The scandals and controversies that have engulfed Albany surely feed public cynicism.\u00a0 However, the vast majority of the time, government is providing services that help people, and it does so in a reasonably efficient and ethical way.<\/p>\n
But that doesn\u2019t make news.<\/p>\n
Last week, there was evidence of how effective New York\u2019s policymaking has been \u2013 at least compared to the rest of the nation.<\/p>\n
Recently, the Obama Administration unveiled its plan to combat global warming by ordering a cut in carbon emissions from power plants.\u00a0 The plan calls for a 32 percent nationwide carbon reduction in power plant emissions by the year 2030.<\/p>\n
The President\u2019s plan makes sense.\u00a0 2014 was the hottest year in recorded history.\u00a0 The world\u2019s experts have stated that global warming is largely due to human activity\u2014primarily the result of reliance on fossil fuels.\u00a0 They argue that the only way to respond to this crisis is to dramatically slash the use of fossil fuels, like coal, oil and gas, which, when burned, emit the greenhouse gases warming the planet.<\/p>\n
New York State has been responding.\u00a0 In June, the state\u2019s energy plan committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent, decreasing energy consumption in buildings by 23 percent, and making sure half of the state\u2019s energy is produced from renewable sources.\u00a0 These goals are part of the state\u2019s overall effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by the year 2050, the goal set by the world\u2019s climate experts as part of the overall worldwide strategy to reduce the impacts of global warming.<\/p>\n
While the federal plan focuses on power plants, the state\u2019s energy plan also looks at other sectors \u2013 suchas heating buildings and the transportation industry \u2013 toboost energy efficiency.<\/p>\n
New York\u2019s plans \u2013 if enacted \u2013 would ensure that the state meet the Obama Administration\u2019s deadline a full decade ahead of the federal mandate.<\/p>\n
New York\u2019s head start is the result of its policymaking.\u00a0 A key component has been New York\u2019s participation in a nine-state effort known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which caps each state\u2019s annual carbon emissions and requires power plants to purchase pollution allowances at auction, with the money supposed to be reserved for clean-energy projects in each state.<\/p>\n
The potential program that could dramatically boost the state\u2019s global warming efforts is New York\u2019sReforming the Energy Vision<\/em> (also known as \u201cREV\u201d) plan.\u00a0 REV is under active development before the state\u2019s Public Service Commission.\u00a0 REV has the potential to fundamentally reshape the production and distribution of electric power and significantly reduce the creation of heat-trapping carbon emissions through the use of energy reductions, efficiency measures and the move to reliance on alternative energy sources, such as solar power.<\/p>\n The REV is also the vehicle for modernizing the state\u2019s energy system.\u00a0 Under the current utility structure, the power sector in New York is on track to spend an estimated $30 billion to replace and modernize the state\u2019s aging energy infrastructure over the next decade.\u00a0 REV offers a way to modernize that system in a \u201cgreen\u201d and affordable way.<\/p>\n New York\u2019s REV offers a vision for how to modernize the energy grid while mitigating the impacts from global warming.\u00a0 At the moment, it is just a plan.\u00a0 But if it succeeds, it can offer a model for the nation and perhaps the world.<\/p>\n And it is an example of innovation in state government.\u00a0 It\u2019s easy to get depressed by the news coming out of Albany.\u00a0 It is, however, important to keep the bad news in perspective.\u00a0 There is a lot happening in New York that\u2019s good, too.\u00a0 The state\u2019s efforts to tackle global warming areexamples of its positive efforts to respond to the most daunting issue of our time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The scandals and controversies that have engulfed Albany surely feed public cynicism.\u00a0 However, the vast majority of the time, government is providing services that help people, and it does so in a reasonably efficient and ethical way. But that doesn\u2019t make news. Last week, there was evidence of how effective New York\u2019s policymaking has been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1526"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1526\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1527,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1526\/revisions\/1527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}