MESSAGE
| DATE | 2022-12-23 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] The Climate costs in NY Law
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High costs and few benefits in New York's crazy climate plan
James Hanley
5–6 minutes
Top-down economic planning has failed everywhere it’s been tried,
creating stagnating economies and poverty. But that’s no deterrent to
New York’s Climate Action Council. Its just-approved scoping plan, the
blueprint for implementing the state’s Climate Leadership and Community
Protection Act, has few benefits — but staggeringly high costs — for New
Yorkers.
The law requires the state’s entire economy be reorganized to reduce
greenhouse-gas emissions. Charged with this task, the council chose to
dictate what types of consumer products New Yorkers will be able to buy,
how they can heat their homes, how much workers in the green economy
will be paid, how quickly reliable sources of electricity will shut down
and what types of businesses will be bribed to set up shop in the state.
The council mandarins actually think they know how to plan a $2
trillion, 8-million-worker economy. It doesn’t matter that individual
New Yorkers may have their own life goals or economic realities. They
will be “incentivized” — and if necessary forced — to make
government-deemed “correct” choices.
The council has armed itself with a consultant’s “integration analysis”
that purports to show the climate act’s benefits outweigh its costs. But
its scoping plan fails to note that this analysis says New York’s direct
costs are around $150 billion greater than its direct benefits.
A wind tower
The council openly admits there will be shortfalls in electricity
production from wind and solar.
Getty Images
How is that so? Most of the benefit is defined as the value of avoided
greenhouse-gas emissions — a global benefit of which New York shares
only a small portion. The immense costs, however, will be borne almost
entirely by New Yorkers. The council has carefully hidden this ugly
truth from the public.
The costs are also likely to be much higher than the consultant’s
estimate because the ultimate price tag of multibillion-dollar public
projects is nearly always underestimated by a factor of two, three or
more. That means New York’s costs may outweigh its gains by $300 to $500
billion — a deadweight loss of up to $25,000 per state citizen.
As California politician Willie Brown said, politicians don’t tell the
truth about the cost of public projects because if they did the public
might never support them.
There’s also no direct connection between the integration analysis and
the costs suggested in the scoping plan. The council seems to have taken
the cost-benefit estimate as a blank check for spending. So compliance
with its plan’s various stipulations is to be accomplished via
“incentives” — a word that appears in the plan almost 200 times. Because
the individual costs of these incentives are undetermined, their total
cost could easily exceed that predicted by the integration analysis.
The analysis also ignores two potentially vast costs. First, it
implicitly assumes that all this top-down planning doesn’t harm the
broader economy, making it harder for businesses to run profitably and
deterring investment in the state. But history shows that such
heavy-handed intervention tends to be an economy killer.
Keyspan's Ravenswood Power Plant
New York’s costs may outweigh its gains by $300 to $500 billion — a
deadweight loss of up to $25,000 per state citizen.
Bloomberg via Getty Images
Second, there is still no plan to replace electricity production from
natural gas before shutting down gas-fired power plants. The council
openly admits there will be shortfalls in electricity production from
wind and solar but does no more than speculate on a nonexistent (perhaps
magical) “dispatchable, emissions-free resource” that will — it hopes —
plug the gap.
Not only is the cost of this magical solution not given, but unless it
appears, that gap could lead to electricity blackouts costing hundreds
of millions of dollars in economic damage, not to mention potentially
hundreds of lives.
Yet at a meeting this month, one council member shockingly said it would
not be good for the plan to “overstress” electric reliability.
Such a remark makes clear that the council wasn’t serious about
understanding the real costs of its plan. And it’s not hard to
understand why.
The Climate Action Council was charged to pursue a statutory goal: the
climate act’s mandated reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. Yet that
same law puts no limit on what residents can be forced to pay to achieve
its targets. It’s sad but it’s also predictable that the council’s plan
shows such little concern for the act’s effect on residents’ overall
well-being.
After all, the underlying law was written with even less concern for the
well-being of the average New Yorker.
James Hanley is a fellow with the Empire Center for Public Policy.
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
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