This question has been troubling me for years, now, and I don't have very many easy answers to help us get out of the pathetic status that we are now in. There are three glaring problems that I see.
1.) Lack of political will. The governor and the legislature, especially the Assembly have not been very interested in actually having NY State do its part to help save a habitable climate, and they are not seriously motivated to do it even when the CLCPA is a law that says they must do it. The law has been treated as a suggestion and has cynically been used as a green fig leaf to brag about being a climate leader, without the real, needed actions to execute it. The administrative entities, including DEC, DPS/PSC, NYSERDA, NYPA, etc. have apparently been deterred due to lack of support by the governor.
I have lobbied a NY Assembly member, who has used the time it took for Climate Action Council to develop a scoping plan as an excuse to wait, and then even after it was released in Dec 2022, was just not very motivated to co-sponsor, never mind champion climate legislation. But they would vote for something once it looked likely to pass. Now the excuses by NY State officials are the COVID hangover with supply chain problems, withdrawal of federal incentives/support for climate actions by current administration, the current federal administration's hostility to offshore wind, as well as the cynical use of the 'affordability' buzzword, even though renewable energy, backed up by battery based energy storage, is the least expensive way to produce electricity.
2.) Nobody is clearly in charge of climate action/CLCPA compliance. The second problem has been that NY State has never put any clear entity with appropriate authority, in charge of implementing the CLCPA provisions, not just the mandated targets for Greenhouse Gas emission reduction, and renewable energy sourced electricity, but also to enforce the requirement to prioritize all NY State decisions to consider effect on climate and to make sure they are made in order to help save a habitable climate, as much as possible, rather than stall this effort or worse yet, to make NY State's climate change worse.
3.) Lack of a detailed project management plan. The third problem is that an appropriate, powerful entity needs to put together a detailed project management plan with schedule timelines for tasks, milestones, assignment of responsibility and resources for individual tasks, tracking to make sure tasks get implemented on time, and corrective actions to recover schedule if milestones are in danger of being missed.
I worked as an engineer in a technical industry and this is how complicated activities were planned, executed, tracked, and managed. Here is a link to one source for further explanation of project management planning: https://graduate.northeastern.edu/knowledge-hub/developing-project-management-plan/
- We urgently need more honest public education of the urgency and the accelerating increases in climate driven horrible events.
- We need to explain the positive aspects of the needed transition to an electrified economy based on renewable energy, including better health, less deaths, less infrastructure damage, less risk of home damage, better jobs, etc. and connect them to affordability.
- We need to stress the huge consequence risks that have unknown onset, but with rising probability of occurrence, especially for widespread global famine that could happen in any year, as well as the slowly accelerating threat of rising sea levels at the other end of the spectrum.
Much of the public is oblivious and either thinks it is a hoax/scam or a slowly rising linear problem, but they don't understand how quickly we can trigger almost irreversible chains of horrific events.
The probability of occurrence of a climate-driven series of extreme weather events causing a global famine was analyzed by a huge insurance agency, named Lloyd's a few years ago. The following excerpt in single quotes, gives some sense of how bad this could be, but does not communicate the suffering, fear, chaos, breakdown of law and order, collapse of governments, and likely loss of much remaining ability to take further beneficial climate actions that could accompany the dry statistics, and that this could lead to a climate runaway to a hothouse earth, with billions of people dying, and a raging mass extinction event.
'A 2023 report by insurance giant Lloyd’s explores the odds of such a scenario, using weather data from the past 40 years and a crop model combined with a water-stress model to measure the economic impact of a sustained period of extreme weather.' ... 'The “extreme” case, which would cause global havoc, was estimated to cause $17.6 trillion in damage over a five-year period, with a 0.3% probability of occurrence per year — a 9% chance over 30 years. This extreme case would meet the United Nations’ definition of a global catastrophic risk event: a catastrophe global in impact that kills over 10 million people or causes over $10 trillion (2022 USD) in damage.'
Source of this excerpt: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2024/01/what-are-the-odds-that-extreme-weather-will-lead-to-a-global-food-shock/
I do not have any easy answers, but we need to try to come up with a better strategy and tactics. I don't even think very many environmental groups and climate activist groups, especially their largely inactive members, are fully aware of all of the potential horrific consequences and how close we are to triggering enough tipping points to stumble into climate catastrophe.
Valdi Weiderpass
Chair, Susquehanna Group of the Atlantic Chapter Sierra Club