Democrats’ new approach to Trump on climate change

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ALBANY, New York — State climate policies are reeling from a double blow.

Even before President Donald Trump started dismantling the regulations and incentives that were meant to cut planet-warming pollution, blue states were grappling with their own voters’ concerns over high electricity and gas prices.

Taken together, the dynamics threaten the success of Democratic officials to aggressively fight Trump’s agenda and save their own climate goals.

“The public is exhausted,” said New York Assemblymember John McDonald, a Democrat from the Albany area. “At the end of the day, they don’t want to see their bills go up. We have to be sensitive to that.”

Democrat-led states have responded with an acknowledgment that they may not be the bulwark against federal climate rollbacks that they were during Trump’s first term.

“We should not surrender because of the change in Washington, but we have to be realistic that we’re not going to have a federal partner,” McDonald said.

Democratic politicians’ wariness of public backlash to the high consumer costs of the clean energy transition was evident before Trump won. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has warned of her state’s climate law’s effect on home heating bills and prices at the pump, emphasizing it was passed before she took office.

“What is the cost? I can’t do things without knowing the cost on consumers and either educating them that this is the way to go because it’s good for the future or just making it go a little bit slower,” she said over the summer about New York’s efforts to transition to clean energy. “The goals are still worthy — but we have to think about the collateral damage.”

Now, many of the same states that enacted ambitious emissions reduction goals are balking at carrying out the far-reaching measures needed to meet them as Trump pursues the same playbook this time around.

Hochul announced this month she would no longer finalize a landmark pollution pricing and climate funding program this year as originally promised. Maryland is delaying action on a similar program, and Vermont also looks poised to jettison an effort to fund home electrification by charging more for heating fuels after bruising losses for Democrats in the Legislature.

Canada is dealing with a conservative offensive against its carbon tax, too. The policy has fallen so far out of vogue north of the U.S. border that most Liberal contenders vying to replace Justin Trudeau as prime minister in March are walking back their support for the federal price on carbon. And even California is pushing back reauthorization of its emissions cap, the nation’s first.

The latest setbacks reflect Democrats’ decades-long struggle to navigate the balance between climate action and the shorter-term economic interests of their voters.

Still, there are pockets of optimism.

Eight years ago, Democratic governors and mayors launched coalitions to keep up climate action in the face of the wrecking ball Trump took to Obama-era rules. New York, California, New Jersey, Washington and Oregon strengthened or enacted ambitious emissions reduction targets — and some Republican leaders followed them, like Vermont Gov. Phil Scott and former Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker.

“We are ready to do it again,” said former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who now serves as the U.N.’s special envoy on climate ambition and last week committed to paying America’s dues to the U.N. climate body after Trump issued an executive order withdrawing from the Paris climate accords.

Hochul and New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, co-chairs of the U.S. Climate Alliance, claimed earlier this week that the group of 22 states and 2 territories would still reach its target of cutting emissions at least 26 percent from 2005 levels by this year to support the Paris agreement.

Hochul signed a sweeping “Climate Superfund” measure that will attempt to extract billions of dollars from fossil fuel companies to compensate for past fossil fuel emissions and moved forward with congestion pricing in New York City. Lujan Grisham said she wants to codify a net zero by 2050 goal for her state this year.

And Washington state handily defeated a ballot measure seeking to repeal its landmark carbon pricing program in the face of conservative attacks that it has raised gas prices. Regulators there now want to expand their program to join a market with California and Quebec.

“We had a direct test of that hypothesis that you can’t support climate change action if there’s some financial impact,” former Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat who left office earlier this month, told POLITICO after the election. “We’ve showed that you can, you must, and over time, I believe we will.”

Other Democrats are trying to highlight how their renewable energy policies can help control costs. Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont emphasized an all-of-the-above approach during his State of the State address earlier this month.

“Everyone was mad as hell looking at their bills following the hottest July in recorded history,” Lamont said.

Environmental advocates are swift to point out that there are many factors behind high energy prices, including volatile fossil fuel costs and aging gas infrastructure.

“Our status quo is not affordable and our status quo is causing climate change,” said Jess Ottney Mahar, The Nature Conservancy’s New York policy and strategy director.

But as Trump starts his second term, the gulf between rhetoric and reality on cutting emissions is starting to appear insurmountable, jeopardizing states’ ability to continue making headway in fighting global warming.

Offshore wind and other renewable energy projects have been canceled due to rising costs of components, supply chain disruptions and inflationary pressures tied to the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and that was all during the Biden administration.

Now, Republican victories in 2024 are threatening to stifle climate action further.

“The election rattled everybody,” said Kim Coble, co-chair of the Maryland Commission on Climate Change and executive director of the state’s League of Conservation Voters chapter. “I think everybody kind of stopped and said, ‘Wait a minute. Wow. What’s this really mean?’”

Coble isn’t reading too much into Washington’s win at the ballot given its inability to translate to similar programs in Maryland and New York, two states with Democratic trifectas. And environmentalists are discouraged by Hochul’s moves against a backdrop of federal inaction.

In addition to delaying the emissions trading program, she temporarily delayed a toll on traffic coming into Manhattan and acknowledged the state isn’t on track to meet its 2030 target of getting 70 percent of its electricity from renewable energy. Hochul is pointing to $1 billion she proposed in her budget earlier this month for climate programs like decarbonizing state buildings and electrifying vehicles, but green groups aren’t satisfied.

If there was still a Democratic president in D.C., “perhaps we’d be fine with a visionless governor,” said Eddie Bautista, executive director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, who joined two other advocates in resigning from a state climate justice panel on Tuesday in protest of Hochul’s approach on climate. 

On the other coast, California has repeatedly delayed plans to strengthen its emissions trading program that officials have cited as essential for meeting climate goals as Trump threatens to kneecap state electric vehicle regulations that rely on federal waivers.

State lawmakers are now preparing to take up its reauthorization, but are demanding more oversight of its cost and climate impacts, after an intense battle last year over a related program to lower transportation fuels’ emissions.

“We’re deciding how we want to proceed,” California Air Resource Board Chair Liane Randolph said Thursday when asked if the update would happen before lawmakers pass a reauthorization bill.

Governors will continue to step up efforts as they grapple with the costs of climate change fueled disasters, said U.S. Climate Alliance Executive Director Casey Katims.

“There’s going to be a lot of implementation that happens this year,” he said. “A lot of our states have set ambitious goals for clean energy and clean electricity standards and … this year is going to be an important year to deploy new clean energy generation to help meet those goals.”

The potential loss of federal funding shouldn’t halt efforts to address climate change, said McDonald, the New York lawmaker.

“It should not be a death knell, but it’s an opportunity to say, ‘Okay, where can we make a change to be sensitive to people’s wallets?’” he said.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey contributed to this report.

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