New York lawmakers have once again blown past the April 1st deadline for enacting a state budget. This week, the State Legislature passed a second budget extender, through Monday, April 13th, to allow more time to negotiate with the Governor on a number of policy proposals. Among the major obstacles is Governor Kathy Hochul’s desire to roll back key provisions of New York’s landmark climate law, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA).
New York’s budget process has long been legendary for its lack of transparency. Governor Hochul has taken this to a new level by not including any amendments to the climate law in her proposed budget language. The only details she has shared publicly about her intentions are in an op ed published in the Empire Report in late March. However, it has been widely known that she wants to weaken the climate law, especially after her administration circulated a NYSERDA memo claiming that the CLCPA, as designed, would cost New York households and businesses thousands of dollars a year more for their gas and electricity.
For PFPI and the other groups that have been watchdogging New York’s law since its passage in 2019, all this feels like déjà vu. Governor Hochul made a similar attempt to weaken the CLCPA during the 2023 budget process. Climate activists rallied and thankfully the Legislature held firm and rebuffed those changes. This year, however, the stakes appear to be higher, in large part due to the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation’s (DEC) failure to issue regulations for reducing climate emissions in the timeframe required under the law, the state’s lack of progress toward meeting the law’s renewable energy targets, and consumer worries about higher energy prices in general.
The CLCPA requires the state’s electricity system to be zero emission by 2040. To attain this goal, it requires 70% of the state’s electricity to be generated by renewable energy by 2030 and only allows zero emission sources to qualify as “renewable energy systems.” This language forced the closure of New York’s last remaining biomass power plants, which were no longer eligible for the state’s clean energy subsidies as a result of the CLCPA.
However in 2023, the biofuels, biomass, and fossil fuel industries persuaded Governor Hochul to press for radical changes in the climate law, in particular with regard to how greenhouse gas emissions were calculated. Arguing that the CLCPA required different accounting systems than the “internationally accepted approach” (words that were echoed in the 2026 NYSERDA memo and the Governor’s op ed), they pushed for changes that, among other things, would:
- change the time horizon for measuring the global warming impact from 20 years to 100 years, thereby giving methane a free pass and making natural gas look much cleaner than it is;
- add anaerobic digestion and forest biomass to the list of eligible renewable energy systems; (the latter a bit of a “Hail Mary pass” to save the ReEnergy Black River biomass plant, which closed later in 2023)
- treat the combustion of biomass and biofuels as having zero CO2 emissions, a ploy well known to PFPI and others that work on bioenergy issues; and
- require life cycle analysis for calculating GHG emissions, using the GREET model, which notoriously undercounts CO2 emissions.
Combined, these changes would have enabled New York to reach its climate targets by not counting most of the GHG emissions associated with energy production and use – in other words, cheating on the math.
Armed with this foreknowledge, and the limited language in NYSERDA’s memo and Governor’s op ed, PFPI circulated a memo to the NYS legislature urging them to reject Hochul’s proposed changes to the GHG accounting methodology in the climate law. In addition, we signed on to a letter to Governor Hochul from 65 scientists rebutting NYSERDA’s claims that the CLCPA’s methodology is out of line with Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) standards.
State legislators are rightly suspicious of the changes that Governor Hochul is seeking to make to New York’s nation-leading climate law. While there have been changes at the federal level and delays at the state level that, combined, may make some of the climate law’s near-term targets out of reach, the Governor’s solution is unacceptable. An extension may be necessary, but cheating must not be allowed.
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Learn more:
On Thursday, April 16th, 2026, from 12-1 pm, New Yorkers for Clean Power will host an online teach-in on the proposed rollbacks to New York’s climate law being debated in Albany. Hear from PFPI’s policy advisor Laura Haight, Liz Moran from Earthjustice, and Eric Walker from WE ACT for Environmental Justice, about the status of negotiations and how they will impact energy affordability, health and the climate. Register here to attend.
