New York Will Bankrupt Itself Chasing Net Zero Goals Without Nuclear Energy and It Isn't Happening in Time to Meet Them

Guest Post by Roger Caiazza of Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York.

I am very frustrated with the New York Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act) net zero transition because the reality is that there are so many issues coming up with the schedule and ambition of the Climate Act that it is obvious that we need to pause implementation and figure out how best to proceed. This article describes additional reasons to pause implementation.

I am convinced implementation of the Climate Act net-zero mandates will do more harm than good because the proposed green energy programs are crimes against physics. The energy density of wind and solar energy is too low and the resource intermittency too variable to ever support a reliable electric system relying on those resources. If this reality is not acknowledged soon and these policies paused, then the enormous costs of this futile gesture to control the climate will bankrupt the state.

Protecting American Energy from State Overreach

On April 8 President Trump issued an Executive Order protecting American energy from state overreach. The purpose of the order: “My Administration is committed to unleashing American energy, especially through the removal of all illegitimate impediments to the identification, development, siting, production, investment in, or use of domestic energy resources — particularly oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, geothermal, biofuel, critical mineral, and nuclear energy resources.”

New York earned a specific callout:

Many States have enacted, or are in the process of enacting, burdensome and ideologically motivated “climate change” or energy policies that threaten American energy dominance and our economic and national security. New York, for example, enacted a “climate change” extortion law that seeks to retroactively impose billions in fines (erroneously labelled “compensatory payments”) on traditional energy producers for their purported past contributions to greenhouse gas emissions not only in New York but also anywhere in the United States and the world.

But wait there’s more. Trump implicitly addresses New York’s carbon taxation cap and invest plan:

Other States have taken different approaches in an effort to dictate national energy policy. California, for example, punishes carbon use by adopting impossible caps on the amount of carbon businesses may use, all but forcing businesses to pay large sums to “trade” carbon credits to meet California’s radical requirements. Some States delay review of permit applications to produce energy, creating de facto barriers to entry in the energy market.

The first section ends with this: “These State laws and policies are fundamentally irreconcilable with my Administration’s objective to unleash American energy. They should not stand.”

Section 2 starts with this:

State Laws and Causes of Action.

• The Attorney General, in consultation with the heads of appropriate executive departments and agencies, shall identify all State and local laws, regulations, causes of action, policies, and practices (collectively, State laws) burdening the identification, development, siting, production, or use of domestic energy resources that are or may be unconstitutional, preempted by Federal law, or otherwise unenforceable. The Attorney General shall prioritize the identification of any such State laws purporting to address “climate change” or involving “environmental, social, and governance” initiatives, “environmental justice,” carbon or “greenhouse gas” emissions, and funds to collect carbon penalties or carbon taxes.

• The Attorney General shall expeditiously take all appropriate action to stop the enforcement of State laws and continuation of civil actions identified in subsection (a) of this section that the Attorney General determines to be illegal.

That section also notes that the report from the Attorney General is due in 60 days. I imagine that the report will prominently feature New York’ Climate Act as impeding American energy. I think even the fanatics in the Hochul Administration are realizing that Climate Act implementation is going to be ruinously expensive even if it works and there are signs that it won’t. However, admitting this will open the Administration to attacks that they are not trying hard enough. What better excuse to pause than to blame this Trump Executive Order?

Electric Vehicle Mandates are Failing

Paul Homewood at Not a Lot of People Know That published three recent articles describing the progress of electric vehicle mandates in Great Britain. There are no encouraging signs that it is working.

In the first article he documents that the electric vehicle (EV) sales figures are lower than the mandates.

The second article notes that the EV costs are not coming down as projected which no doubt contributes to the poor sales. He concludes with a note describing the government’s long awaited announcement of the new plans to rollout EVs. He notes: “But strip away the waffle, greenwash and gaslighting, and we are left with rearranging to deckchairs on the Titanic to a higher deck, so that they don’t sink below the waves quite as soon!”

There is no way that the EV projections and rollout will be any different in New York.

Green Energy Jobs

Proponents of the Climate Act claim the investments in green energy are creating new economic activity in New York. The 2024 Clean Energy Industry Report claims in a factsheet that “New York’s clean energy industry gained 7,700 jobs between 2022 and 2023”. I recently ran across a well-documented post by JoNova that suggests that this claim is a biased assessment:

It’s not rocket science. If energy costs more, that means we have to make do with less of it, or make do with less of something else. Thus if the government forces everyone to pay more for electricity, companies have less spare cash to employ people. Their margins are tighter, they can’t make and sell as many products. So when we are told the clean energy revolution is creating jobs, is it virtually self-evident that’s a mythical fairy claim.

Her article quotes analyses that show that each green job in Britain costs £100,000 (and 3.7 other jobs); in Spain for every green job created 2.2 jobs were lost; in Italy, each green job cost 5 jobs from the rest of the economy; in Germany, the subsidies far exceed the wages of the jobs created; and in Denmark wind power reduces the GDP. If there is a full accounting of the costs of the Climate Act provided we will be able to calculate the cost per job created. I doubt that New York will perform any better than the European countries when a final job accounting is completed.

Pausing to assess whether the job benefits are real is not the only jobs-related issue. The bigger problem is that the work needed relies on skilled tradespeople and there simply are not enough available to do what needs to be done.

Necessity for Nuclear Challenge

I have frequently written about the dispatchable emissions free resource (DEFR) necessary to keep the lights on during extended periods of low wind and solar resource availability in the Scoping Plan proposed electric system. One major problem is that there are no commercially available DEFR resources. I think the most promising DEFR backup technology is nuclear generation because it is the only candidate resource that is technologically ready, can be expanded as needed and does not suffer from limitations of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. However, it is not really ready to fulfill New York’s needs.

Ted Nordhaus describes the issues that the nuclear industry has to overcome before we can deploy it in New York effectively: “Rebooting the US nuclear sector for the 21st century is a hard problem in the face of an ossified industry, an overbearing and underprepared regulator, liberalized electricity markets that are ill-suited to investing in large public works projects, and competition from both cheap gas and a mature, subsidized renewables industry.”

Clearly, it would be prudent to pause renewable development until DEFR feasibility is proven because nuclear generation may be the only viable path to zero emissions and it will not be ready to deploy as needed to meet the aspirational Climate Act schedule..

#Caiazza #Climate #DEFR #Hochul #NewYork #ClimateAct #Nuclear #NetZero

Roger Caiazza blogs on New York energy and environmental issues at Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York.  This post represents his opinion alone and not the opinion of his previous employers or any other company with which he has been associated. Roger has followed the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act) since it was first proposed, submitted comments on the Climate Act implementation plan, and has written over 500 articles about New York’s net-zero transition.