New Climate Regs Mean More Cars On The Road
ALBANY — Sometimes, it isn’t worth the wait.
Gov. Hochul and state lawmakers quietly executed a budget-season hit on New York’s landmark climate law to protect their own political flanks, environmental advocates and lawmakers warn.
The backdoor maneuver effectively guts the state’s 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, trading real public health protections for short-term political cover.
Under the original law, every state agency was legally mandated to target and slash greenhouse gas emissions across all of its daily operations. But during this year’s chaotic budget cycle, Hochul forced through a budget that relaxes the state’s carbon accounting timeline, stretching it from a strict 20-year metric to a diluted 100-year horizon.
Because methane gas packs its most destructive climate punch during its first two decades in the atmosphere, this century-long calculation artificially deflates the recorded impact of current emissions. The accounting trick lets the state claim environmental progress on paper without changing a single infrastructure habit on the ground.
The new budget also delays the state’s nearest emissions deadline from 2030 out to 2040, giving the administration until 2028 to come up with compliance guidelines. The extension comes after the Department of Environmental Conservation already blew past its mandatory 2024 deadline to draft basic recommendations for hitting the law’s original carbon-cutting goals.
Short-sighted ‘affordability’
Hochul framed the rollbacks as a defense of New Yorkers’ wallets, claiming the strict rules would cause utility bills to skyrocket. Opponents, however, point out that the administration weaponized an entirely fake narrative, since the climate law was never even implemented in the first place — and because failing to arrest our out-of-control emissions will cost the state in the long term.
“The problem with folks saying the climate law is causing utility rates to soar is that it’s just patently false because the climate law hasn’t been implemented,” said state Sen. Pete Harckham (D-Peekskill), who chairs the Senate Environmental Conservation Committee.
By relaxing the math, the state has cleared a path for agencies to keep rubber-stamping massive, car-centric highway projects. The state Department of Transportation has spent years expanding highways from Buffalo to the Bronx under the guise of routine repairs, relying on the thoroughly debunked premise that wider roads reduce travel times. For decades, these expansions have only poured more cars onto the asphalt, spiking localized asthma rates.
A scathing report by New York Lawyers for the Public Interest reveals the administrative rot driving this trend, documenting how the state DOT has aggressively pushed forward at least 40 highway expansion projects without performing required environmental or equity screenings. Agency officials have long weaponized a bureaucratic loophole to defend their highway-widening pipeline, claiming they cannot implement engineering elements to scale back total vehicle miles traveled because the state has failed to hand down explicit regulatory rules to do so. Hochul’s newly enacted budget codifies this institutional foot-dragging, giving the agency a multi-year pass to dodge emissions mandates altogether.
For advocates, giving the state a free pass to ignore vehicle miles traveled is a direct threat to survival.
“The changes to the Climate Act are really frustrating and heartbreaking for our communities, because changes to the climate law do put Black, Brown, low-income and disadvantaged communities on the chopping block,” said Taylor Jaffe, environmental justice coordinator for Catskill Mountainkeeper. “They’re on the front lines of the climate crisis. To have these changes to the climate law to continue to create circumstances where DOT and other state agencies can just keep saying, ‘We don’t have this responsibility to reduce emissions,’ when they do. It’s not just.”
The state’s refusal to curb automobile reliance is a major blow to national climate goals. Motor vehicles generate roughly 29 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions across the country, with light passenger cars and SUVs making up 60 percent of that total. And sales of such vehicles dominate the market for personal transportation.
And transit options like buses have been shown to adopt alternative and greener fuel services faster than individual motorists, according to the American Public Transit Association.
The transit math
Instead of moving commuters out of cars by pouring serious money into public transportation, the state budget added just 5.4 percent funding to transit networks outside of New York City, totaling just $121 million.
That number falls drastically short of what transit systems need to survive. The New York Public Transportation Association is already warning that these bare-minimum allocations will trigger immediate route suspensions and service rollbacks across upstate hubs like Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse, trapping residents into mandatory, and pricey, car ownership.
State Budget Director Blake Washington qualified the shortfalls, telling reporters that the state simply did the best it could with limited cash.
“We have requests across the state for increases beyond what the governor’s done in their budget, but I would say that that record shows that for the last five budgets the governor has made sure that upstate and downstate transit systems were treated fairly,” Washington said.
He added, “It’s never enough.”
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