Albany Update: In the Dark Days of Trump, New York can still Shine

 

Along the Taconic Parkway, in a quiet section of Westchester County, NY, motorists are greeted by a faded road sign that announces the exit to “Donald J. Trump State Park.” Any traveler who would be diverted off the parkway by this curiosity would find themselves at a weed-choked parking lot, cut off from a trash-strewn wooded area by an 8-foot-tall chain link fence. 

 

This abandoned property was donated to the State of New York (NYS) in 2006 due to Donald Trump’s frustration and failure to secure needed permits for an 18-hole golf course on the land. Allegedly, he purchased the property in the 1990s for two million dollars, but claimed the land was valued at over 100 million dollars at the time of the donation, securing himself a hefty tax write-off for a grossly overvalued property.

 

The donation of land never came with the funds to maintain the park, so all that remains 10 years after the ribbon-cutting is a fa.ade with little substance. Whether there is a metaphor contained within this monument to President Trump remains to be seen.

 

What is absolutely certain is that, if there is no significant resistance, Donald Trump’s penchant for deception and fraud will run rife through the very foundation of our democracy and undermine the laws that protect New York’s environment. As the shadow of his presidency is cast across the globe, New York State is still uniquely positioned to be a beacon of light to cut through that darkness. Will we choose to shine that light is the only question. Trump has vowed to advance all fossil fuel extraction options, roll back regulations protecting clean water and air, dismantle climate change mitigation programs and in general obscure inconvenient scientific truths. In war, says Aeschylus, truth is the first casualty.  And ancient Greeks didn’t even have Twitter.

 

At the core of this threat to New York is the potential degradation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt at the helm. Pruitt is an unrepentant climate change denier and petroleum industry lackey whose record suggests that he’s more intent on dismantling the agency than running it. But much of the EPA’s mandate to uphold the nation’s seminal environmental protection laws, including the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. The National Environmental Protection Act in New York State is delegated to New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation. Even if there’s a total collapse of the federal agency’s power, the state still has the ability to uphold if not strengthen environmental laws.

 

Governor Andrew Cuomo has already started laying the framework for New York to be a liberal bulwark against Trump’s political agenda and has unveiled a series of proposals on environmental and social issues that continues a progressive trajectory. But there’s a growing sense that the governor has to go to extraordinary measures to compensate for the damage Trump could do, both globally and within every community in NY. The state’s leaders and regulators will have to use every legal tool available and stretch every authority to the fullest extent possible if we are to be successful. Here are some areas where NY must show leadership. 

 

The Threat: Trump campaigned on the US backing out of all international climate agreements, declaring global warming a hoax. He intends to dismantle Obama’s Clean Power Plan, a signature policy designed to diminish carbon emissions from power plants as renewables are brought on line. Trump has given great deference to the fossil fuel industry, both in his appointments and his rhetoric. If he cannot change the rules governing climate change, he will financially starve the agencies that uphold these laws.

 

While it’s discouraging to watch the national progress on addressing climate change decline so drastically, New York can still double down on its own Clean Energy Standard that will see a 40% reduction in greenhouse gases and a 50% commitment to renewable energy by 2030. In January, Cuomo proposed to build 2.4 gigawatts of wind power off the coast of Long Island and to lower the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative’s cap on carbon by 30%, also by 2030. While all these goals are executive proposals — we can make them real and enforceable by codifying them into law. This year Cuomo should support and the state Legislature should pass the Climate and Community Protection Act — a bill that commits New York to 100% greenhouse gas reductions, in all sectors, by 2050, all while protecting our most vulnerable communities and ensuring that green jobs are good jobs with fair labor practices.

 

The Threat: Donald Trump has vowed to roll back President Obama’s Clean Water Rule that would enhance the way millions of acres of wetlands are protected in the United States. As a developer, Donald Trump was often thwarted by wetland regulations and appears to be committed to easing restrictions protecting the “natural infrastructure” that provides us with clean drinking water, flood attenuation and other irreplaceable ecosystem services. 

 

How New York Fights Back: New York State protects wetlands that are 12.4 acres or larger and leaves the regulation of smaller wetlands, comprising more than 60% of the state’s inventory, to the Army Corps of Engineers (ACoE). Presumably, under the Trump administration, the ACoE will be directed to no longer intervene when “isolated wetlands” are threatened. Other applications may get rubber-stamp approvals or egregious violations of the law may go enforced. The answer is for NYS to assume jurisdictional authority for all wetlands in our state as we can no longer depend upon federal regulators for protection. The NYS Legislature has been on the cusp of taking up such authority, though the measure always gets stalled in the Senate. The crisis created by Trump should finally elevate the issue so that it can now be acted upon. 

 

The Threat: Fossil fuel industrygroups have already lobbied the Trump administration to reverse several key pipeline and infrastructure decisions made by the Cuomo administration. The Constitution Pipeline — which the governor denied last spring due to unacceptable impacts to wetlands and stream crossings — is the principal project in the crosshairs. The pipeline’s company, and the oil and gas companies that it would service are demanding that Trump remove NYS’s permitting authority over the pipeline and insert the ACoE as a replacement. It presumably will be swift to approve the pipeline.

 

How New York Fights Back: New York not only has to fight federal regulatory overreach but also should expand the authority it does have to influence ill-conceived fossil fuel infrastructure projects statewide. The State Environmental Quality Review Act gives the Department of Environmental Conservation considerable leverage, in issuing each permit, to consider not only local air and water quality issues but also far reaching impacts, such as cumulative effects and climate change. We can no longer feel constrained to use those powers in limited applications. New oil infrastructure, such as “bomb” trains, barges and pipelines, enjoy the protection of preemptive federal laws, yet NYS’s regulators have been slowly tightening the noose around their expansion. If our state regulators do not push the envelope within the few areas of local control enjoyed by the state, we will lose ground to aggressive new Trump policies.

 

The Threat: Laws, programs, regulations and agency structures are hard to undo — even or a determined Trump administration. However, on the agency level, Trump will have the power of the purse and can starve any bureaucratic action it cannot otherwise subvert. New York receives hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for environmental protection and infrastructure projects. This funding could evaporate if New York does not play ball with the changing policies of the new administration and Congress.

 

How New York Fights Back: In his Executive Budget, Governor Cuomo proposed a $300 million Environmental Protection Fund and a $2 billion water infrastructure fund, representing historic state financial commitments to the environment. But with a one- billion-dollar budget deficit and an expiring “millionaires tax,” there are great fears that the state’s understaffed and overburdened environmental agencies will not receive the financial support they deserve. The Cuomo administration must anticipate the urgency of a weakened EPA and greater pressure for NYS to lead on environmental protection by augmenting state staffing numbers and providing state regulators with the resources they need.

 

The Threat: There is a direct link between the degradation of our democracy and the degradation of our environment. Toxic money in electoral campaigns and the halls of Albany make it virtually impossible to pass meaningful environmental legislation because lawmakers are insulated from doing the people’s business. Trump has taken this unbalanced influence to the extreme and will undoubtedly set the tone for Republican senators who cling to control of NYS’s Senate. 

 

How New York Fights Back: Governor Cuomo has proposed a number of campaign finance and voting rights reforms. But nothing will happen without a willing Senate able to bring such measures to the floor for a vote. One of the remarkable outcomes of the 2016 elections is that the Democratic Party took back the NYS Senate with a 32 to 31 majority.  However, the formation of the “Independent Democratic Conference’s” seven breakaway Democrats, who are willing to trade away their party’s majority for individual committee chairmanships and perks, has ceded control of the Senate to the Republicans. If Cuomo is serious about having New York lead the national resistance to Trump dismantling American progressive values, he must have a functional legislature capable of passing critical legislation. Reunifying the Democratic Senate should be a top priority, and not seen as an impossible task. 

 

President Obama exits the White House with an environmental legacy he can be proud of. Under his leadership the country’s renewable energy portfolio grew exponentially. He significantly increased fuel efficiency standards for cars, created 23 new national monuments representing over 265 million acres of protected land, mandated systematic carbon emission reductions through the Clean Power Plan, paved the way for global climate agreements and vetoed the Keystone Xl Pipeline. 

 

It’s also fair to say that many of the worst fears we attribute to an incoming Trump administration have been hiding in plain sight over the past eight years. The age of fracking saw its crescendo under Obama, and its impacts were only buffered by the industry’s own overproduction, and boom-and-bust nature — not any profound federal regulatory control or restraint. Issues of a rapidly warming planet, economic and social inequity, racial tension and corporatization of our democracy persisted throughout the Obama years, though perhaps obscured by our president’s moderate presence and a disengaged electorate. 

 

A Trump administration will exacerbate the worst of these elements —but, though they were once in the background, he may also bring all these issues to the forefront of the American consciousness. His defiant lack of concern for his own conflicts of interest, and unrepentant style of bullying and intimidation strip away the veneer that covers up so much of what ails our country. His presidency may be the final wake-up call to Americans to get off the couch and into the streets. Let’s hope New York leads that charge.