New York state gives up on its most ambitious climate targets

Seven years ago, New York passed what leaders touted as one of the nation’s most ambitious climate laws. Now, the state has kneecapped it ahead of a crucial end-of-decade deadline.

On Tuesday, the Democratic-controlled legislature approved a budget bill that effectively vaporizes a 2030 mandate to slash planet-warming emissions by 40% from 1990 levels. Instead, the new legislation says, New York should aim for 60% by 2040 — but the target should be pursued only ​“to the maximum extent [that it’s] feasible and cost effective.”

The measure also alters how New York calculates the global warming impact of methane, which will align its methodology with that of most other states but deemphasize the potent greenhouse gas’s near-term effects on the planet. And New York will no longer account for emissions from importing fossil fuels into the state. The new calculus — which has drawn criticism from climate scientists — will make it look like New York has accomplished greater emissions reductions than it has.

The rollback is the result of a monthslong campaign by Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul, who is up for reelection in November and swiftly signed the budget bill after its passage. She shoehorned the proposal into the state’s budget negotiations, arguing that the original mandates threatened to raise energy costs and weren’t feasible amid the Trump administration’s attacks on renewable energy.

That has frustrated advocates who say clean energy is actually a tool to improve affordability and quality of life.

“Kathy Hochul has struck the one blow against New Yorkers that Donald Trump couldn’t: gutting a state law that would have lowered bills, saved Black and brown children from lung disease, and protected the planet for the next generation,” Alex Patterson, campaign coordinator for Public Power NY, said in a Tuesday statement.

Hochul has been on a collision course with the state’s climate goals for years.

The 2019 law, enacted under then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), gave New York until the beginning of 2024 to issue regulations to meet the emissions targets — a deadline it missed under Hochul.

In early 2025, the governor was set to release rules for a cap-and-invest program, which charges polluters for each unit of emissions and uses the proceeds to pay for decarbonization projects.

But then, in a move that caught many advocates and legislators off guard, Hochul made an about-face and delayed the cap-and-invest program once again. Fed up, climate and environmental groups sued the administration in March 2025. In October, they notched a win, with a judge ordering the state to issue regulations by early February this year.

February arrived, and instead of regulations came a controversial memo by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. The document estimated that meeting the state’s 2030 decarbonization mandate via a cap-and-invest program would cost many New York households thousands of dollars a year and spike gasoline prices — figures that Hochul later leaned on to promote the policy rollback.

The memo prompted criticism from some legislators and advocates for relying on an unrealistically high price of carbon and assuming that the state would rely solely on cap-and-invest to meet decarbonization goals.

The memo ​“plays into oil and gas industry arguments by presenting a cap-and-invest program with astronomical costs that no one has asked for and nothing requires,” said Elizabeth Moran, New York policy advocate for Earthjustice, which represents the groups that sued the state. The lawsuit, she added, was ​“over inaction — not about the substance, not about anything else, just needing to issue regulations.”

Hochul’s decision to pursue the climate law rollbacks via budget negotiations, which happen largely behind closed doors, was also controversial. While her proposal had the support of some business groups and Republicans, many legislators still supported the climate law in its original form.

Under the new legislation, New York has until the end of 2028 to issue rules to meet its 2040 goal. The climate law still mandates an 85% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

New York has a long way to go even to meet weaker targets: So far, the state has reduced emissions by only 14% from 1990, according to its official dashboard. It gets about 23% of its electricity from renewables — a figure that’s on par with the national average but reliant on older hydropower resources rather than newly built wind, solar, and storage.

Hochul, for her part, has been vying to position herself as a champion of ​“commonsense” and ​“all of the above” energy policy ahead of election season. (See, for example, her administration’s pause on the state’s all-electric building standard, which was supposed to kick in at the beginning of this year, and its approval of a controversial, Trump-backed interstate gas pipeline that New York had previously denied permits for.)

But the climate law’s softening also speaks to a nationwide trend: In an era when concerns about energy affordability are reaching a fever pitch, clean energy and energy efficiency have become scapegoats.

“When you don’t understand why your utility bills are high, you are willing to believe whatever story you hear that sounds reasonable,” New York state Assemblymember Sarahana Shrestha told Canary Media in early April. Shrestha, a Democrat, supported the climate law in its original form.

The factors raising electricity prices are complex and vary from region to region, but many experts say that the main drivers are skyrocketing demand, the cost of maintaining and operating an aging grid, natural disasters, and natural gas price volatility. Wind, solar, and batteries — the cheapest ways to add electrons to the grid — can actually help bring bills down.

“We’ve seen that states that deployed the most renewables from 2019 to 2024 — Iowa, New Mexico, and South Dakota — saw some of the largest decreases in electricity rates,” said Ava Gallo, climate and energy program manager at the National Caucus of Environmental Legislators, a nonprofit that serves as a resource for state lawmakers.

Despite the New York rollback, Gallo noted that many states are still passing strong climate policies this year. She pointed to laws allowing residents to install DIY solar panels that plug into a standard outlet — which Maine, Colorado, and others have enacted — as well as the slew of clean energy measures that succeeded in Virginia.

“There are many opportunities to continue this work even in an uncertain federal environment,” she said.