What Kathy Hochul’s Budget Tells Us About New York’s Cap-and-Invest Plan
By Colin Kinniburgh, NY Focus
AS GOVERNOR KATHY HOCHUL unveiled her executive budget Wednesday, New York’s climate watchers zeroed in on one critical piece: cap and invest. Hochul has presented the proposal, which would force polluters to buy allowances for carbon emissions and reinvest the proceeds into the clean energy transition, as a cornerstone of New York’s climate policy. But she had so far offered little detail on a plan that could potentially transform the state’s economy.
The executive budget Hochul presented on Wednesday — a first draft whose final form state lawmakers must approve by April 1 — fills in a few of those details, but not many.
It specifies that at least a third of revenues from the cap-and-invest program should go into a Climate Action Fund, the bulk of which would provide direct rebates to New Yorkers to offset increased energy costs from what is effectively a carbon tax. It also requires that “energy-intensive and trade-exposed facilities” get their share of allowances for free. And it says that “an amount” of the revenue should go into the state general fund to cover the expense of enforcing it.