What’s Behind the Escalating Fight Over New York’s Climate Law?

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NEW YORK STATE · March 10, 2026

What’s Behind the Escalating Fight Over New York’s Climate Law?

The legislature left the climate law untouched for now, but Governor Kathy Hochul could still push for changes in coming weeks.

By Colin Kinniburgh , New York Focus

Governor Kathy Hochul says the time has come to “sound the alarm.”

New Yorkers’ energy bills are spiking, and moving ahead with the state’s climate law is only going to make things worse, she says. Her evidence: A memo released by the state energy authority NYSERDA in late February, which claims that some New York households could face $4,000 or more in increased upfront energy costs by 2031 if the state were to follow the law as written.

“For us to meet the goals on the time frame that was set by the legislature, there’s going to be enormous costs to families. Enormous,” she told reporters last week. “I just need a reality check.”

The NYSERDA memo has brought the fight over New York’s clean energy transition to a crescendo, with longtime skeptics hailing it as vindication, while climate hawks call it deliberately misleading.

It came at a pivotal moment in the state’s political calendar: The governor and legislature are this week entering final budget negotiations — Hochul’s best shot at pushing her agenda through the legislature.

But she has yet to say how exactly she wants to change the climate law, and neither chamber of the legislature included amendments in their budget proposals released Monday night.

So what’s really happening here, and where might things go next?

What is Hochul Proposing?

We don’t know.

Hochul has made it clear for months that she wants to amend New York’s flagship climate law, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, or CLCPA. The 2019 law gave the state a decade to cut its emissions by 40 percent and set a course to achieving net zero by 2050. It also imposed a stringent method of counting greenhouse gas emissions.

Under those metrics, New York has made little progress so far. It’s less than halfway to reaching its 2030 target; officials estimate that the state is running at least seven years behind.

Hochul has maintained she wants to stay “true to the ultimate objectives of the law” but account for all the obstacles that have emerged since 2019 — including President Donald Trump’s wholesale dismantling of federal support for renewable energy.

But she did not put forward any changes to the law in her State of the State address, January budget proposal, or February budget amendments. Instead, she and agency officials have built up a drumroll of talking points in recent weeks about the “undue pressures” that the law would impose on New Yorkers.

She has floated two sets of “adjustments” to the law:

Loosening how the state counts emissions, to bring it in line with other states; and

pushing back the deadlines.

Asked in early February which she preferred, she smiled and said that she wanted “all of the above.”

“All they’re trying to do by changing the timeline is to change the psychology, not the reality.”

—Assemblymember Anna Kelles

She’s recently discussed the CLCPA with key lawmakers behind closed doors, Politico reported, but says she’s “not going to telegraph” what they are discussing. The lawmakers briefed by her office say they haven’t seen anything concrete.

“This is somewhat of a trial balloon,” Senate environmental committee chair Pete Harckham told reporters last week. “I’m sure they’re floating this out to see what public response will be. So there is no proposal right now.”

Hochul’s office declined to provide more details when asked.

How Did We Get Here?

In 2023, Hochul announced a mechanism to fund the green transition, drawn from the state’s official climate plan: a carbon pricing program known as “cap and invest.” But within months, she began to waver over concerns that the program could increase energy costs. She attempted to change the state’s emissions math in budget negotiations, but dropped the idea within days after pushback from climate groups and lawmakers.

Hochul’s energy and environmental agencies spent much of the next two years ironing out the details of the cap and invest program, and laid out a plan that likely wouldn’t have met the CLCPA’s 2030 targets — but that climate groups were prepared to support anyway. Then, she suddenly shelved the program, prompting climate groups to sue. Last October, a judge found that the state was violating the law and gave the Hochul administration months to produce rules to come into compliance.

The state appealed, buying Hochul time, and the governor made clear that she wanted to use that time to reopen a deeper debate about the climate law.

Does Her Math Hold Up?

Hochul has held up the recent NYSERDA memo as proof that following the law as written would impose unbearably high costs on New Yorkers.

But the memo itself offers limited new data. It presents a scenario that neither the Hochul administration nor Democrats in the legislature have entertained in recent years: one where New York relies almost entirely on a carbon price to meet the 2030 emissions target on time. That would likely trigger significant price hikes at the pump and on heating bills.

As a result, upstate households that continue to rely on gasoline cars and heating oil could see their annual energy costs increase by $4,100 or more over the next five years, NYSERDA estimates, although the figure drops to $2,400 after factoring in planned consumer rebates.

But the proposals that regulators outlined for cap and invest in 2024, before Hochul shelved them, were structured the other way around: They would have erred on the side of keeping carbon prices low and missing the legal emissions target, in the name of preserving affordability.

Under the proposal that came closest to advancing, the cost of carbon in the early 2030s would likely be about five times lower than the one NYSERDA presented in its recent memo, according to the agency’s prior modeling. The impact on households would likewise be much lower. Middle-income households were expected to see annual price increases of less than $100 after rebates by 2031, on average, while low-income households would have seen a net savings.

And those that actually made the switch to electric home heating and transportation would save the most. Supporters of cap and invest stress that this is the central aim of such a program: to support a widespread shift toward cleaner technologies, and to save New Yorkers money in the process.

What Does the Legislature Think?

Neither chamber included climate law rollbacks in their responses to Hochul’s budget proposal on Monday, though some upstate Democrats have voiced support for a “course correction.”

More than two-thirds of Democrats in the state Senate sent her a letter on Thursday saying they “categorically oppose” any such effort. Assembly environmental committee chair Deborah Glick was gathering signatures for a similar letter last week, according to a source in the chamber, but it has not been released. (Glick’s office did not respond to inquiries about it.)

The Senate’s budget resolution notes that the chamber supports the implementation of cap and invest along with a variety of other proposals to “facilitate CLCPA compliance,” such as legislation to accelerate solar energy adoption and increased incentives for electric cars and heat pumps.

The fight is by no means over: Hochul could still propose language in closed-door budget talks with Senate and Assembly leaders that could be negotiated into the final legislative package before the two chambers vote to approve it later this spring. Hochul could offer concessions in any number of other areas to make a deal more palatable to reluctant lawmakers — though at least one key lawmaker, Senate finance committee chair Liz Krueger, has threatened to vote against any such deal, saying the issue is “too important” for horse trading.

State Republicans have for their part seized on the NYSERDA memo as confirmation that the climate law should be repealed in full. Dozens of GOP lawmakers from both chambers held a press conference last Wednesday calling on their colleagues to “repeal the Cuomo/Hochul energy tax.”

Business groups, including the influential Business Council, have largely backed Hochul’s call to amend the law. Gavin Donohue, president of the power plant trade group Independent Power Producers of New York, has echoed the administration’s position that the climate law is “well intentioned” but in need of refining.

Climate groups, for their part, remain universally opposed to changing the law, saying it would take New York in the wrong direction at a time when states should be leading on climate.

Assemblymember Anna Kelles said the Hochul administration was like a student asking for their failing grade to be converted to a B, without doing anything differently.

“All they’re trying to do by changing the timeline is to change the psychology, not the reality,” she continued. “Leave the pressure on. Meet it or fail to meet it, but don’t take the pressure off just because it’ll make you feel better.”

Many have attributed Hochul’s posture on the climate law to political considerations, with her reelection bid looming and affordability a top concern for voters.

But John Raskin, president of the Spring Street Climate Fund, said Hochul might be misjudging voters. He pointed to 2024 election results in Washington state, where voters chose in a referendum to continue the state’s cap and invest program, by a 24-point margin. The Democratic candidate for governor, meanwhile, won by 11 points.

“Cap and invest won by a lot more because people saw how it was helping them,” Raskin said. “That’s the political reality that we can build here in New York as well.”

What Are the Possible Paths Forward?

Hochul’s office says that, with the state under court order to follow the climate law as written, New York faces a stark choice: either impose the extreme version of cap and invest hypothesized in NYSERDA’s memo, or change the law. Environmentalists say it’s a false binary.

The judge’s October order said that the state must come up with a plan to meet emissions targets, but did not specify that it must pursue cap and invest in particular.

The state’s appeal threw out the judge’s February deadline. The parties in the case now have until early April to file their briefs, and it could take several more months before the appeals court hands down a decision.

Even if the climate law survives budget negotiations intact and the appeals court affirms the original decision, advocates say there’s nothing that would force the state to take extreme action. As long as the state shows it is making a good-faith effort to comply, further court challenges would likely face tough odds — and few environmentalists would even try.

Rachel Spector, an attorney with the nonprofit Earthjustice who is representing the plaintiffs in the climate law case, called the governor’s stance “extremely disingenuous.”

“There’s no scenario in which, if the legislature does not change the law, these costs will automatically come into effect,” she said, adding that the plaintiffs would be very open to resolving the case through a negotiated settlement.

The goal of the lawsuit “is a commitment to moving forward at a scale … that will get us as close as we can” to meeting the emissions targets, Spector said — even if the 2030 target is out of reach.

“If we continue to stall or we move the goalposts so that there’s further room to delay, that’s the worst outcome,” she continued. “It doesn’t help New Yorkers with their bills. It just kicks the can down the road.”