Roger Caiazza

Francis Menton’s recent article about New York’s Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act) explained that the decision by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to halt to all construction work on a project called Empire Wind means that one interim target cannot be achieved.   As reality causes the implosion of the Climate Act outsiders undoubtedly wonder why New Yorkers have not called for repeal of the law before.  A recent poll by the Empire Center offers some insight into that question.

The Climate Act established a New York “Net Zero” target (85% reduction in GHG emissions and 15% offset of emissions) by 2050.  It includes an interim requirement for 70% of electricity by 2030. The Climate Action Council (CAC) was responsible for preparing the Scoping Plan that outlined how to “achieve the State’s bold clean energy and climate agenda.”  Lately the State has been trying to implement the Scoping Plan recommendations through regulations, proceedings, and legislation. 

Poll Overview

The Empire Center is an independent, not-for-profit, non-partisan think tank dedicated to promoting policies that can make New York a better place to live, work and raise a family.  In the interests of full disclosure, I am an adjunct fellow of the Empire Center. 

Late last year the Empire Center canvassed 1,021 New York registered voters in a poll conducted by Morning Consult. There were 38 questions in the survey and 16 questions about the demographics of the respondents.  Survey toplines and crosstabs are available.  For survey neophytes like me the topline lists the questions and the overall results.  Crosstabs provide the breakdown of responses to questions by the demographic categories.

There were six questions were included about the Climate Act.  I only address the first two questions in this article.

Climate Act Awareness

The responses to the question “How familiar are you, if at all, with the provisions of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (also known as CLCPA or the Climate Act) that was signed into law in New York in 2019?” show that the reason that there hasn’t been much pushback about the Climate Act is that the majority of New Yorkers are unaware of it.  The survey found that 45% of the people polled had never heard of it and another 24% had heard of it, but didn’t know what it is.  In my opinion, if they only have a general sense of the law (another 19%), then they are probably unaware of the details.  That means 88% of New Yorkers polled do not know what is coming in enough detail to understand its impacts on affordability, personal choice, reliability, and environmental impacts.

I guess New York is getting what it deserves but I wonder how many people in other jurisdictions with similar net-zero legislation have any idea about the impacts of unrealistic policies header their way.

Willingness to Pay

In my opinion, the reality slap to New Yorkers will be when the costs go up and the Hochul Administration can no longer hide the extraordinary costs.  This is because I have never seen any poll regarding a willingness to pay that did not find most people are willing to pay very much.  This is verification for Roger Pielke Jr.’s Iron Law of Climate “While people are often willing to pay some price for achieving climate objectives, that willingness has its limits.”

This poll is no different.  One third of the respondents are not willing to anything on their monthly energy bill for cleaner energy.  Another 28% are only willing to pay up to $20 a month for cleaner energy while another 20% would pay up to $40 a month.  Nineteen percent are willing to pay up to $200 a month but only 3% are willing to pay more than $200 per month. Another 7% did not know or had no opinion.

National Grid Long-Term Gas Plan

One of the components in the Scoping Plan is to eventually electrify the natural gas system.  I recently described the comments I submitted on Case 24-G-0248 Review of the Long-Term Gas System Plan for National Grid.   That plan describes how the three National Grid New York operating companies intend to transition away from natural gas projected out to 2050. 

I was frankly surprised with the consumer costs projected for just this component of the Climate Act transition plan.  The scenarios include a reference case, CEV or “clean energy vision”, and AE or “accelerated electrification”.  The difference between the reference case and the CEV scenario represents the minimum cost of the Climate Act.  The following tables (using original table numbers) are from the Long-Term Gas System Plan document for three service territories now owned by National Grid in New York.

The 2030 average monthly increase for National Grid customers in the former Niagara Mohawk service territory in Upstate New York ranges from a 50% increase to a 96% increase.  The Climate Act cost by 2030 is $57 additional per month.

Table 12-11: Niagara Mohawk Bill Impacts by Scenario

Credit: National Grid Long-Term Gas System Plan

The 2030 average monthly increase for National Grid customers in the former Brooklyn Union Gas service territory in New York City ranges from a 65% increase to a 148% increase.  The Climate Act cost by 2030 is $43 additional per month.

Table 12-12: Brooklyn Union Gas Company Bill Impacts by Scenario

Credit: National Grid Long-Term Gas System Plan

The 2030 average monthly increase for National Grid customers in the former Key Span service territory on Long Island ranges from a 41% increase to a 90% increase.  The Climate Act cost by 2030 is $44 additional per month.

Table 12-13: KeySpan Gas (LILCO) Bill Impacts by Scenario

Credit: National Grid Long-Term Gas System Plan

Willingness to Pay for National Grid Long-Term Gas Plan

In the National Grid Long-Term Gas Plan, the expected increase in price to implement the “clean energy vision” consistent with the Climate Act exceeds $40 per month for all three service companies.  I consolidated cross tab survey results as show in Table 1 that lists the willingness to pay $40 per month for selected demographics of the survey participants in the Empire Center poll.  Note that 71% of respondents said that they were unwilling to pay more than $40 per month.  I am not going to discuss the demographic breakdowns but present them for your edification.

Table 1: Empire Center Willingness to Pay for Increased Energy Costs Relative to National Grid Expected Gas System Transition Costs of at least $40 per Month Additional by 2030

Discussion

The electric and gas utilities must invest in programs that will implement the Climate Act mandates and those costs are starting to show up in their rate case proceedings.  The National Grid Long-Term Plan to transition the gas system out of existence which is necessary to comply with the Climate Act is but one example.  The expected cost increase by 2030 to fulfill the clean energy vision is more than $40 per month.  Only 22% of the people polled were willing to pay that much.

I recently submitted comments about affordability in Proceeding 22-M-0149 “Assessing Implementation of and Compliance with the Requirements and Targets of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act”.  On March 26, 2025, Jessica Waldorf, Chief of Staff and Director of Policy Implementation for the Department of Public Service (DPS) posted a letter responding to a letter from Michael B. Mager Counsel to Multiple Intervenors that had been submitted earlier in March to Chair of the Public Service Commission Rory Christian regarding the affordability standard.  The Mager letter from the Multiple Intervenors pointed out that the DPS and New York State Energy Research & Development Authority (NYSEDA) were supposed to provide an annual report describing Climate Act implementation costs.  No report was produced in 2024 and the letter asked when the next report would be provided.  Waldorf’s response made no commitment.  Given the politicization of all New York agencies and the “willingness to pay” results I don’t think that it is surprising that the Hochul Administration is failing to report on Climate Act as mandated.

Keep in mind that the natural gas transition cost component is only one program.  Electric bills will need to increase by at least the same amount to pay for the infrastructure necessary to electrify everything.  The New York Cap-and-Invest program is nothing more than a tax on carbon that will necessarily increase the cost of gasoline and heating fuels.  Personal investments in electrifying homes and transportation by most New Yorkers will be necessary.  I believe that a proper cost estimate will show that consumer costs will exceed $200 a month.

Inevitably people will figure out that there is a law in place that is causing much of the observed increase in energy costs.  I also believe that the Hochul Administration is fully aware of the ramifications of Climate Act costs on the next election.  Consequently, they are delaying implementation of the mandate to produce an annual cost information report as long as possible and may even try to wait until after the 2026 election.

In the meantime, the politicians will be more than willing to let the utilities take the heat for the inevitable observed cost increases.  No doubt they will simultaneously forbid the utilities to explicitly break out the Climate Act costs in the consumer bills all the while demanding that utilities lower their rate case proposals.

Conclusion

Any way you look at the willingness to pay question response, the Empire Center survey confirms Roger Pielke Jr’s Iron Law of Climate.  People polled are not willing to pay much for the net-zero aspirations of the Climate Act if 50% are unwilling to pay more than $10 per month for cleaner energy.  It is troubling that 88% of the New Yorkers polled had no more than a general sense of the Climate Act and many had never heard of it.  This is setting up a reckoning for all the politicians that foisted the Climate Act on New Yorkers.  It is inevitable that the politicians will reconsider and give up on it or be voted out for utter stupidity.  The only question is whether political reality will occur before the electric and gas system is destroyed and costs bankrupts the state.

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Roger Caiazza blogs on New York energy and environmental issues at Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York.  The opinions expressed in this post do not reflect the position of any of his previous employers or any other organization he has been associated with.

Markets Insider

By Jo Nova

Price fixing kills the cocoa farm

There has been a wicked price spike in cocoa beans which the usual suspects are blaming on “climate change” as if your air conditioner was ruining cocoa crops in West Africa. Instead African governments have fixed the price of cocoa for decades, forcing poor farmers to work for a pittance, and keeping the big profits for themselves. Not surprisingly, even though there is a wild price spike, farmers in Ghana are leaving the industry, smuggling crops out (because they get a better price). They didn’t plant new trees, they ran out of money for fertilizer, and didn’t try new varieties. Their children don’t want to farm cocoa, and the yields are falling on old sickly plantations.

So, surprise, socialist government controls wrecked the industry and they are now scrambling to put the pieces back together. Things are so desperate, the government of Ghana raised the price of cocoa by 58% last April and then raised the price of cocoa by another 45% last September, to try to reduce the smuggling. (The government was losing too much money). At one point last year it was estimated that a third of the national crop was lost to smugglers. A few months after this, the farmers were hoarding their beans in expectation the government would have to give them another price rise. Just chaos for everyone.

Meanwhile other socialists use these failures to tell us they have to fix the weather and we must give them lots of money to do it.

It’s always the way. Big Government creates a crisis and then beats us over the head with it, to demand more money and power. Greenies pretend to care about the poor, but they are happy to exploit the poor farmers of Ghana as fodder for press releases for their industrial “renewable” schemes, and banker friends.

Feel the pain of these farmers. Some of them have farmed for decades, yet they have nothing to show for it, saying “ It feels like we are working for other people’s benefit.”

Ghana has farmed cocoa for over 100 years. The country is the world’s second-largest producer, behind Côte d’Ivoire. The cocoa industry employs over a million people and contributes about $2 billion in foreign exchange annually. In recent times, prices of the commodity have increased exponentially, pushed by extreme climate events and supply chain crisis on fertilizers used by farmers.

Yet farmers like Anane and Holiata say they see little of this wealth. They point to the low prices set by the Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD), established in 1947. The board sets cocoa prices to regulate the industry and protect farmers from exploitation by European merchants, but farmers argue that these prices fail to reflect the crop’s true value on international markets.

The Cocobod traders were forward selling as much as 70% of the crop one year in advance. But when weather, disease, and a lack of fertilizer hit the crop, the bureaucrats couldn’t find the cocoa they’d already sold. They were caught short, forced to buy cocoa on the open market which sent the prices rocketing. (If only climate models worked, eh, they could have seen this coming?)

According to Oxfam, up to 90% of Ghanaian cocoa farmers do not earn a living income. Many of the 800,000 smallholder farmers who cultivate the crop survive on less than $2 a day, struggling to afford basic needs such as food, clothing, housing, and healthcare.

The cocoa industry is rife with human rights issues, like forced child labor, and slavery. When the environmentalists start to care about pain and suffering in the here and now, instead of theoretical storms in a hundred years time, we might think they give a damn about making the world a better place.

Apparently man-made climate change made it too wet, then too dry. Sure, we believe you…

The weather has been bad in Ghana in the last two years, first it was too wet which rotted the old sickly trees, and then it was too dry, but no climate model on Earth predicted both these extreme seasons correctly (the witchdoctors might as well use chicken entrails), and other countries nearby suffered bad weather too, yet they increased their crop yield. Nigeria’s cocoa exports saw a year-over-year increase of 15% in October 2024, and Cameroon’s cocoa crop is expected to rise 7% this year.

Price fixing, and regulation hurts the people it was supposed to protect

The Government of Ghana formed the price fixing board to try to protect farmers from volatile prices. Instead they trapped them in poverty and fed a bunch of bureaucrats that may destroy the local industry.

Under Ghanaian law, selling cocoa to anyone other than the Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD) through its licensed buying companies (LBCs) is a crime. The market is tightly regulated, with prices set annually by the government through the Producer Price Review Committee (PPRC).

If the government had offered a service but not forced it upon the farmers, the Cocobod bureaucrats would have had to stay competitive, or the farmers would have abandoned it to make their own deals. But there were no brakes or accountability on the government. In the end, the farmers did abandon it, but years too late, because it was against the law to smuggle the cocoa out of the country — so the farmers had to be desperate before they would take the risk.

It takes up to five years to grow new cocoa plants, so chocolate will be expensive until the free market solves itself, which it will, as long as the government gets out of the way.

 

From CFACT

By David Wojick

Every operating wind power facility has a US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) permit to kill eagles on an ongoing basis and many do kill eagles. Each permit depends on eagle-kill offset rules which appear to be false. If so then the killing is illegal, a violation of the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act.

The offset is called “compensatory mitigation” which means the wind power facility pays the FWS or their agents to have their eagle killing offset by helping others live someplace else. Compensatory mitigation is used in other regulatory systems where it may actually work. For example under the Clean Water Act you can destroy a wetland if you create an equivalent one someplace else.

The problem is that while it is easy to verify wetland offsets, it is impossible in the eagle case. Moreover it is extremely unlikely that these offsets actually work.

The issue is electrocution. By coincidence the spacing of the wires on the standard power pole is just right for electrocuting eagles. These are the poles that line most roads and many streets in America, delivering power to the myriad homes and businesses along the way. Some eagles occasionally die this way.

The wires on these poles can be restructured in a way avoids electrocuting eagles and this is what wind power compensatory mitigation is paying for. The first problem is there is no way to know how many eagles are not being electrocuted. The deeper problem is there are likely many millions of these poles and the fraction being converted must be very small.

Note that this compensatory mitigation practice has been going on since a least 2016. It is discussed in a FWS report titled “Bald and golden eagles: population demographics and estimation of sustainable take in the United States, 2016 update” found here.

https://www.fws.gov/media/population-demographics-and-estimation-sustainable-take-united-states-2016-update

Here is the essence:

“When authorized take (killing) exceeds EMU (Eagle Management Unit) take limits, Service policy is that take must be effectively offset by compensatory mitigation such that there is no net increase in mortality. Currently, the only offsetting mitigation measure the Service has enough information to confidently apply in this manner is retrofitting of power lines to reduce eagle electrocutions….”

and

“Offsetting mitigation is mostly an issue affecting take authorization for golden eagles, as EMU take limits are set at zero requiring all authorized take to be offset.”

(Executive Summary)

In short the number of golden eagles saved has to at least equal the number killed. We do not know what that number is because while the FWS gets eagle kill reports from all wind facilities that data is held secret to keep the industry from public scrutiny. There are published third party estimates placing the number in the hundreds per year but it could be higher.

How the FWS has determined the dollar amount of compensatory mitigation also looks to be a secret as I can find nothing on it. The method is called Resource Equivalency Analysis but searching the FWS site for that just yields a calculation spreadsheet.

How the FWS gets from these dollars to the actual saving of the required number of eagle’s lives is a mystery. I do not see how such an analysis is even possible let alone verifiable. Where is the derivation and justification for this preposterous program with 160,000 MW of secret wind killing supposedly offset annually and 230,000 MW more in line.

That retrofitting some power poles can effectively offset the ongoing and increasing wind turbine slaughter of eagles seems completely unrealistic. Compensatory mitigation looks like a legal loophole designed to help the wind power industry avoid the Eagle Protection Act. The wind power facilities are just buying the indulgence of killing eagles year after year, more every year.