Misinformation is filling New York’s climate plan information void

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Misinformation is filling New York’s climate plan information void
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Updated: February 17, 2023 @ 12:09 pm
Misinformation is filling New York’s climate plan information void
Lynn Saxton and Anshul Gupta | Commentary
Feb 17, 2023
6 hrs ago
The implementation of New York’s Climate Action Council’s recently approved scoping plan is set to induce transformative changes, but despite repeated pleas, the state’s energy agency NYSERDA has failed to initiate an earnest effort to broadly inform and engage the public about its benefits. The fossil fuel industry and its allies with decades of well-documented experience in disseminating disinformation to avert climate action are gleefully filling the information void.
Historic blizzards in Western New York have provided a perfect backdrop to practice the mantra of not letting a good crisis go to waste. The layers of irony would be comical if it weren’t for the tragic loss of life that the fossil-fuel industry is brazenly exploiting in reaffirmation of its moral decrepitude.
First, the events themselves bear unmistakable fingerprints of fossil-fueled climate weirding.
Then, the losses were mostly the result of an outdated fossil-fuel dependent energy system. During the holiday blizzard, four people died in gasoline powered cars in Erie County and at least 11 in their homes with fossil-fueled heating that doesn’t work in power outages. The sole death in Niagara County was from fossil-fueled carbon monoxide poisoning. UBMD Otolaryngology Clinic in Buffalo suffered more than $100,000 of damage from catastrophic failure of their gas heating system.
These aren’t isolated cases. During the last cold snap, and also amid the terrible 2021 Texas winter storm, widespread gas network failures shut down power plants. Millions of downstate customers received emergency warnings to curtail heating. Hundreds of NYCHA residents in New York City are without gas, some for weeks and months, due to dangerous leaks. As poweroutage.us would reveal, power outages are uncommon beyond severe weather events, but HVAC technicians and plumbers rescue thousands of shivering customers from broken boilers, furnaces, and water heaters almost every winter day.
The price of fracked methane sold under the “natural” gas moniker is as capricious as its infrastructure. The United States has recently become the world’s largest liquified natural gas exporter, leaving us at the mercy of the highest international bidders and unpredictable geopolitics. The era of affordable gas is over. Multiple studies now show that it’s cheaper to both build and power all-electric new homes that save lives and the environment because gas is an awful health hazard and a terrible climate pollutant.
Electrification of our homes and vehicles will also improve safety. Just like we stock up on groceries before storms, we’ll be able to stock up on electrons. A fully charged Ford F-150 Lighting can easily power an induction cooktop, a heat-pump water heater, and a small mini-split or a space heater for two to three days in an emergency. In any case, the climate plan doesn’t prohibit backup generators or pellet stoves.
On the road, a half-charged battery of a stranded EV can run the seat warmers for a couple of days — something that will deplete a conventional vehicle’s fuel in hours even if a snow-covered tailpipe doesn’t turn it into a lethal gas chamber first.
Cold-climate heat pumps and EVs would be just fine in upstate or western New York; much-colder Montreal’s ban on fossil fuels in new construction starts next year, and 80% of new cars sold in Norway are now pure electric. By the time the climate law’s mandates fully take effect in the middle of the next decade, these technologies will be much cheaper and more versatile with advances in microgrids and vehicle-to-grid and vehicle-to-vehicle charging. Contrary to gas utilities’ propaganda, we will not need four times the grid capacity to match the energy content of the inefficient fossil-fuel systems — EVs and cold-climate heat pumps use three times less energy to do the same job.
Electrification is more than about the climate; it’s also about doing more with less, more cleanly, more healthfully, and more reliably — a beautiful future that the purveyors of soot, fumes, smog, and carbon monoxide are hell-bent on delaying because it imperils their profits.
Lynn Saxton of Warsaw and Anshul Gupta of Valhalla volunteer with the Climate Reality Project; Saxton co-chairs its Western New York chapter.
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