Editor’s note: Roger Caiazza is an adjunct fellow at the Empire Center. He has a long and deep private industry background in environmental regulatory analysis and compliance. His frequently updated personal blog on New York State environmental policy is Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York. 

A new statewide poll released by the Empire Center this month gives Albany a clear, if unwelcome, message: New Yorkers will accept climate policy, but only if it does not raise their energy bills. 

The survey of 600 likely 2026 general-election voters, conducted by Cygnal, found that when respondents were forced to choose between lower energy prices and lower greenhouse gas emissions, 24 percent picked price, 24 percent picked emissions, and the largest bloc — 42 percent — said they would support emissions cuts only if those cuts did not raise energy costs. Sixty-three percent oppose mandatory home-heating electrification. On the state’s proposed New York Cap-and-Invest (NYCI) program, opinion is closely divided, with roughly one in five voters still unsure — a number that climbs toward 30 percent in some demographic groups. 

New York already has a climate program that has been running long enough to test the plurality’s condition directly: the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. RGGI is a cap-and-invest program that has covered power-plant carbon dioxide emissions in New York since 2009, and the state now points to it as the model for how the far larger, economy-wide NYCI program is supposed to work. RGGI’s own price record over the last five years shows that the “no higher prices” condition is already being violated. 

When Governor Hochul took office in August 2021, the most recent completed RGGI auction had cleared at $7.97 per allowance. The most recent completed auction as of this writing, in June 2026, cleared at $35.00 — about a 339 percent increase in five years. That happened while the Department of Environmental Conservation, New York State Energy Research & Development Authority, and the Department of Public Service — all agencies under the Governor’s Administration — took part in RGGI’s design, auction administration, and the cap-tightening decisions that determine allowance scarcity. The Third Program Review amendments the Administration finalized this August lock in still steeper cap reductions from 2027 through 2033. 

DEC and NYSERDA describe RGGI’s investment record as generating “nearly $12 billion in net ratepayer savings” against about $2 billion invested — a “nearly 6-to-1” return the Administration cites as proof the program pays for itself. The underlying technical documentation tells a narrower story: that $12.3 billion figure is a modeled, expected-lifetime projection of bill savings to participating customers, not verified, realized savings, and it is measured only against the direct cost of allowances purchased at auction. It leaves out the cost RGGI adds through New York’s wholesale electricity market, where an emitting generator’s allowance cost becomes part of the price paid to every accepted resource in that pricing interval — not simply the unit that bought the allowance. 

Accounting for that market-wide effect is estimated to roughly double RGGI’s cost to ratepayers. For a typical residential customer, the estimated annual RGGI-driven cost was about $70 in 2024 when the market effect is included, versus $24 counting allowances alone. Applying the same method to this year’s $35 allowance price produces an estimated residential cost of roughly $121 a year — about 7 percent of a typical electric bill, up from about 4 percent just two years earlier. 

That is the same dynamic the poll’s 42-percent plurality says it will not accept, happening in real time, inside a program the Administration has already been running for over 15 years and is actively tightening further. 

For further and more detailed analysis of the RGGI cost data, the wholesale-market cost mechanism, and the Administration’s benefit-cost claims, see the full post at Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York.