean energy: the economics are changing, the politics are fundamentally blue here. She should grab the opportunity that we’re talking about, not join the Republicans. This really is a close fight. People should pick up the phone and call their state legislators right now if you’re in New York and say, “Do not roll back the climate law. We do not want higher utility bills. We do not want more pollution. Turn back the governor’s proposal.”
David Roberts
Also, if you were of a mind to make the argument that fossil fuel dependency is the reason your prices are so high and you want a visceral demonstration of that, lucky for you, the Strait of Hormuz is closed and all of global oil and LNG is about to spike through the roof. If you want to point and say, “Look, look how expensive they are, let’s get off them.”
Pete Sikora
You could even pay for all this.
David Roberts
Never a better time, right?
Pete Sikora
You even could pay for it with a windfall profits tax. Who likes the oil and gas companies? Nobody. Everybody hates them. Go beat up on them, Democrats. They’re not your friends.
David Roberts
We’ll leave it there. Good luck to you. What a frustrating state. What a frustrating Democratic Party you’re dealing with.
Pete Sikora
The fight is great. Thank you so much.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out especially to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes me and my guests sound smart every week. It is all supported entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at Volts.wtf, leaving a nice review, telling a friend about Volts, or all three.
Thanks so much and I’ll see you next time.
