By Tom Ellis
As March ended, residents, politicians and corporations were engaged in a major tug-of-war over New York State’s energy policy while largely ignoring the dire accelerating ecological crisis of the Earth.
During March, the Green Education and Legal Fund reported: “Several years ago, the UN Secretary General warned that the slow action by elected officials in addressing climate change had opened the gates of hell. Two years ago the UN reported that significant parts of the world would become uninhabitable within 18 years. Seven of the nine global life boundaries have already been breached. Global warming is happening faster than most scientists predicted, sea levels are higher than previously thought, and we are rapidly approaching catastrophic tipping points.”
The World Meteorological Organization State of the Global Climate report 2025, issued late in March, “confirms that 2015-2025 are the hottest 11-years on record, and that 2025 was the second or third hottest year on record, at about 1.43 [degrees] C above the 1850-1900 average. Extreme events around the world, including intense heat, heavy rainfall and tropical cyclones, caused disruption and devastation and highlighted the vulnerability of our inter-connected economics and societies.”
As the April 1 state budget deadline neared, Governor Kathy Hochul was advocating for weakening the 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act CLCPA) and for the state to establish a goal of constructing five billion watts of new electricity generating capacity. The governor proposed delaying by seven years the already late issuance of regulations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, delaying actual reductions by ten years, and making it easier to undercount the warming impacts of methane. Opponents countered urging the state legislature to retain CLCPA and enact a carbon tax.
The Alliance For a Nuclear Free New York urged the state to enact a two-year moratorium on any state funding or subsidies for new nuclear energy. Based on a half-century of soaring nuclear construction costs, five thousand megawatts of new nuclear electricity generating capacity would likely cost more than $100 billion dollars, and sent electricity soaring.