News 10 ABC, Johan Sheridan, 3.26.26
ALBANY, N.Y. (NEXSTAR) — Hundreds swarmed the New York State Capitol on Wednesday, blocking the entrance to Governor Kathy Hochul’s office for about three hours to demand that she prioritize the environment. Demonstrations around the Capitol were pushing back against Hochul’s plan to delay greenhouse gas rules by five years and emissions reductions by a decade.
Protestors marched from the Legislative Office Building to the second floor of the New York State Capitol Building on Wednesday afternoon. In the video at the top of this story, you can see the crush of demonstrators posted underground on the Concourse. They chanted and held banners outside the governor’s office, accusing Hochul of siding with the fossil fuelers and bailing out corporate polluters.
State Police arrested 21 demonstrators for trespassing after they blocked the way to Hochul’s office. That’s a civil violation, not a crime, but three of them caught misdemeanor charges for resisting arrest. Raj Goyle, campaigning for state comptroller with a promise to divest from fossil fuels, was among those arrested. In the video below you can see several protestors outside the glass doors:
Hochul wants to rewrite the 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act by April 1 as part of budget negotiations. The CLCPA requires the state to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2030. After the state missed a deadline to release cap-and-invest rules, a state judge ordered the government to comply by February 2026.
Instead, the Department of Environmental Conservation under Hochul pushed back, filing an appeal on March 13. State attorneys argued that they need at least eight more months to draft and propose new cap-and-invest regulations, and that any shorter timeframe would violate the State Administrative Procedure Act. They said updating greenhouse gas models would take five months. The appeal also cited the December 2025 New York State Energy Plan, projecting that federal hostility toward clean energy will cost New York $31 billion in financial assistance through 2040.
The administration argued that the state’s power grid can’t support a rapid transition to renewables. The New York Independent System Operator, which manages the grid, reported that retiring power plants, extreme weather, and high energy demands from data centers may trigger supply shortfalls that require thousands of megawatts of additional power from new fuel sources over the next decade.
Hochul wants to use her leverage in budget negotiations—Assemblymembers and State Senators don’t get paid while the budget is late after March 31—to force the changes through. She wants to release the late cap-and-invest rules in 2030 and achieve the first emissions reduction threshold by 2040.
“I would love to execute the climate law,” Hochul told reporters at campaign rallies in and around Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo on Wednesday, while the protests were going down. “I just cannot change the world from what it is.” She said New Yorkers should contact their legislators and encourage them to support the delay.
To counter the governor’s affordability argument, the environmental coalition NY Renews released a memo Thursday morning outlining some costs of delaying cap-and-invest. They projected up to $60 billion in lost local revenue and 150,000 jobs lost statewide, calculating that households making below $200,000 a year would miss out on over $8,530 in direct energy rebates.
The memo also highlighted the public health impact, predicting almost 5,000 premature deaths and over 4,000 asthma hospitalizations linked to continued pollution, creating $3.4 billion in statewide healthcare expenses. They argued that half of those premature deaths and as much as $21 billion of the lost revenues would directly impact poor and nonwhite communities.
A public health analysis from the State Energy Plan backs up those demographic disparities. According to the state’s own projections, the climate law protects disadvantaged communities. If enacted, it would prevent emergency room visits over asthma, for example. Minority communities would account for 72% of that reduction. And although these disadvantaged areas have a smaller share of the population, they’d also see half of all prevented premature deaths and hospitalizations.
Hochul based objections on leaked estimates from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority that the CLCPA will increase residential utility bills by thousands of dollars a year, even though it’s never technically been implemented. The governor hasn’t formally proposed any language to change the CLCPA, instead writing an op-ed in the digital Empire Report based on the numbers from that leaked NYSERDA memo. The governor is responsible for appointing nine of NYSERDA’s 13-member Board of Directors.
According to state data cited by the coalition of over 40 environmental and community groups that organized the rally—including New York Communities for Change, Citizen Action of New York, and Seneca Lake Guardian—sticking with fossil fuels will eventually cost New Yorkers $115 billion.
Democratic legislators at the press conference pushed back on the governor’s narrative, calling it a manufactured political crisis in an election year. They argued that rewriting the climate law doesn’t lower utility bills or follow established science.
“It doesn’t matter what the dates on the pieces of paper say,” said Finance Chair and Democratic State Senator Liz Krueger. “The fastest options we have to improve the reality from a cost perspective and a climate perspective is to keep moving as quickly as possible towards sustainable energy. And even organizations that we don’t think are always on our side, like who are doing the evaluation of what we can be doing in New York and what’s in the pipeline, say we can be moving quicker, we can be getting where we need to go despite the damage that the Trump administration and the Zeldin EPA administration are doing.”
Democratic Assemblymember Michaelle Solages warned that backtracking on climate will have an outsized effect on the marginalized in communities of color. She said they “breathe the dirtiest air, they flood first, they die in the floods, and they recover last.” She also argued that climate change will cost Long Island alone some $100 billion.
And Democratic Assemblymember Dana Levenberg roasted Hochul for trying to unilaterally dismantle the hard-fought law within days left in the budget process. “The CLCPA didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t happen in a last-minute budget adjustment,” she said. “It took scientists. It took advocates. It took industry. It took labor. Everybody coming together to say, ‘How can we do better in New York State?’”
The New York Civil Liberties Union has also condemned the governor’s plan. In a press release, Lanessa Owens-Chaplin, director of the NYCLU’s Racial Justice Center, called the CLCPA a shield against environmental racism. “The Governor’s proposed rollbacks are an affront to Black and Brown communities that have long borne the brunt of pollution and rely on these protections.”
The governor, business representatives, and some labor unions have argued that the CLCPA’s goals are impossible and too expensive. The Business Council of New York State launched a calculator on Tuesday to show how much the climate law would increase bills. Their estimates showed that meeting the 2030 mandate would represent a carbon fee costing residential customers between $120 and $178 per ton of fuel. The calculator’s campaign website repeated Hochul administration estimates that utility bills will go up by $4,000 a year upstate and by $2,300 around New York City.
Labor groups from the coalition New Yorkers for Affordable Energy—including leaders from ELEC Local 825 and IBEW Locals 10, 97, 1049, and 1249—also support Hochul’s proposed delays. In a press release, the union leaders warned that businesses would face a 45% increase in utility costs and a 60% increase in delivery costs under the current CLCPA, forcing businesses to raise prices and cut thousands of jobs.
A recent poll from Independent Power Producers of New York showed voters feeling frustration with energy prices. Released on Tuesday, that survey of about 800 of New York’s likely voters found that 71% had higher utility bills last year, while 57% said affordability was their top energy priority.
Hochul has also taken issues with how the CLCPA counts emissions of the greenhouse gas methane. A report released Tuesday by the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law analyzed the state’s unique accounting system for methane. They found that the state could close in on its targets faster were we to adopt international standards.
But the researchers—led by Al McGartland, former 20-year lead economist at the Environmental Protection Agency—concluded that the emission reductions required in the CLCPA are substantial enough, warning that leaders shouldn’t let math debates derail our climate goals. Still, the Citizens Budget Commission supported changing the methane math.
“New York State will not meet its 2030 emissions reductions goals,” said CBC President Andrew Rein. “Pushing to meet unattainable goals will dramatically increase household costs, hinder job growth and competitiveness, and squeeze out other state budget priorities.”
At the rally, Democratic Assemblymember Anna Kelles warned that shifting methane accounting from a 20-year to a 100-year window would mean ignoring the immediacy of climate threats, and that such an approach isn’t backed by science. “If you measure [methane] on a 20-year time scale, you’re capturing when it’s really influencing the atmosphere. If you measure it on a 100-year time scale, you are artificially watering it down,” she said. “We don’t lie. We follow science!”
On March 19, Attorney General Letitia James sued the federal government to stop President Donald Trump from rolling back some national climate rules, specifically the 2009 endangerment finding that classified methane and other greenhouse gases as a public health threat. But advocates at the rally accused the Hochul administration of using the very same junk science to gut the CLCPA, all to power crypto and artificial intelligence data centers.
Take a look at the DEC’s appellant brief in the CLCPA cap-and-invest case, filed March 13: