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If you live in California, you’re already paying the cost of catastrophic wildfire three times: in your homeowner insurance bill, in your electricity bill and through your taxes. Survivors pay a fourth time through the damage and destruction of their home and community. Sadly, the bills will only keep climbing because the fires driving them keep getting worse.
I am working closely on this issue with my expert colleagues on wildfire, insurance, electricity and public policy. Together, we are examining the recent report Enhancing California’s Resiliency to Natural Catastrophes (the so-called “SB 254 report”). This is the first in a series of blog posts defining the wildfire-insurance-electricity challenge, assessing options presented in the SB 254 report, identifying tradeoffs, and making the case for urgent action.
Catastrophic wildfires have become a sobering reality of life in California. While fire is an essential part of the ecosystem in most of the state, catastrophic wildfires burn with greater severity than these ecosystems have evolved to withstand. These more extreme wildfires devastate human communities, destroy forests and other landscapes, threaten water supplies and produce poisonous smoke that is hard to escape. This new reality is driven by the convergence of climate-driven extreme weather, woody accumulation from the decades of suppression of ecologically necessary fire and housing development into wildlands.
The impacts and escalating costs from wildfires are creating dangerous failures in markets that are essential to daily life: insurance and electricity.
The growing magnitude of wildfire losses has destabilized the homeowners insurance market, causing insurers to stop offering coverage in high-risk areas, making insurance bills more expensive for everyone and leading to an increase in the number of homeowners reliant on the CA FAIR Plan — the state’s insurance market of last resort.
At the same time, catastrophic wildfires also impact our electric bills because utility equipment is a common cause of catastrophic fires. In California, state regulators order utilities to spend billions to reduce that risk, cover liability and recover from past events. Those wildfire-related costs add an average of $21 to $41 a month to residential electricity bills, in a state where the cost of living is already high. California needs an electric grid that is affordable, clean, safe and reliable — and the high costs of reducing wildfire risks make it harder to afford the clean energy transition California needs.
No single actor created this problem, and none can solve it alone: the state, utilities, insurers and communities each hold part of the answer. California needs long-term investments and short-term actions that do not simply move liability and costs around.
The only solution to addressing the wildfire crisis is to reduce the risk itself through significant, sustained investment in wildfire mitigation. Science-backed mitigation strategies that reduce losses will improve the lives of Californians while easing the pressures destabilizing the electricity and insurance sectors. These include land management strategies like fuel breaks and community strategies like home hardening. By targeting the highest risk areas, California can achieve the greatest risk reduction possible for the lowest shared cost. Policy that engages communities, utilities and the private sector can enable innovations and efficiencies that make limited dollars go further.
This work is substantial, but the costs of inaction are even greater. The 2025 Los Angeles wildfires alone are estimated to have caused up to $130 billion in losses. By comparison, the cost of fuel treatment in all high wildfire hazard areas in California is projected to cost $9.7 billion in total. These costs, along with home and community hardening, are a relatively small investment compared with the estimated $140 billion in capital losses, health costs, and indirect economic impacts caused by California’s wildfires in 2018 alone.
Mitigation not only reduces loss, it lowers fire suppression costs — which can be staggering. Nationally we are spending almost $3 billion every year on suppression, with CAL FIRE’s recent average over $800 million per year. One study focused on the Pacific Northwest found that every dollar invested in fuel treatments results in $5-6 less spent on firefighting expenditures. Across the Western U.S. as a whole, a dollar spent on fuel treatments saves about $3.75 in damages.
While California scales up long-term risk reduction, it also needs near-term measures to stabilize utilities, insurance and communities recovering from wildfire. California is unusual because investor-owned utilities can be held responsible for property damage caused by their equipment — even when they were not found to be negligent. Those utility payments help survivors rebuild and allow insurers to recover some of what they have paid out in claims. But wildfire liabilities have already pushed a major utility into bankruptcy, delayed survivor payments, raised borrowing costs and limited the utility’s ability to invest in grid safety, reliability and clean electricity.
Reform should make the utilities’ financial responsibility for wildfire more predictable and fairly shared across stakeholders without reducing the compensation survivors urgently need. California must also better connect utility, property and community mitigation to insurance pricing and coverage. This is important so that mitigation investments that measurably reduce risk actually improve insurability and increase insurance affordability. But these steps will provide only temporary relief unless they are paired with meaningful, sustained reductions in the underlying risk.
The SB 254 report (Becker, 2025) tasked the California Earthquake Authority with developing a comprehensive assessment to analyze and develop long-term reforms that could preserve access to insurance, strengthen wildfire and natural catastrophe mitigation while improving community safety and resilience. The resulting report offers a range of policy options for addressing California’s interconnected insurance, utility and wildfire challenges. Importantly, it recognizes that reducing wildfire risk will require a “whole-of-society” effort — from front doors to mountain tops.
We will always pay for wildfires. The choice is whether we pay for a more costly response and recovery, or for adequate risk reduction and resilience beforehand.
The following areas are critical to get right:
In upcoming pieces, we’ll dive deeper into these topic areas, reflect on the options in the SB 254 report, and explore policy changes needed to make California wildfire resilient, insurable, and affordable.
Expert contributors to this blog series include Jenna Knobloch, Talley Burley, Michael Colvin and Katie Roback from Environmental Defense Fund and Jeremy Sokulsky and Brynn O’Donnell from Environmental Incentives.
Electricity prices are rising across the U.S. Demand for electricity is going up for the first time in 20 years. And more extreme weather and heat waves are causing blackouts.
Yet instead of expanding access to low-cost, clean power, the Trump administration is making the problem worse. Since Day One, the administration and its allies in Congress have pushed policies that restrict the supply of affordable, homegrown clean energy – creating a self-inflicted rate hike just as the country needs more power.
The consequences are apparent: According to research from EDF and Atlas Public Policy, 21 gigawatts of clean power have been cancelled in that timeframe – or about 10 Hoover Dams’ worth of generating capacity.
Wind and solar offer some of the cheapest – and fastest – ways to provide electric power today. In contrast, the cost to build natural gas plants has soared in recent years and a shortage of turbines is delaying construction, while coal remains one of the most expensive and dirtiest ways to generate power. To put it simply: Blocking cheap, clean energy while doubling down on outdated fossil fuels makes no economic or environmental sense.
The attacks on clean energy are not only raising our electricity bills, but they are unleashing more pollution in our water and air, killing thousands of jobs and making our electric grid weaker. Here are major ways the Trump administration is obstructing clean energy – and how EDF and allies have been fighting back:
When Duke Energy Carolinas (DEC) initially submitted its 2025–2026 general rate case, customers faced the prospect of an 18% rate hike — a crushing burden at a time when North Carolina families are already struggling with high costs of living. As an intervenor in the proceeding before the North Carolina Utilities Commission (NCUC), Environmental Defense Fund stepped in with clear goals: stop the unfair shift of massive infrastructure costs onto working families, and accelerate the transition to a clean, resilient electric grid.
The comprehensive settlement reached between Duke Energy, the Public Staff, EDF and key partners represents a critical course correction. It cuts the amount Duke is allowed to earn on grid infrastructure investments, reduces the utility’s request for excessive revenue guarantees by more than half, and makes meaningful, targeted cuts to some of the utility’s proposed capital investments. Altogether, this agreement spares household electric customers a lot of unnecessary financial pain.
However, this settlement doesn’t solve all issues and isn’t yet final. In particular, the question of what happens to the state’s critical Customer Assistance Program for residents struggling to pay their power bills remains unresolved. A final Commission order on this and the pending Duke Energy Progress (DEP) rate cases will be issued this fall, which may or may not accept this settlement’s provisions.
While we expect other advocates, and leaders like Attorney General Jackson, will rightly continue to push for lower rate increases, the proposed settlement also includes a significant win in the fight over who pays for the infrastructure costs from soaring energy demand in North Carolina.
North Carolina is facing unprecedented electricity demand growth. Driven by an explosion of hyper-scale data centers, peak energy use across Duke’s Carolinas system is projected to surge over the coming decades, largely driven by “computational load.” Historically, when large commercial users enter a utility’s territory, the utility builds expensive new generation and transmission infrastructure, socializing those capital costs across all customer classes. Under Duke’s original proposal, ordinary residential customers were on track to continue subsidizing power-hungry tech giants.
EDF and clean energy allies challenged this dynamic directly. Through expert analysis, we demonstrated that large load expansion must not come at the expense of everyday consumers. In the hearing, commissioners agreed that, for example, the cost of building a new power line from a power plant to support a data center shouldn’t go on “grandma’s light bill.”
In response, we secured a vital concession from Duke Energy: supporting a separate, expedited regulatory proceeding dedicated to establishing a formal Large Load Tariff (LLT) before new rates go into effect.
A properly structured Large Load Tariff is essential for customer protection and, if done correctly, will provide relief to future residential power bills, remove risk for other customers, and potentially offer a pathway towards the financing and expedited deployment of new, affordable, clean energy solutions. By establishing rules such as minimum monthly billing requirements, multi-year power purchase commitments and exit fees, an LLT ensures that data center developers carry the full financial risk and cost of their grid connections.
A properly designed LLT enforces a simple principle: the data center energy giants must pay their fair share.
The proposed settlement agreement does not set the details of a LLT, which are key, but it does commit Duke and Public Staff (North Carolina’s professional ratepayer advocacy agency) —with input from stakeholders like EDF — to submit a special tariff covering large data centers by the end of September.
While establishing a Large Load Tariff prevents unfair cost-shifting, it only solves half the equation. If data centers satisfy their massive energy needs by expanding centralized fossil fuel generation, North Carolina’s climate progress and public health will suffer. The next frontier is ensuring that new large-scale demand is paired with dedicated, zero-carbon energy.
To achieve this, EDF is championing “Bring Your Own Clean” (BYOC) frameworks. Under a BYOC structure, large commercial operations are required to directly procure, co-locate or contract for their own clean energy, battery storage and demand-response resources. By pairing data center expansion with new clean energy capacity, incoming tech operations can meet their own power needs without driving up system-wide peak prices or adding new sources of climate- and health-harming air pollution to the grid.
The momentum for BYOC policies is rapidly building. Governor Josh Stein’s Energy Policy Task Force, established under Executive Order 23, highlighted this exact priority. The Task Force’s interim report called for BYOC options, load flexibility (when data centers temporarily reduce their power use from the grid), and grid-enhancing technologies to manage load growth from data centers responsibly.
Implementing BYOC framework in North Carolina will most likely require legislative action. To this end, EDF is actively collaborating with Task Force stakeholders, state regulators and industry leaders to translate these recommendations into concrete policy proposals. Looking ahead to the 2027 legislative session, our focus will be on codifying statutory protections that enable data center developers to bring their own clean energy.
Legislative action in 2027 will be vital to safeguard grid reliability, better protect customers’ wallets, and ensure that any future data center development in North Carolina powers all of us toward a clean, affordable energy future — rather than a retreat to outdated, expensive fossil fuels that further strains North Carolina families’ budgets and health.
California just took another major step toward cleaner air, healthier communities and more affordable transportation. Governor Newsom recently signed a state budget that invests roughly $600 million in cleaning up local air pollution – especially from transportation. The package includes a first-of-its-kind instant rebate program for first-time electric vehicle buyers, continued investments in charging infrastructure and funding that will help keep California’s transition to pollution-free transportation moving forward.
At a time when federal vehicle climate protections have been rolled back and California’s clean air authority faces ongoing unlawful attacks, this budget shows that states can continue leading the way by partnering with automakers to deliver practical solutions that save families money, reduce pollution and strengthen the economy.
What’s in the budget?
The biggest win is MyFirstEV, a new instant rebate program that makes buying an electric vehicle easier and more affordable. Eligible first-time buyers can receive $3,500 off a new electric vehicle or $1,750 off a used electric vehicle right at the dealership. Instead of waiting months for a tax credit, buyers receive the discount immediately when they purchase or lease an eligible vehicle.
The program also makes public dollars go further. Participating automakers will match the state’s investment dollar for dollar, effectively doubling available rebate funding. Thirteen major automakers have already committed to participating – including Ford, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Lucid, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Rivian, Subaru, Tesla, Toyota and Volvo – demonstrating broad support for helping more Californians drive electric. Earlier this year, EDF joined automakers, public health organizations and clean transportation advocates in urging lawmakers to establish this innovative public-private partnership.
The budget also continues investing in charging infrastructure and advancing other clean transportation priorities that make owning an electric vehicle practical and convenient. Together, these actions help address two of the biggest barriers to EV adoption: affordability and access to reliable charging. While this budget marks significant progress, EDF will continue advocating for sustained investments in light-duty vehicles, heavy-duty trucks, charging infrastructure and programs that expand access to cleaner transportation for lower-income Californians.
Why these investments matter
Transportation is California’s largest source of climate pollution and one of the biggest contributors to unhealthy air. Replacing gasoline-powered vehicles with electric vehicles reduces the tailpipe pollution that contributes to asthma, heart disease and other serious health problems, especially in communities located near ports, warehouses and major truck routes where exposure is highest.
These investments also help families save money. California EV owners can save up to $1,500 every year on fuel and maintenance compared to gasoline-powered vehicles. Instant rebates make those long-term savings available to more households by reducing the upfront cost of buying an EV. As more vehicles become electric and charging becomes smarter, reliance on the volatile cost of fossil fuels declines. Growing EV adoption can also improve grid efficiency and help lower electricity system costs over time.
California’s clean transportation leadership is also creating economic opportunity. The state’s policies have already attracted more than $10 billion in private investment while supporting more than 250,000 jobs across manufacturing, construction, utilities and technology. Continued investment gives businesses the confidence to keep building, hiring and innovating in California.
Looking ahead
This new EV incentive program demonstrates what’s possible when elected leaders invest in practical solutions that lower costs, reduce pollution and improve people’s lives. Now it’s time to build on that momentum. EDF will continue advancing policies that make the electric grid more affordable, reliable and resilient, including fully funding the California Energy Commission’s Demand Side Grid Support program that pays Californians to help stabilize the grid during periods of high demand while reducing costs and reliance on highly polluting fossil fuel peaker plants.
Texas has quickly become a new epicenter for data center development, on track to pass Virginia as the largest data center market in the U.S. in the coming years. As of right now, there are about 335 data centers in operation in the state, with at least 247 projects in development.
These facilities will need enormous amounts of electricity, with demand in the state projected to skyrocket by nearly 60% in less than four years. Already, there are 32 polluting gas-fired plants planned in the state to supply power for data centers — more than in any other state.
Data centers are causing and exacerbating serious pollution, water use and cost impacts on communities, leading to strong local pushback. While there are plenty of challenges to address, some of the major questions being determined by state officials right now focus on who will be responsible for paying for all this build-out caused by data centers? Without the right safeguards, Texas families and businesses could end up footing the bill for the massive energy, transmission and grid upgrades needed to serve new data centers.
While some public officials, including Governor Abbott, are raising the alarm about costs, a law passed in the 2025 legislative session (Senate Bill 6) is already setting some guardrails for how large load projects — which includes data centers — will connect to the Texas grid while minimizing costs and maintaining power reliability.
It is now up to the Public Utility Commission of Texas, the state utility regulator, to determine how Senate Bill 6 gets implemented. The rules it adopts will determine whether data centers pay their fair share and help keep the grid reliable — or whether the costs unfairly fall onto Texas families and businesses. Those decisions will also shape the next round of legislative proposals in 2027.
Here, we break down why these highly technical rules matter, how they can ensure that data centers pay their own way and preview the many other guardrails that Texas needs.
What it is: As Texas sees a surge in data center development, this rulemaking (PUCT #58481) will determine the rules for connecting these massive new electricity users to the grid, including what requirements they must meet and how much of the costs they must cover. In March of 2026, PUCT published a draft rule which proposed a fee structure and potential financial penalties for large load projects that are delayed or cancelled to help regulators predict the amount of load anticipated to come online and discourage “speculative” applications.
Why it matters: Utilities rely on predictions of future loads to plan and build out the grid. If they build facilities to serve an anticipated new data center but then the data center fails to materialize, Texans could be the ones footing the bill. EDF’s comments argue that prospective data centers should pay both refundable and nonrefundable fees to connect to the grid, which would help deter speculative projects while ensuring that data centers pay for all transmission costs they trigger.
What it is: Many large electricity users, including data centers, can temporarily reduce their electricity use or switch to onsite power for short periods, known as “demand flexibility.”
The Public Utility Commission of Texas is considering a program that would reward data centers for briefly reducing their power consumption when the grid is under stress. Known as the Large Load Demand Management Service (PUCT #58482), the program is designed to use demand flexibility as a grid reliability tool, helping meet peak power demand while reducing costs.
Why it matters: Maintaining grid stability is a balancing act, and there are different ways to manage it by adding power or subtracting demand. Instead of relying solely on building expensive new power plants to bring more power into the grid or over-relying on expensive, dirty “peaker plants,” PUCT can call on data centers to power down. In other words, subtracting power demand in these high stress periods can reduce costs for everyone.
In EDF’s comments, we recommended design features intended to maintain robust customer participation while controlling costs, including commitments from large customers on a seasonal basis — ensuring there’s enough flexibility during the times it’s needed the most. Maintaining strong participation from large electricity users is critical because every megawatt of flexible demand is a megawatt Texas doesn’t have to serve with new power plants or emergency measures. The more large customers that can reduce their electricity use during periods of grid stress, the more reliable and affordable the grid can be for everyone. We also encouraged regulators to consider how to expand demand management opportunities beyond large loads to smaller customers as well, in light of the enormous, untapped savings potential they represent.
What it is: As electricity demand grows, utilities must build new transmission lines to reliably deliver power to customers — including data centers — and those costs are ultimately paid by all electricity customers. Under the state’s current transmission cost rules, many large electricity users can avoid paying millions in transmission costs by reducing their demand during a few peak hours each summer. That means data centers can substantially lower their transmission bills while still requiring the grid to build enough infrastructure to serve them the rest of the year. This rulemaking on the evaluation of transmission cost recovery (PUCT #58484), seeks to update the rules regarding how these costs are allocated to ensure data centers are paying their fair share.
Related to this issue: During these peak periods, large commercial and industrial customers receive far greater financial benefits for reducing electricity use than residential customers. One analysis found that reducing one megawatt of demand saves a commercial or industrial customer about $68,550 in annual transmission costs, compared with just $94 for a residential customer — a 727-to-1 disparity for providing the same grid benefit.
Why it matters: EDF argued that the state should assign transmission costs to retail energy providers serving residential customers on a demand basis. This would give households more opportunities to reduce their costs by avoiding peak periods, thereby incentivizing use of grid-benefiting behaviors and technologies, like smart thermostats and batteries. As more customers reduce demand when the grid is most constrained, the amount of transmission infrastructure needed — and the costs that must be recovered from all customers over time — can also be reduced.
Grid load forecasting: As Texas braces for an onslaught of new large load customers joining the grid, it is essential that Texas regulators have an accurate way to forecast demand. An accurate forecast allows the state to assess reliability and determine transmission and infrastructure investment needs. In October, EDF submitted comments on PUCT #58480, which aims to update how Texas projects future grid supply and demand.
In a step forward, PUCT recently decided to improve large-load forecasting by incorporating adjustments based on the actual baseline electricity use of early projects (known as “Batch Zero”). Taking more time to refine these forecasts will help ensure future reports accurately reflect how much new demand is likely to come online and when.
Transmission cost recovery in the long term: There is another key rulemaking that is currently open for comments ahead of Senate Bill 6 implementation in late 2026 (#58000) that seeks to determine how large electricity users should be charged for transmission service along with determining if/for how they should remain responsible for full costs if their usage is not as high as expected or declines over time. This rulemaking may impact who gets shouldered with the cost of infrastructure in the long term, since data centers may be obligated to pay less over time, and that may mean that costs get shifted onto other Texas customers.
These rulemakings are just a slice of what Texas must address with regard to data centers. The PUCT’s Senate Bill 6 implementation may resolve some of these issues but certainly not all of them.
Policymakers, tech companies and utilities should create enabling conditions for data centers to realize bring-your-own clean power solutions that can serve their load, reduce costs and reduce stress on the grid. They should also expand access to distributed energy resources — such as residential battery storage, rooftop solar and energy efficiency — to support data center growth and increase reliability. At the same time, they should ensure data centers strengthen, rather than strain, local water resources, and take further steps to protect ratepayers from price increases spurred by data centers.
As Texas prepares for unprecedented growth in electricity, state officials have a choice right now: create rules that ensure data centers pay their fair share, keep the grid reliable and continue the rapid deployment of affordable clean energy — or risk shifting the costs onto families and businesses.
New York recently passed major rollbacks to its landmark Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act in an opaque process as part of New York’s FY2027 budget negotiations. While the state’s long-term climate commitments remain, these changes allow the state to delay action on cutting climate and health-harming pollution and slow the transition away from price-volatile fossil fuels.
The CLCPA amendments make changes to three major components of the law: the deadline for regulations to achieve statewide greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets, GHG emissions accounting methodology and the GHG emissions targets themselves. While strong long-term commitments are preserved, these changes collectively have the effect of allowing for less-ambitious near-term action to drive down climate pollution and improve energy affordability, risking the state’s ability to timely and cost-effectively meet its long-term targets.
In this blog, we dive into the impacts of changes to the deadline for statewide regulations and how this change further delays already overdue benefits promised to New Yorkers when the CLCPA was first passed in 2019: cleaner air, decreased climate pollution and reduced dependence on price-volatile fossil fuels. Future blogs in this series will examine the impacts of other recently enacted changes to the law.
Among the amendments passed into law at the end of May was a shift to the deadline for regulations to achieve the state’s GHG emissions limits. The original law required that these regulations be in place by January 1, 2024—a deadline the state missed and was therefore subsequently found by the New York State Supreme Court-Albany County to be out of compliance. Under the amended law, regulations are now not due until December 31, 2028 – nearly a decade after the law’s original passage and five years after the original deadline. The state’s 2022 Scoping Plan identified cap-and-invest as the most cost-effective program design to drive down statewide GHG reductions, and the Hochul Administration previously drafted but never released cap-and-invest regulations to fulfill this requirement. If the state takes all the time it is given under the amended law, a program will not start generating pollution cuts, household energy cost savings and job creating investment programs until 2029.
Delays in these implementing regulations mean that New Yorkers continue to miss out on the public health and economic benefits promised since 2019. Looking at the effects of delaying cap-and-invest alone, the cost impacts are clear. In the intervening period between the program’s originally anticipated 2025 start and a potential 2029 start, New Yorkers will have missed out on an estimated $16.7 billion in clean energy and affordability investments. These investments would fund utility bill rebates and help households adopt home efficiency measures and upgrade to clean, efficient technologies that lower bills, including electric vehicles, heat pumps, rooftop solar and more.
Based on prior analysis of how New York cap-and-invest dollars could flow to clean energy programs, a delay until 2029 would mean hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers – particularly low- and moderate-income households – miss out on investments that make it cheaper and easier to access clean energy and efficiency upgrades that lead to month-over-month energy cost savings. To be clear, New Yorkers are paying more for energy now than they would be if cap-and-invest were in place. For example, delaying cap-and-invest from 2025 to 2029 would mean:
It also means billions in foregone investments in public transit, in job-creating clean energy projects and in programs that would cut pollution and create economic opportunity in disadvantaged communities. These are only a few examples of potential investments that should already be delivering cost-savings and pollution cuts in communities today.
Delaying climate progress also means delaying cleaner air and the health benefits that come with it, in addition to good-paying job opportunities. Based on prior analysis by NYSERDA and DEC, cap-and-invest would have delivered an estimated $16.9 billion in public health benefits between 2025 and 2029 and avoided over 1,500 premature deaths and thousands of emergency room visits from asthma. Over that same period, cap-and-invest would have supported 118,000 new good-paying jobs across New York, with average earnings 21% above the state median income.
At a moment when the costs of relying on the volatile fossil fuel economy are higher than ever, changes made to the CLCPA are delaying the job, health and economic benefits that New Yorkers need now. Further delay is now enabled by these amendments, but it is not inevitable. There are clear actions the administration and legislators can take to provide immediate relief to New Yorkers, limit the growing costs of fossil fuel reliance and improve our access to clean and reliable energy.
Most critically, it is in every New Yorkers’ interest for the Hochul Administration to move swiftly on cap-and-invest and get a program up and running before 2029. The sooner the program is in place, the sooner cost-saving and pollution-cutting investments start flowing.
In the interim, it is essential that state leaders accelerate investment of $2 billion available to benefit New Yorkers now through the Sustainable Future Fund. These programs will help homeowners and renters lower utility bills through clean heating and efficiency measures, help school children breathe cleaner air with zero-emissions buses and healthy school retrofits, and much more. These critical cost-saving and job-creating investments are precisely the type that could be scaled and sustained over time by cap-and-invest.
In the coming years, legislative leaders must seek every avenue to ensure timely spending of available funds on these benefits, oversee rapid and robust implementation of the amended climate law, and work to advance additional policies that remove barriers to clean energy progress or require robust action for specific emissions sectors or sources.
New Yorkers cannot afford to wait years longer for the benefits they were promised. Each year of delay means higher energy costs, more avoidable pollution, missed clean energy investments, and fewer good-paying jobs. The 2026 CLCPA amendments may have lowered the floor for near-term action, but they did not lessen the urgency of the climate, affordability and public health challenges New Yorkers face. State leaders must move faster, not slower, to deliver the cleaner air, lower bills and good-paying jobs the CLCPA is designed to deliver.
