Every September, New York City is overrun by Climate Week. That’s when self-appointed elites — professional activists, fearmongering politicians, woke corporate executives, and billionaire foundations — gather to demand more expensive ways to remake America’s energy system and lecture ordinary Americans about sacrifice.
New Yorkers know about sacrifice. They’re struggling with some of the nation’s highest electricity prices. In May, New York’s residential electricity rate was 29.93 cents per kilowatt-hour, third-highest in the country and 62% above the national average. Ordinary New Yorkers get stuck with the bill, not that green politicians would know or care.
During this summer’s heat wave, only 47% of city residents said they could comfortably afford to run air conditioning. More than half limited its use to avoid high electric bills or didn’t have air conditioning at all.
Yet New York’s Climate Week will feature the people pushing renewable mandates, fossil-fuel restrictions, electrification schemes, and carbon-pricing plans that drive up the cost of power, transportation, heating, food, and just about everything else Americans buy.
Now, with the midterm elections approaching, Democrats have suddenly discovered “affordability.” They speak sympathetically about families squeezed by grocery bills, rent, insurance, and utility costs. Then they gather to applaud policies expressly intended to raise energy prices.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a featured Climate Week speaker, has said American families face higher insurance premiums, higher electricity bills, and higher grocery bills. This is rich coming from the Senator who fiercely advocates carbon pricing. Whitehouse has argued there is no “pathway to climate safety without a price on carbon.” Whitehouse even quoted economist William Nordhaus approvingly. Carbon pricing, he said, creates “market prices” that “raise the price of goods and services that are carbon intensive.”
So much for the affordability message. In truth, the climate grifters would rather make energy expensive than abandon their climate fantasies.
New York shows exactly where this leads. Its officials caved to green activists and shuttered the Indian Point nuclear plant in phases between 2020 and 2021. By 2022, the price of power had shot up a staggering 83.77%, to $45.39 per megawatt-hour.
Facing reelection and soaring electricity prices, New York Democrat Governor Kathy Hochul has suddenly discovered nuclear power. She now says New York needs more of it and is pursuing what would be the state’s first new nuclear facility since 1988.
Fine. Nuclear power is real electricity, available around the clock, regardless of wind speeds and sunshine. But Hochul’s turn to nuclear rings hollow while she opposes reopening Indian Point.
Indian Point wasn’t the only self-inflicted wound by state officials. They spent years blocking additional natural-gas pipeline capacity to appease environmental extremists.
The bill is now coming due. Con Edison customers in New York City and Westchester face cumulative increases of 10.4% on electricity bills and 15.8% on gas bills through 2028. For a typical city home, that means roughly $615 more per year for gas and electricity by 2028. New York politicians didn’t have to make electricity unaffordable before admitting the state needs nuclear power.
Albany’s “solution” is to take more money from ratepayers, then call it “relief” when it hands some of it back. The state has committed $1 billion for electricity-bill rebates and expanded a program offering some households up to $500 a year in utility assistance. Maybe that buys a family a little breathing room. But only for a while. What it does not do is lower the cost of energy. But it does provide political cover for the damage wreaked by Albany’s own energy policies.
Climate Week’s green elites will applaud the policies that produced this mess. They will demand more mandates, more subsidies, more restrictions, and higher energy prices.
Working families are left to pay for it.
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Steve Milloy is a senior fellow at the Energy & Environment Legal Institute and former Trump EPA transition team member.
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