Climate And Energy Provisions In New York's FY 2027 Budget: Making The Coming Crash Worse

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  • New York State’s fiscal year runs from April 1 to March 31, and thus there is a mandate that the budget for each year must be approved before April Fool’s Day. This year they blew right by that deadline. But today, 8+ weeks late, it appears that a new budget has been enacted for what they call “fiscal year” 2027, that is, April 1, 2026 to March 31, 2027.

  • Among several contentious issues that held up enactment of this year’s budget, probably the most contentious involved the provisions relating to energy and “climate.”

  • Our climate law, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019 (CLCPA) had imposed absurd deadlines for eliminating fossil fuels from the energy system. Seven years in, Kathy Hochul, our lightweight Governor, had finally mustered just enough brain cells to recognize that disaster was approaching. But she faces big legislative majorities of her own Democratic Party committed to “climate action.” And of the members constituting those majorities, most are not moderates open to pragmatism, but rather progressive activists committed to total climate purity.

  • How to get out of this trap?

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Ocean "Acidification" -- Another Fake Scare That Won't Go Away

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Ocean "Acidification" -- Another Fake Scare That Won't Go Away

  • Ocean “acidification” is a somewhat unique branch of the overarching climate scare. It differs from other branches of the big scare in that it does not depend on atmospheric heating as the driver of the supposed scary consequences. Instead, with ocean “acidification,” the idea is that increased CO2 in the atmosphere (from the burning of fossil fuels) leads to increased CO2 dissolved in the oceans, which leads to lower pH of ocean water, which then becomes the driver of the alleged scary consequences.

  • Thus, ocean “acidification” can theoretically work as a scare even if the atmosphere fails to heat with increasing CO2 content to the extent predicted by advocates’ climate models.

  • But the ocean “acidification” claim has its own frailties. For advocates of apocalyse, it is a problem that the ocean is (somewhat) alkaline, rather than acidic, and that the change in ocean pH from even large increases in CO2 in the atmosphere is small. Some might even call the change in ocean pH “slight.” And the pH change, even in worst-case scenarios, is not nearly enough to bring it down to the level of neutrality, let alone acidity. The last point is the reason that I have been putting the term “acidification” in quotes.

  • So, how can advocates make ocean “acidification” into something sufficiently scary to motivate lots of people to hate or fear fossil fuels?

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Driving Up The Cost Of Energy While Claiming To Promote "Affordability"

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  • A fair criticism of politicians is that they all lie, at least to the extent of engaging in extreme levels of spin and/or exaggeration to put the best face on their proposals and programs. But some political lies are worse than others, in that they go far beyond mere spin or exaggeration and get into the blatantly counter-factual. In that category are the claims of many of the governors of the Northeastern states that they are promoting energy “affordability.” These lies are particularly consequential in that they involve very large economic effects and vast waste of resources.

  • In late 2025, the talking point of energy “affordability” became a major theme of the successful candidacies of Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill for the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey, respectively.

  • Elsewhere in the region, the governors’ offices were not up for election in the off year, but the sitting governors have equally been talking up their energy “affordability” agendas. See for example, Governor Maura Healey of Massachusetts here on March 16 (“Governor Maura Healey today is setting strong new targets for bringing more energy into Massachusetts and lowering energy bills.”); and Governor Kathy Hochul of New York here on May 7 (“[Governor Hochul] Tackles Energy Costs With Sweeping Affordability Package.”).

  • And yet somehow, it’s hard not to notice that the electricity rates in the Northeastern states are among the highest in the country.

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New York Following Cuba's Strategy For Powering The Electrical Grid

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New York Following Cuba's Strategy For Powering The Electrical Grid

  • Suppose that you are a large U.S. state with a dynamic modern economy. Here’s an idea for a strategy for powering your electrical grid: Intentionally disinvest in your functioning fossil fuel generation plants; fail to maintain them adequately, and let them age into obsolescence. Meanwhile, encourage and even subsidize the development of solar panels as a replacement. After all, solar power is cheaper!

  • Those who follow the policy of New York State with respect to our electrical grid will recognize this description as covering the essential elements of our strategy. In our case, the strategy was mainly enacted into law in 2019 via the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA).

  • In heading down this path, have we checked around to see what other states or countries have adopted this strategy, and how it has worked out? Just asking.

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Trump Administration Gets Strategic With Offshore Wind

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  • Among all the crazy ways that humanity is supposed to “save the planet” by reducing emissions of carbon dioxide, offshore wind electricity generation has to be about the craziest. Between the expense of building and integrating the facilities and the intermittency of the output, the build-out of offshore wind infrastructure has threatened large and accelerating increases in consumer electricity bills.

  • Despite lack of any demonstration of feasibility or cost of running the grid on offshore wind, the Biden administration (with support from Congress) threw tens and hundreds of billions of taxpayer funds into the industry in the form of open-ended life-of-project tax credits.

  • The Trump administration came into office with a known hostility to offshore wind. However, its first efforts to shut down construction on these projects ran into a wall of judicial opposition. But rather than giving up, or embarking on years of appeals with uncertain outcomes, the administration has done some strategic thinking and come up with Plan B. This one looks to me like it will work.

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Two Bets On The Future Of Wind Energy: Who Is Right?

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Two Bets On The Future Of Wind Energy: Who Is Right?

  • Two articles from the New York Times in the past couple of days describe the widening divergence between the approaches taken by the U.S. and China on the subject of wind energy. I apologize that these pieces are behind the Times’s paywall, but remember that I subscribe there so that you don’t have to.

  • On Monday (May 4) the article was about the status of wind energy development in the U.S., with the headline “More Than 150 Wind Projects Stall as Pentagon Delays Reviews.”‍ ‍Tuesday’s (May 5) piece covered the same subject in China, headline “China’s Big Bet on Wind Power Is Paying Off.”‍ ‍

  • These articles once again illustrate the extent to which the U.S. and its people are uniquely blessed in the world.

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