Is anyone else ticked off about the Memo “re: Likely costs of CLCPA compliance” that NYSERDA President and CEO Doreen Harris just sent to Governor Kathy Hochul’s office? After 30 minutes of searching I finally found the full 3 page memo at documentcloud.org (Thank you, MuckRock Foundation!)  NYSERDA’s own website does not display the “Hochul energy cost” memo. 

On February 26, 2026, Harris sent a 3 page memo to Hochul claiming that full compliance with New York’s 2019 Climate Law would cost an extra $2,400-$4,100 by 2031 for the average New York household.

Why? Because the Climate Law’s “differing accounting standards from the internationally accepted approach and inflexible near term targets–would combine to yield high costs to New York households and businesses.” 

The memo drew immediate support from business groups, chambers of commerce and elected Republicans with the theme that “we said all along that the energy mandates are too costly.” 

Governor Hochul is seeking re-election this year running on an “affordability” platform. 

Why would Harris send such a memo in the middle of budget season to Governor Hochul? That has never happened before. The only reason is to provide Hochul political cover for rolling back investment in the emission reduction targets in the Climate Law. Hence we are going to call this “Hochul’s memo.”

Let’s assess the memo’s claims.

Hochul’s memo says: “the model doesn’t reflect the current hostile and disruptive federal government…”

No one in 2019 saw Donald Trump returning to office in 2025 and eviscerating the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act. Does that mean that the fifty states–as laboratories of democracy–should roll back their efforts? No, it means the opposite. The states should redouble their efforts to secure a healthy future for their residents, regardless of whether the federal government is helping or not. 

Imagine if New York had taken a “the-feds-are-not-helping” attitude toward, say, women’s suffrage! Oh, wait! New York was the 11th state to allow women to vote, 48 years after Wyoming did so in 1869.

Hochul’s memo says: “acceleration of clean energy deployment represented by the model as required to achieve the CLCPA’s targets is infeasible today”

Wait a minute. Does Hochul not think we can install enough solar, energy storage and wind in time? Distributed solar in New York has been the only target that was under budget and ahead of schedule. So what did New York State do? It yanked hundreds of millions of dollars away from solar in 2025 to scatter over other energy technologies that were languishing. Per SEIA, New York is currently #8 among US states for total installed solar capacity. Red states like Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Arizona, Florida and Texas have even more solar than we do. If they can plow ahead with the same, lame federal hostility, why can’t New York? Fact: New York’s solar capacity installed annually has averaged growth between 7-10% year over year for more than a decade. 

Hochul’s memo says: “current law attributes higher emissions to New York than other leading jurisdictions do for the same activity, as well as higher emissions than under accepted science.”

First, the Climate Law itself sets emission reduction goals but does not include actual emission amounts. The Scoping Plan spells out those details. Maybe this is just a typo. Or someone did not read the actual law. Or maybe AI wrote the memo.

Second, NYSERDA does not give a source for “accepted science.” The 22 member Climate Action Council spent 4 years from 2019 to 2023 to compile the Scoping Plan that would implement the 2019 Climate Law. The stakeholder process involved input from hundreds of organizations with deep and diverse expertise, including the ones I work for. The 11 public hearings yielded over 35,000 written comments. The Scoping Plan’s full report (445 pages), which NYSERDA’s Doreen Harris co-chaired, was delivered in December 2022. 

One perhaps generous interpretation is that the NYSERDA organization that co-chaired the multi-year process that yielded the Scoping Plan’s emissions data is not the same NYSERDA that would attribute emissions in 2026. 

Hochul’s memo says: “emissions from out-of-state fossil fuel production, which is not incorporated in jurisdictional inventories by the IPCC…”

Scope 3, baby. In the early days of tallying greenhouse gas emissions, everyone focussed on the easiest stuff to count: emission from their own direct efforts, which became known as Scope 1. Then they moved on to count the indirect emissions from the fuel sources they consumed, known as Scope 2, e.g., the impact of using electricity that is generated by burning fossil fuels.  The last and hardest to count are emissions for which we are responsible outside of our own walls of our home or borders of our state, such as from manufacturing and transporting the goods we purchase to the disposal of the products we sell, known as Scope 3. The Scoping Plan includes all 3 sources of emissions, as it should. McKinsey explains the scopes better than I can.

The IPCC takes a global perspective. Its “jurisdictional inventories” are not relevant to the emissions for which New Yorkers are responsible. If every state ignored scope 3 emissions, then total emissions could go on rising as states traded goods, services and energy even as each state met its “inside the border” targets!

Hochul’s memo says: “attributing to bioenergy its combustion emissions and thus ignoring the treatment of the short carbon cycle by scientists and the IPCC…”

This statement is just bad science. The carbon cycle on the globe is conceived of as a short cycle of a few years to a long cycle of millions of years. Coal, gas and oil extracted from the Earth today are part of the long geological cycle of carbon that was locked eons ago, but then burned and released into the atmosphere. A tree or a person that grows and dies is part of the short biological carbon cycle. If you burn bioenergy, such as a tree, that was part of the short carbon cycle, you are releasing carbon into the atmosphere. The atmosphere does not care whether that CO2 molecule came from a tree that lived yesterday or a tree that lived during the Jurassic Age.

Hochul’s memo says: “use of Global Warming Potential 20 (GWP-20), which the IPCC states is not standard practice in the scientific community and doesn’t comport with the Paris Agreement Rulebook…”

The use of GWP-20 (versus GWP-100) to represent the Global Warming Potential of gases like methane was deliberate and reflected the enormous, short term (20 year) impact of methane emissions from burning (and more importantly, leakage of) so much natural gas, instead of coal or oil. The IPCC and Paris Agreement use methodologies that are geared toward long-term global impacts.

Our state’s Climate Law and Scoping Plan is directed at hyperlocal impact–what New Yorkers can do-–based on our dominant fuels. Natural gas and oil drive 90% of the Downstate electricity production. If we use the 100 year impact of burning natural gas as our “bridge fuel” between 2020 and 2040, the emissions impact of the methane in 2120 would be lowered after a century of interacting with other molecules up there.  Methane breaks down over time, but only after turbo-charging global temperatures between 2030-2060, which is the critical time period for a cascade of environmental tipping points.

Hochul’s memo implies: “New Yorkers did something crazy by being ambitious, but everything has turned to crap since then.” By the way, New Yorkers overwhelmingly voted for the unprecedented $4.2 billion Environmental Bond in November 2022 to help pay for all the emissions reduction initiatives. 

Does that mean New Yorkers should back off? Or should New Yorkers push even harder to do the right things as a counterweight to withdrawal of fethe deral help?

Hochul’s memo closes with these reasons to punt on reducing emissions: “the disruptive and lingering impacts of COVID-19 and the subsequent supply chain crisis, the return of an inflationary economy, and the influence of geopolitical events on energy costs generally.”

Is there an adult in the room?! Why not tell our children, “We postponed your birthday because it rained this week.” 

No one saw the COVID pandemic coming. The subsequent “supply chain crisis” has largely resolved itself by either ramping up production of the prior products (heat pumps, transformers, etc) or innovating with newer, better versions, e.g., solid state batteries replacing Lithium Ion batteries. No one predicted the Russian invasion into Ukraine.

Please read this quote from the opening pages of Chapter 4, Current Emissions, of the Scoping Plan. 

“The Climate Act requirements for GHG emissions accounting are different in two important ways from the methodology provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Taskforce on National GHG Inventories. First, GHG emissions must be measured in terms of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) using a 20-year rather than a 100-year time interval. This results in a higher numeric value for some gases, such as methane, even if the emission rate was the same. Secondly, “statewide” GHG emissions under the Climate Act include out-of-state GHG emissions associated with imported electricity and the extraction and transmission of imported fossil fuels. This greatly expands the scope of GHG emission sources typically included in governmental GHG reduction goals and inventories. Addressing some of these GHG emission sources may require action at the federal level. Additionally, the emission values provided here include carbon dioxide (CO2) associated with the combustion of biogenic fuels, although this comprises a very small portion of statewide emissions (less than 4%). Therefore,  the emission values provided here are not comparable to those reported by other governments, nor are they comparable to values reported by New York State in the past. The economic sectors described here may not represent the same emission sources as presented in other GHG reports.” (page 46) 

“Gross total emissions for 2019 were 379.4 million metric tons (MMT) CO2e (GWP-20). … Net total emissions, or gross emissions minus emission removals and biogenic CO2, were 338.5 MMT CO2e (GWP-20) in 2019. [The footnote here reads as follows: If measured using the methodology provided by the IPCC, gross emissions were 194.6 MMT CO2e (GWP-100) and net emissions were 165.5 MMT CO2e (GWP-100) in 2019]” (page 47)

This Scoping Plan language explains all of the topics that now, mysteriously, the Hochul memo sees fit to question. 

The natural gas market is very volatile. Gas is a big driver of rising electricity rates. So is the 100 year old grid we need to renovate. Solar and battery storage actually reduce stress on the grid. And are much less expensive than gas.

Trying to make something more affordable today simply means passing the buck on to our grandchildren. I am not that kind of grandpa. And neither are the 3,522,141 New Yorkers who voted YES on the Environmental Bond proposition in 2022.

Why is Hochul doing the fossil fuel industry’s dirty work on climate? Ask her yourself!