It’s gotta be on many an observer’s mind. The stark and obvious question: “Do Andrew Cuomo and his political pals in the NY State government want to clear the state of people and their businesses?
Because it sure looks like it.
According to Benjamin Storrow, of EENews, after last year’s election handed both the NY State Senate and Assembly to Democrats, the mono-party government has raced to pass via legislation many of the “climate mandates” that charming Democrat Governor Andrew Cuomo had been instituting on his own through “executive action”.
What’s that mean?
It means higher costs for gas, home heating oil, electricity, home construction, and pretty much every aspect of life in New York State. It means more cash for the state in the form of “clean energy” taxes, it means more money for politically-connected “green” industries that might benefit from the new mandates on citizens and businesses in New York, and it means the redistribution of wealth from people using gas or oil or electricity derived from fossil fuels, handed to “underprivileged” communities.
Writes Storrow:
The legislation calls for reducing emissions by 40% from 1990 levels by 2030 and 85% by 2050. The remaining 15% of emissions would be offset, making the state carbon neutral. The bill would also require that all electricity generation come from carbon-free sources by 2040. A Climate Action Council would be established to ensure the state meets its targets.
Of course, nothing is really “carbon-free”, which is why market economics is essential in allowing people to determine what benefits them or costs them more and harms their living standards. It takes the use of energy to derive energy, be that human energy collecting wood rubbing sticks together, or focusing sunlight through the use of a polished piece of glass, be it through human-made solar panels comprised of glass, plastics, copper, rubber, carbon, and acids, or through digging for, transporting, and burning coal or oil. Nothing is “carbon free”, and we can always mention that to people who drive electric cars and claim the energy is “clean.” It’s more likely a coal-powered car – a machine that charged-up thanks to a station that offered electricity derived from a coal-burning power plant.
These are not academic exercises. They have life-effecting prices attached to them at every level of production and disposal. So, for example, people who extol the virtues of electric cars rarely discuss the sources of the electricity nor the energy needed to build the batteries or dispose of them.
People like George W. Bush, who imposed a higher federal mandate for corn-based ethanol to be thrown into our gas, never bothered to discuss the fact that corn-based ethanol is a net energy loser. It takes more energy to till the soil, plant the corn, raise it, harvest it, cut and refine it, and then transport it, than the energy the ethanol actually produces.
And now, people like Mr. Charm himself, Andrew Cuomo, spouts megalomaniacal drivel about making NY State “Carbon Neutral”, when no such thing is possible unless all human life on the planet ends, and one of his allies, Assemblyman Steve Englebright offered the classic rhetoric of many a despot, it’s for the children:
It means that on Father's Day, when I see my grandchildren next year, I'll have a lot less uncertainty about their future than I did yesterday morning…
It’s too bad he seems to think that their future will be benefitted by his attack on energy choices, because the future that is in store for them if they stay in NY will be higher energy costs, and either lower living standards or living standards that won’t grow as well as they could because costs will eat more of productivity.
But don’t bother thinking about that when politicians are more apt to follow the nonsensical rhetorical nerve pathways of the Climate Cult, adopting language such as the newest vacuous mask for authoritarianism, “Climate Justice”.
Yes. As Eddie Bautista, the Executive Director of the New York Environmental Justice Alliance proclaims:
By inserting climate justice, it becomes a plan about humanity; it becomes a plan about the dignity and value we place on humanity. There are ways to help all of us to catalyze economic development for all of us.
Which tends to make a person thankful that one can catalyze his humanity through expressionizing his expression-alogue… for all of us, of course.
This is the state that currently has the fifth highest gas taxes in the US. It is the state with the highest overall tax burden in the US. Therefore, such fatuous nonsense is pretty stunning coming from politicians who put more energy into telling others how to live than actually starting their own businesses and peacefully offering alternatives to people.
But, notes Storrow, Governor Cuomo made sure to impose those things on his own, setting the template.
Republican control of the state Senate meant climate policy in New York had been centered in the governor's office until this year. Cuomo has pumped out executive orders banning hydraulic fracturing, calling for the closure of the state's remaining coal plants in 2020 and targeting a 40% reduction in emissions by 2030, among other things.
And now, with the help of the monopod in politics there, New York’s tax and spend scheme will not only push the “mandates” on energy providers, builders, drivers, and everyone else, it will increase taxes on fuel and energy and then redistribute that plunder through a system of political glad-handling:
At least 35% of revenues would go to disadvantaged communities. That funding could rise as high as 40%, which would amount to $370 million in fiscal 2018-19.
Classic. Wrap the fist in a velvet glove of rhetoric, and swing, never stop, and claim you’re “helping the planet.”
And it’s all to solve what politicians and politically-connected scientists tell us is a problem, but have to keep manipulating data to keep hounding us with their fearmongering.
Great news! It’s good to know this…
In case one wants to open a moving company to help refugees follow the film character Snake Plissken, and “Escape from New York”.