NY Renews Statement on Business Interests' Calls to Weaken the CLCPA
**FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE***
October 23, 2024
Contact: Marie Scarles | (646) 389-8429 | marie@nyrenews.org
Web: @NYRenews | www.nyrenews.org
In response to a new report by the Citizens Budget Commission calling for New York to modify its climate and environmental justice mandates, the 380+ member NY Renews Coalition issued the following statement:
It’s outrageous that the most powerful business interests in New York are calling for a rollback of the State's climate goals and community investment programs even as millions of Americans are suffering from one of the most extreme hurricane seasons on record and toxic air and water pollution.
More than five years after New York passed the Climate Act (CLCPA), the cap-trade-and-invest program is the single biggest policy to make the emissions-reduction benchmarks real, and stands to provide immediate health benefits to New Yorkers, invest billions of dollars in community-led climate, clean energy, housing, and transportation projects that will lower home heating and cooling bills, and create thousands of sustainable good jobs across our state. The revenue from this program can help pave affordability pathways for New Yorkers as the state transitions to clean energy, particularly for low- and middle-income households who already bear the costs of climate change, inaction, and injustice.
We call for a cap-and-invest program that makes the worst corporate polluters—not NY families and households—pay what they owe toward the cost of transitioning to a green economy. This is one of several tools, including revenue measures, that Governor Hochul and the Legislature must use to meet the reasonable goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% below 1990 levels
Toxic co-pollutants are responsible for high rates of asthma, heart disease, stroke, and early death, particularly in environmental justice communities where fossil fuel infrastructure is disproportionately sited. It is not enough to simply cap greenhouse gas emissions and hope to see a reduction in co-pollutants. They must be prioritized in the regulations to ensure improved health and economic outcomes in our communities.
Greenhouse gas and co-pollutant emissions permits must be non-tradable and must have aggressive penalties for exceeding cap levels, avoiding loopholes that have weakened or undermined other efforts. Polluters should not be permitted to play games with the system. Banking and trading allowances have the potential to concentrate emissions, creating or worsening pollution hotspots in environmental justice communities.
This is the existential crisis of our era. Extreme weather events will only continue to impact New York’s Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian, and working-class communities the hardest, worsening an already criminal level of inequality we see in New York. Every year we don’t take action, the more costly the energy transition, disaster recovery, and climate resilience become and the harder it will be to recover and adapt to a hotter, wetter state.
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NY Renews is a coalition of over 380 environmental justice, faith, labor, and community groups, and the force behind the nation’s most progressive climate law. We fight for good jobs and climate justice for New Yorkers statewide.