NY Renews Coalition Calls on the Public Service Commission to Halt Toxic, Expensive, and Unnecessary Fracked-Gas Northeast Energy Supply (NESE) Pipeline
***FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE***: September 18, 2025
Contacts: Marie Scarles, marie@nyrenews.org, (646) 389-8429
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As the Public Service Commission considers approving plans to purchase gas from a fracked gas pipeline off the coast of New York City, NY Renews Executive Director Stephan Edel issued the following statement:
As the Williams NESE Pipeline rears its head once more—an expensive, toxic, and unnecessary project and denied not once, not twice, but three times in the past 8 years by NY’s Department of Environmental Conservation—the NY Renews coalition calls on the Public Service Commission to vote no on National Grid’s long-term gas plan and halt this project in its tracks.
The NESE Pipeline threatens to poison the waters off of Long Island and New York City, the most populous region in the country, and it directly contradicts New York’s Climate Law, which demands that NY rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, launch the transition to renewable energy, and protect frontline, Black, Brown, Indigenous, and low-income communities—not fast-track projects that would destroy our waters and our health.
Governor Hochul claims she’s delaying progress on the Climate Law to protect working people’s wallets. However, if her Public Service Commission approves National Grid’s long-term plan, that action tells a different story. In reality, it’s working people who will bear the cost: polluted waters and higher heating bills—$3.2 billion over 15 years—to fund the pipeline. Hochul's rhetoric doesn’t align with the harm her actions will cause.
Governor Hochul, we call your bluff: New Yorkers shouldn’t subsidize billionaire profits. It’s AI data center and corporate utility CEOs who will benefit from this fracked gas disaster, not working people. Your Public Service Commission must stop this toxic, dangerous, and costly fossil fuel pipeline in its tracks.
Member organization quotes:
"There is no justification for threatening our public health and environment in the pursuit of propping up previously rejected fossil fuel infrastructures," said Kathleen Nolan, MD, MSL, Senior Research Director for Catskill Mountainkeeper and the President of the New York State Chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility. "In terms of the NESE pipeline," she continued, "the Public Service Commission must not unwind the environmental and health progress of the past decade in and around Raritan Bay and must vote against a long-term plan that would put the wrong solution (natural gas) in the wrong place at the wrong time."
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NY Renews is a coalition of nearly 400 environmental justice, labor, and community groups, and the force behind the nation’s most powerful climate law, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. We fight for good jobs and climate justice for New Yorkers statewide.