Good news: Public backlash is rising against the state’s lunatic Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act’ s “de-carbonization” schemes banning gas stoves; soaring utility bills and oppressive gas-stove and -heat bans will do that.
Bad news: Team Hochul is looking to spend $500,000 in taxpayer money to propagandize us all into accepting this utterly pointless pain.
The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, a k a NYSERDA, which is charged with implementing the Climate Action madness, is offering the half-million, one-year contract for a PR firm to help spin a “positive narrative” around the plan.
The scheme (a brainchild of then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo that Hochul has embraced) mandates slashing statewide carbon emissions 40% by 2030 and 85% by 2050 by closing reliable natural-gas power plants and replacing them with less reliable — and more expensive — wind and solar energy.
One sign of the extravagance: The state Public Service Commissioners last year rejected wind and solar developers’ requests to more than double to $22 billion their subsidies — whereupon NYSERDA just let out more contracts at the even-pricier rate.
The NYSERDA bid document requires the “winning” PR firm to target its efforts at the “headwinds related to large scale land-based and offshore renewable energy project development” as well as “concerns related to the cost and practicality of supporting building decarbonization.”
That is: The sheep are starting to wake up — help us put them back to sleep!
Even NYSERDA admits the program is growing impossibly expensive: Its latest public update adds $300 million to bring the estimated cost of one piece of the puzzle (adding 6 gigawatts of energy storage by 2030) to $2 billion.
Costs that will be added to consumers’ bills, though the state is ordering utilities not to let ratepayers see it as a separate charge.
As we’ve said before, it’s only a matter of time before this whole mad scheme collapses, either from its inherent impossibility or public fury over the costs.
None of the numbers add up (it won’t even meaningfully impact climate change!), and no PR snow job is going to change it.
Hochul can start facing reality by saving that $500,000 for something that could actually make a difference.