New York State passed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) in 2019
By Walter Maxon
Global warming is already causing problems. The five year average inflation adjusted costs of United States weather disasters has increased from 14.2 billion in 1985 to 123.4 billion in 2023, a rate 2.5 times the growth of GNP. That’s $360 dollars a year for every person in the US last year vs. $58 dollars for every person in 1985. You can’t attribute any single event to global warming, but there are many more events, and you can attribute the the vast majority of the increase in damage to global warming.
New York State passed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) in 2019. The purpose of the act was to reduce New York States greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2030 and 85% by 2050, in line with what scientists think emission reductions should be. One of the tasks mandated in the CLPLA was to produce a scoping plan, which outlines the costs and benefits of several paths to that goal. Tom O’mara has in the past claimed that there is no “credible cost benefit analysis” of the CLCPA, but that’s what the scoping plan is. One suspects though that the keyword in the quote is “credible.” The scoping plan can be criticized on a lot of levels. The benefits of decarbonization are too small, and some of them like more walking (probably because of better public transport), which has undeniable health benefits, might not seem like benefits. Like O’Mara says, some of the technologies for the last 15% of carbon reductions are experimental. There are biggest unknowns, in a plan that has a lot of capital improvements over thirty years, and nobody knows what interest rates are going to be. Despite that, I think his real objection is that the conclusions are not what he wanted. The expected costs of the program is $300 billion over 30 years, or about $1.50 a day per person per day, or about 1% of the GDP. The plans expected benefits are larger than the costs, at $400 billion dollars. What Republicans have been saying for years is that fixing climate change would wreck the economy, and they simply can’t accept, that a good faith estimate of costs and benefits found that it wouldn’t. Make no mistake $300 billion is a lot of money, but New York is a big state, 30 years is a long time, and there are plenty of benefits. It won’t break the bank.
The Republican alternative to to the CLCPA starts with putting off the transition for a least 10 years, “giving the state time to develop a sustainable plan to build affordable, clean energy infrastructure.” But if you use using 2050 as the date when New York reaches net zero a much steeper reduction in emissions would be needed, which is a much more expensive program. A very large portion of the costs of reducing climate change is going to be abandoned stuff. Not just leaving oil, coal and gas in the ground, which is what the oil companies and their paid mouth pieces object to, but abandoned cars, pipelines, busses, gas tanks, lawnmowers etc. which is why the CLCPA has a thirty year ramp down, so stuff can wear out. Pushing off the start date just pushes off the end date making the damages the plan is meant to avoid worse. Also, the Republicans want to subsidize a rural natural gas pipeline system. This shows how unserious the Republican plan is. A natural gas system would be a huge capital project that would have to be abandoned, or would force a longer fossil fuel dependence. There is no way that that project would pass any reasonable cost benefit analysis.
He also proposes hydrogen as an alternative to electric vehicles, but hydrogen is already in the scoping plan as one of the 15 percent experimental technologies that he also objects to.
The Republican plan is an attempt to sound reasonable, while putting off doing anything about climate change.
