On Friday, Gov. Kathy Hochul finally started tiptoeing toward reality on New York’s climate law.
In a lengthy opinion column, she laid out her proposal to postpone by a decade the state’s stringent greenhouse-gas emissions rules, set by law to hit in 2030 — pointing fingers at everything from COVID-19 to upstate NIMBYism to President Donald Trump to justify waving the white flag.
But Albany legislators should never have imposed these draconian CO₂ emissions targets to begin with.
Even in 2019, when the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act was passed, New York had among the lowest carbon emissions per capita of any state in the US, with 6% of the nation’s population but only 1% of its CO₂. Forcing this law on New Yorkers is like imposing calorie restrictions on anorexics to solve America’s obesity problem.
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