During his 2024 election campaign, President Trump exhorted oil and gas executives to contribute a billion dollars in exchange for creating a windfall for their industry. The industry responded with more than $450 million to influence the 2024 elections, and the federal government, in turn, went after clean energy with a wrecking ball in 2025 — a shortsighted move that spells trouble for electricity bills, clean air, and America’s technological competitiveness.
Several states from California to Illinois to Maine countered the Trump administration with bold green policies, but New York obsequiously approved a Trump-backed fracked gas pipeline and cryptocurrency mining, stopped the implementation of its landmark climate law in its tracks, and advanced a disastrous state energy plan to burn costly, polluting oil and gas largely unabated for decades.
Alas, New York’s fossil-fuel pivot is even more imprudent than the nation’s.
New York imports almost all the $50 billion worth of oil and gas it consumes annually from other states. It also leads the nation in pollution from heating homes and buildings with fossil fuels. Both the indoor and outdoor pollution from burning fossil fuels in buildings is associated with myriad health risks, thousands of premature deaths, and billions in health care costs, missed workdays, and lower quality of life.
Renewable energy creates local energy-infrastructure jobs and is fueled by free in-state sunshine, wind, and rivers. Electric vehicles and heat pumps deliver superior performance and comfort without health- and climate-destroying pollution and use only a fraction of the energy of their fossil-fuel counterparts.
Favoring fossil fuels over energy conservation and clean energy is a drag on New York’s economy and on New Yorkers’ health. It also runs counter to our core values.
New York has a proud history of environmental stewardship, which is now threatened. New Yorkers didn’t organize to ban destructive fracking in the state only to import more and more fracked gas from Pennsylvania. We didn’t fight for one of the nation’s strongest climate laws so Albany could quietly walk away from it.
Big Gas and Oil’s $450 million election crash didn’t buy attacks on just clean energy, but also on science, education, health care, immigrants, unions, first-amendment rights, Venezuelan sovereignty, and American democracy — all things New Yorkers care about. Bolstering the state’s dependence on fossil fuels forces us to keep funding the destruction of our environment, health, and a civil democratic society.
The Hochul administration has offered federal antipathy and energy affordability as rationales for its new energy policy that is euphemistically dubbed as “all of the above” but favors a fossil-fuel status quo. The excuses have more to do with political expediency and gas lobbying than reality.
Current federal policy is indeed problematic, but Gov. Hochul has several tools to mitigate its impacts, such as removing bureaucratic barriers to cost-effective rooftop and small-scale solar, easing interconnection and permitting for renewable energy, holding data centers accountable for the cost and emissions associated with their enormous electricity consumption, fully funding the Sustainable Future Program, and eventually launching the long-overdue Clean Air Initiative to cap pollution and invest in solutions.
The buildings sector, the largest source of New York’s greenhouse gas pollution, is almost entirely under state purview, free of federal interference.
The affordability pretext is completely backward. Emission reports show that New York’s in-state pollution from fossil fuels has generally stayed steady since Hochul took office. Yet, New Yorkers are facing skyrocketing utility bills. Our energy unaffordability crisis is the product of the fossil-fuel status quo and an aging energy infrastructure. The state’s latest energy plan fails to recognize and remedy this and portends a bleak, costly energy future, not to mention more pollution and higher health care costs.
Despite slowing residential gas demand, New York is on a costly and unsustainable gas-pipe laying spree that locks in 9–10% profits for utilities. Gas heating bills are expected to rise so much in the future due to these unnecessary investments that Hochul’s energy plan suggests adding surcharges to the already high electric bills to pay gas utilities for these pipes and the associated profits. All this because the state hasn’t mustered the political will to stand up to the gas industry and redirect these wasteful investments towards modern, clean and cost-effective alternatives.
Hochul should use her improving political fortune and growing public disdain for the president’s regressive stances to break away from Trumpian energy policies and restore New York’s clean energy leadership in the new year. Our wallets, lungs, and future generations would be grateful.
Gupta is a retired research scientist serving as the policy & research director at New Yorkers for Clean Power.
