State of Politics: Lawmakers await Hochul’s climate law proposal as Senate EnCon chair signals she’ll likely win changes

March 20th, 2026

BY Jack Arpey New York State – Read Online.

Mar. 19, 2026

Planet Albany continued to wait Thursday for a formal proposal from Gov. Kathy Hochul detailing what she would like changed in New York’s landmark 2019 climate law as part of this year’s state budget.

According to state lawmakers, the wait continues.

It’s a budget crusade Hochul has said she is willing to take on to prevent utility rates from skyrocketing — as she claims they will — if the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) and the lagging cap-and-invest funding mechanism behind it remain unchanged, despite environmental advocates dismissing the governor’s calculations.

It seems that a largely resistant Democratic-led state legislature may be starting to accept that this is a fight the governor could very well win — but they want some things too.

Multiple individuals familiar with conversations around the potential changes told Spectrum News 1 that the legislature was briefed on a variety of options the governor is considering this week. They include proposals she has recently highlighted publicly: Shifting the dates by which the state must meet certain goals, and changing the methodology by which New York tracks its progress on lowering emissions from a 20-year methodology to a more forgiving 100-year framework.

A more recently floated option is changing the climate law’s 1990 baseline by which emissions are measured, to a 2005 baseline.

State Sen. Pete Harckham, who chairs the upper chamber’s Environmental Conservation Committee, acknowledged that while he has made his opposition clear, when a final budget deal is hammered out it will likely include changes to the climate law:

“If the governor presents something, I believe it will,” he said. “The governor is insisting we do it in the budget, and if that’s the case, then we work collaboratively to try to get to a place where she feels she’s not in a jam and we continue to move the state forward.”

Harckham said he would have preferred to make changes, if necessary, as part of the next climate action plan update. If the governor insists on doing it this way — with the state budget deadline approaching — it’s imperative that the legislature be able to review a final proposal as soon as possible.

“The sooner we get to work on this, the better we’ll be,” he said.

This would allow resistant lawmakers to move from what Harckham described as a phase of “posturing and staking out positions” to checking Hochul’s work and figuring out how her ideas would impact New York’s emissions trajectory more broadly.

“You impact one side, then there’s an impact on the other side — and that’s why we need to see the calculations behind what they’re trying to accomplish, and then we can respond accordingly,” he said. “I think the environmental community is very concerned that whatever happens, we maintain some sort of cap-and-invest structure with definitive dates, goals, and metrics to measure the process of making progress. That’s incredibly important because that’s how we’re going to get to where we need to be.”

Harckham said he too considers those to be lines in the sand.

Multiple other legislative sources conceded that they don’t think the governor is entirely off base, but they are frustrated with the waiting game and how the proposal has been rolled out.

It’s expected that a potential deal could involve an iteration of Hochul’s wish list combined with items from the Senate and Assembly’s one-house budget proposals, which are intended to provide utility rate relief more immediately.

Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins told Capital Tonight Thursday, “We have to” find a way to address utility costs in the final spending package. “Absolutely, one way or another,” she said.

Hochul this week raised eyebrows by telling reporters that her recent comments around the law and utility rates have been mischaracterized — remarking that declaring the CLCPA the reason for rising utility rates would be a “stupid thing to say” because the CLCPA has yet to be fully implemented.

“I’m trying to stop your utility bills from going higher by rolling this out with a longer runway,” she said. “I think anybody who has a rational brain would look at everything I’ve laid out and say, ‘Oh, I get it.’”

Advocacy groups like Upstate United have long criticized the climate law and its economic impacts, as have Republicans in the state legislature. Executive Director Justin Wilcox told Spectrum News 1 that Hochul is right — making changes now will do nothing for current rates, but the legislature should support the governor’s stance in believing that changes will prevent future increases.

“I don’t think there’s any going backward on that, but I do think the idea is to reduce future expenditures and reduce future increases,” he said, commending the governor for her interest in making changes while chastising the legislature for resisting. “To me, it’s unconscionable that they would allow these increases to go forward at a time when New Yorkers are struggling with affordability and being able to pay their utility bills.”

Hochul has backed up her insistence that increases are imminent through a now-infamous memo from NYSERDA, but environmental advocates have said it is flawed and intentionally alarmist.

Liz Moran, New York policy advocate for Earthjustice — who is part of the lawsuit around which much of the memo was based — is vehemently against any changes to the law. She does not believe that any of Hochul’s proposals will meaningfully lower rates or stop them from continuing to rise, because delaying climate action will keep the state reliant on natural gas for longer.