Could New York Fight Fascism with Climate Policy?

One lesson commentators and strategists are drawing from the 2024 election is that Democrats ignore the cost of living at their peril. That has huge implications for climate policy: Even with deadly drought, wildfires and flooding hammering the working class nationwide, policies that limit this damage from climate change are too often successfully framed by Republicans as a cost to “ordinary Americans.” The clean-energy focused Inflation Reduction Act, despite its name, didn’t do enough to derail that narrative, nor address the very cost of living crisis so many Americans face. New York state, however, now has an opportunity to try to do climate policy right, and put money back into working people’s pockets.

Wednesday at City University of New York’s John Jay College in midtown Manhattan, hundreds of New Yorkers rallied before a public hearing to demand that the New York Power Authority (NYPA) fulfill the mandate set out by the groundbreaking Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA). Passed last year, BPRA commits the state to funding and building renewable energy in the inevitable event that the private sector is not on track to build enough to meet ambitious decarbonization goals that were set by the state in 2019. 

Since BPRA’s passage, the state has drafted a plan to build renewables. Advocates say, however, that it’s not fast happening enough. NYPA’s draft plan envisions 3.5 gigawatts of renewable energy; the Public Power campaign, calling for 15 gigawatts, says that the current plan falls short of what the law demands, and does not include enough projects in the Hudson Valley or New York City, the areas where energy demand is highest.

Now, NYPA is getting feedback on its draft plan from the public. Many New Yorkers have been testifying at the hearings, and remarkably, more than 3500, organizers with Public Power NY claim, have submitted comments since the call went out on October 8, an unusual degree of public engagement for an energy issue—especially considering that this upsurge was not to stop a project from being built, but to demand more.

After months of drought and with Prospect Park literally on fire, the state’s legislatively mandated climate goals should loom large for everyone in government. So should the BPRA’s commitment to phase out the state’s polluting peaker plants, which contribute to childhood asthma in poor neighborhoods. But with Trumpism gaining ground even in this blue state—Harris lost the votes of more New York City residents than any Democratic presidential candidate in recent history—it also behooves the Democratic governor to push NYPA for another reason: we need climate policy that resists Trumpist narratives by improving ordinary people’s everyday material conditions.

Every exit poll this election emphasized inflation, and in New York we are no exception:  the spiraling cost of living was among the biggest issues for voters and certainly one reason Trump and other Republican candidates did unusually well even in New York City.

Working-class New Yorkers also need and deserve well-paying, secure jobs—meaning union jobs. For all the hot air from Trump and Vance about populism, Trump will likely denude the National Labor Relations Board of Biden appointees, who are very sympathetic to unions, replacing them with industry simps and antiunion toadies. Thus BPRA’s provision that NYPA projects use union labor is now particularly timely. Unions, including the AFL-CIO and the Building Trades Council, seeing the opportunity to expand the labor movement even in a hostile federal environment, have joined the call for NYPA to build 15 gigawatts of renewable energy rather than 3.5.

There are some indications that the pressure on NYPA is working: the agency is apparently already looking for more projects to include in the next draft.

It’s fitting that NYPA was founded by Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1931, as Americans—and people worldwide—were struggling for economic survival in the Great Depression and the Nazi Party in Germany was beginning to win elections. The following year, just before Hitler came to power, FDR won the U.S. presidential election. He was savvy about how to fight fascism. “Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations—not because the people of those nations disliked democracy,” he said in 1938, “but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion and government weakness…”. In NYPA, FDR’s legacy lives on and New York has an opportunity to once again fight fascism by democratizing energy.

Besides the founding of NYPA, something else that happened in New York during this decade of ideological and global military struggle between democracy and fascism was that the New York City subway system expanded dramatically, with several entirely new lines added during this period. We have an opportunity to do the same now.

Governor Kathy Hochul has just-revived congestion pricing, the long-delayed and much-litigated scheme to charge a toll to motorists driving into Manhattan (in her new proposal, the toll is reduced from $15 to $9). This policy has been far more demonized than BPRA, lending itself to a populist critique in a way that BPRA does not, since it does force some costs and inconvenience onto regular people. (Lawsuits by several unions attempting to block it certainly underscore that reality.) Republicans are vowing to make sure the Democrats pay a price for congestion pricing if it happens, boasting that the policy could give their party a shot at the governor’s office next time round. If ordinary New Yorkers don’t see much benefit from the toll, I’m sorry to say the Republicans could be right.

However, if New York goes about it carefully, congestion pricing has as much potential to improve New Yorkers’ lives as the BPRA. Most New Yorkers don’t even drive to work. If properly used, the revenue from the toll could make buses free, put elevators in major stations to bring them into compliance with disability laws and ease travel for parents lugging strollers, and expand subway and bus lines to underserved neighborhoods so people don’t need to rely so much on private cars or Uber—not to mention reduce stress and expand New Yorkers’ employment options. A congestion pricing plan geared at making these real improvements in our lives could end up being wildly popular.

FDR and his contemporaries invested heavily in antifascist messaging, but knew that a better antidote to far-right poison was government action to improve people’s lives. New Deal era liberalism tackled energy access and transit, among many other problems of everyday life. New York has a chance to build on that deeply beloved tradition and fight the climate crisis at the same time.