By David Wojick
New York Governor Hochul has told the Court her administration cannot write the regulations required to enforce the Climate Act’s 2030 emission reduction targets because they would be infeasible and ruinously expensive to New Yorkers. For all practical purposes, they are actually impossible, so the law must be changed.
The legal situation is explained in my article “New York’s climate law hits the wall” here:
Below is a brief analysis of the impossibility.
The law calls for a 40% reduction in CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions from the 1990 levels by 2030. According to state data, the emissions have already been reduced by 10% leaving a whopping 30% to go in just four years.
Most of the reductions occurred in just two ways that are similar to America as a whole. Foremost, is a switch from coal to natural gas in electric power generation. Second, is the loss of manufacturing, helping to make China the industrial center of the world. Neither of these reduction measures is available or feasible to help hit the remaining 30%.
According to EIA, roughly 50% of New York’s energy consumption is from petroleum. About 80% of this is transportation fuel, especially gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. It is clearly impossible to reduce transportation by 30%. In some cases, electrification is technologically feasible, but it cannot possible be done at the needed scale in just four years.
This is especially true given much of the transportation is from out of state vehicles. New York stands between New England and the rest of America, so it gets a huge amount of through traffic.
In addition, an estimated 20% of New York households heat with fuel oil. Winters are very cold, so we are not about to cut that by 30%.
The next biggest source is natural gas, which accounts for about 30% of energy consumption, not counting electricity generation. Roughly 60% of households are heated with natural gas as are most larger buildings, such as apartments, co-ops, offices and stores. Here again, while electrification is theoretically possible, it cannot possibly be done in just four years.
A big extra complication is that the emissions to be reduced 30% include those out of state emissions created by producing imported electricity and fossil fuels. This might include emissions from things like Texas refineries and Pennsylvania coal fired power plants. New York obviously has no control over these sources.
Here is the Climate Law’s incredible definition of the emissions that need to be reduced: “”Statewide greenhouse gas emissions” means the total annual emissions of greenhouse gases produced within the state from anthropogenic sources and greenhouse gases produced outside of the state that are associated with the generation of electricity imported into the state and the extraction and transmission of fossil fuels imported into the state.”
New York imports almost all of the huge amounts of petroleum and natural gas that it uses. These out of state emissions are likely to be a significant fraction of those that are required to be reduced 30% in just four years.
Plus of course, there are the emissions from electric power generation. Roughly 40% of the natural gas consumed in New York is used to generate electricity. About 54% of the generated electricity is powered by natural gas versus just 15% from renewables, mostly hydro. These numbers can be little changed in just four years.
New York State cannot cut emissions by the required 30% in just four years, so the 2030 target of the Climate Act is impossible. The legislature must change the law, and the Court has given them until February 6 to do so. After that, the Court says it will impose the Climate Law, which would be incredibly harmful.
Stay tuned to CFACT to see how this perilous drama proceeds.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Buy popcorn futures….
Popcorn and beer.
They could still try…. but….. 😉
More good news. Please stop referring to hydro as renewable. Hydro actually works wind and solar don’t. You are giving hydro a bad name associating it with wind and solar. That is not right.
Ultimately Hydro depends on the weather I snow melt off and rainfall.
How much melt and rainfall do those tidal hydro plants need to work “ultimately”?
Tidal hydro is dismissed as being insignificant in comparison to “stored hydro”, which is actually practical, meets the definition of “renewable”, and currently generates about 15% of the world’s electricity (see: https://lowcarbonpower.org/type/hydro ).
Unfortunately that is standard language that I cannot change.
Renewable, in context, means does not deplete the fuel source. Technically a nit, but hydro does deplete its fuel source and has to be replenished by rain or other means.
The legislature must change the law, and the Court has given them until February 6 to do so. After that, the Court says it will impose the Climate Law, which would be incredibly harmful.
***************
If Gov. Hochul isn’t going to crash NY’s economy, then the judge will do it for her.
The law does it.
Yes David, but politicians put laws on the books so they are ultimately responsible for the consequences of a law’s implementation.
At least that’s the way I look at it.
Neither Hochul nor the judge are responsible for passing the law in 2019.
Sorry, didn’t know the law went that far back. I thought Hochul and the current legislature put the law on the books. Again, my apologies.
Maybe the best thing to do is repeal the law and start over….maybe with the state’s support of nuclear like SMR’s and 4th gen nuclear, especially if they stick to their belief that CO2 emissions are a problem.
It was not the smartest thing to do to shut the nuclear plants that they had.
I guess they will have to put everybody in prison. Where is Snake Plissken when you need him?
Directions for The woke climatologist: “you can’t get there from here.“
Sorry but I don’t actually understand the section in bold.
Does this mean some form of NYS control on “greenhouse gas” caused in another state?
I did not think that was allowed in the US.
“Does this mean some form of NYS control on “greenhouse gas” caused in another state?” No, not directly. It means NY is including those emissions in its own accounting. Lunacy.
Will NY end up curtailing imports of fuel and electricity because of someone else’s emissions? More lunacy.
Well, they can always buy billions of dollars worth of carbon credits to make up for the imported “bad” electricity. 🙂
The law does not allow that.
I was joking. 🙂 Not that they might not consider that if it was legal.
I missed the joke because many states allow buying renewable energy certificates to meet reliability % mandates. A huge state level subsidy. But they do not apply to emission reduction mandates like this.
However the climate law also includes a renewables mandate that I have yet to look at. It may be 70% by 2030 also impossible.
That is in the law but it does not pass the constitutionality laugh test
The best way to show that a law is absurd is to apply it exactly as it is written and let the public learn a very important lesson. Their government is ridiculous.
If the legislature balks they will start down that road. So how cut transportation emissions by 30%? Or gas heating emissions? The explicit threats should be enough.
No – worse than ridiculous.
I would imagine very few in government – and it’s certainly the case in the UK – have ever held real-world positions of accountable responsibility, notwithstanding none of them are qualified in science and engineering subjects.
In other words, those we elect to make decisions on our behalf are NOT QUALIFIED to do so, and none of them should be allowed anywhere near national (or state) decision-making on matters of science and engineering.
Yes – much worse than ridiculous.
idealists with no contact with reality
I agree with the point, except the human cost especially for those that had no hand in the law in the first place (even by their votes).
By what convoluted logic does the Climate Act even benefit New York? Other than being able to virtue signal to their heart’s desire, of course.
It allows democrats to claim that they are “Saving the Earth”, a position that that has worked well for them in past elections. It is virtue signaling as you point out, because no “climate action” anywhere at anytime has resulted in an atmospheric CO2 reduction.
Of course, California democrat Gov. Gray Davis was claiming the same thing when the lights went out in 2003 and he was recalled. So there are limits to the insanity.
How delicious. We now have ‘activist’ jurists stepping in at both the Federal and State levels to blatantly oppose or enforce legislation that is either disliked or approved by the Left, respectively. Given that the sole basis of any judicial system’s legitimacy is the public’s perception that it is impartial, I think these people are playing a very dangerous game.
The law is clear. The regs must “ensure” the target is met. The judge is not being activist in this case.
‘The judge is not being activist in this case.’
I disagree. In this case an ‘activist’ group went before an activist judge to get an activist piece of legislation, that also happens to be infeasible, enforced. Had a ‘conservative’ group gone before the same judge to get the same legislation stayed on the grounds that it was infeasible, I’d bet that they would have been told to pound sand, either because they lacked standing or because the legislation was validly enacted under NYS’ constitution.
I knew the first time I read the bill that it was impossible, why could the legislatures figure that out.
From the above article:
Both the technical and practical situations are explained here:
1) Get the value of New York state’s current annual emissions of CO2 as value “A”,
2) Get the value of the wold’s current total annual emissions of CO2 as value “B”,
3) Divide “A” by “B” and retain at least three decimal places to get to the first significant digit.
IOW, if New York state drove its CO2 emissions to zero, it would not make any significant reduction in the concentration of CO2 in the world’s atmosphere.
But undoubtedly there are New York politicians and bureaucrats—likely even a few judges “sympathetic to the cause”— that don’t realize that the air over New York state doesn’t remain over New York state for more than a couple of days.
I added numbers to David’s article here New York’s Impossible 2030 GHG Emissions Target