Executive Orders on Energy and Climate Have Advocates Across the Nation on Edge
The Buffalo News Editorials
The Climate Crisis is an Affordability Crisis, and New York is Vulnerable
In New York, Bob Cohen is outraged. As the policy director for Citizen Action for New York, a grassroots organization that fights for social, racial, economic and environmental justice, he knows that the rolling back of environmental regulation will have an outsized impact on many of the people he represents—low income and communities of color.
“The old expression goes that Nero fiddled while Rome burned,” said Cohen. “Well, this is a case where Trump is dumping coal and making Rome burn worse.”
Around 44 percent of the city’s census districts are home to environmental justice communities, according to the Mayor’s Office. The New York City Environmental Justice Alliance works to improve the lives of these residents. They advocated strongly for the state’s ambitious 2019 Climate Act, which imposes many targets for the state’s transition to renewable energy, often while prioritizing environmental justice communities.
“The climate crisis is an affordability crisis,” said Ko. “It is a cost of living crisis.”
— Eunice Ko, New York City Environmental Justice Alliance
“We need the governor to stand up tall and lead New York through this darkness and make sure we’re meeting our Climate Act mandates,” said Eunice Ko, its deputy director. “We’re reducing our emissions, but also really reducing this legacy pollution that sickens and kills a lot of the communities that we work with and serve.”
Both Ko and Cohen worry about Trump’s plan to blunt the impact of former President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act which, among many things, offers tax credits and rebates to households who install clean energy technologies in their homes, like heat pumps. Subsidies like these are imperative to keeping people’s energy costs down, particularly at a time where utility bills across New York City are quickly increasing.
“The climate crisis is an affordability crisis,” said Ko. “It is a cost of living crisis. It will mean more rising grocery prices because of droughts and shortages as a result of that, it’s going to mean an increase in medical costs. There’s going to be increased energy bills if we continue to rely on fossil fuels.”
These groups, as part of the broad coalition NY Renews, have been fighting Gov. Kathy Hochul’s delay of the implementation of the cap-and-invest program, which was years in the making. The law would have put a cap on statewide greenhouse gas emissions, and would have required companies to essentially pay to pollute, funneling billions of dollars into a Climate Action Fund.