Last week, the Trump Administration moved to roll back the nation’s auto emission and fuel economy standards.  The current regulations are aimed at cutting tailpipe emissions of carbon dioxide, a major contributor to global warming.  The Trump Administration also demanded that California, which has its own state-based, more stringent auto emission standards, must follow the federal decision or face legal challenge.

California’s authority to regulate auto emissions has been supported by the courts and has allowed 13 other states, including New York, to follow California’s standards.  California, New York, Massachusetts and the other states following the stricter standards comprise more than a third of the national car market.

Introduced in 2012, the current federal rules require automakers to nearly double the average fuel economy of new cars and trucks to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025.  If fully implemented, they would cut oil consumption by about 12 billion barrels over the lifetime of all the cars affected by the regulations and reduce carbon dioxide pollution by about six billion tons, according to the U.S. E.P.A.

So far, California hasn’t shown any interest in weakening their regulations.  In fact, California Governor Jerry Brown announced plans to have the state mandate that 5 million zero-emission vehicles be operated on its roads by 2030, up from a planned 1.5 million in 2025.  California has a legislative mandate to cut carbon dioxide emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.  California will also propose in the next few months that the state’s transit agencies buy zero-emission buses.

Whether the federal proposal will eventually trigger a legal battle with California is unclear and there have been media reports of negotiations between federal and state regulators.  But let’s hope that California does not buckle under the pressure.

Personal vehicles are a major cause of global warming.  Cars and trucks emit around 24 pounds of carbon dioxide and other global-warming gases for every gallon of gas.  About five pounds comes from the extraction, production, and delivery of the fuel, while the great bulk of heat-trapping emissions—more than 19 pounds per gallon—comes right out of a car’s tailpipe.  Cars, trucks and sport utility vehicles in the U.S. are responsible for about two-thirds of greenhouse gas emissions from the U.S. transportation sector.

For the first time in more than 40 years, the largest source of greenhouse gas pollution in the U.S. isn’t electricity production, but from the transportation sector.  Nationwide, nearly 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions are generated in the transportation sector.  In New York, transportation is responsible for 41 percent of fuel-combustion greenhouse gas emissions in the State – almost double the emissions of electricity production.

Since cars are increasingly the dominant source of greenhouse gas emissions, countries around the world are racing to phase out gasoline and diesel cars.  China, the world’s largest car market, is working on a plan to ban the production and sale of vehicles powered only by fossil fuels.  In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel has hinted that it’s only a matter of time before the country that invented the modern car sets an expiration date of its own.

Norway has set the year 2025 as its goal to ban the sale of fossil fuel powered autos, India by 2030, France and the United Kingdom have set their goals for the year 2040.

As mentioned earlier, federal law allows states to either follow the federal requirements or adopt California’s tougher vehicle emission regulations.  Under the Obama administration, the federal standard was raised to match California rules.

Thus, the federal proposed rollback will increase greenhouse gas emissions – which heat the planet, and will allow higher levels of pollutants to be emitted by cars – which are a health hazard, particularly with regard to asthma.

California’s plans, it seems, are not only to dramatically increase the number of electric cars, but to also prohibit the sale of fossil fuel powered cars.  Last fall, the head of California’s Air Resources Board, suggested the state could move to set a date within the next decade to require the sale of only 100% new electric cars or those running on other renewable energy.  If California acts, New York should follow suit.

New York Attorney General Schneiderman has already promised legal action if the Trump Administration moves forward on its rollback plan.  Governor Cuomo, to his credit, has criticized the rollback plan.  But New York should do more.  New York must pledge to both defend California’s legal authority to protect the environment and, working with California, it should set a target date to move to the state toward banning the sale of fossil fuels cars.

In concert, these two states should act now to set a clear environmental policy goal that illustrates just how far the Trump Administration is putting the public’s – and planet’s – health at risk and to show what leadership looks like in the face of a rapidly heating planet.

After three months of discussions and posturing, Governor Cuomo and the legislature finalized a state budget late last week.  Lawmakers took their final votes in the hours after midnight Saturday morning and met the deadline for getting the budget completed on time.

There were significant difficulties in getting an agreement.  The state was facing a large deficit, changes brought about by the federal government added to the budgetary uncertainty, and the upcoming election magnified the partisan differences between the Democratic Governor, the Democratically-controlled state Assembly, and the Republican-led state Senate.

The fragile nature of the Senate majority coalition made deal making even harder.  The razor-thin majority, with 31 Republicans joined by one Democrat, constitute the 32 seats needed to lead and pass legislation in the 63 seat Senate.  Thus, even losing one vote could lead to a budget plan collapse.

As a result, the final budget agreement focused on the basics of paying for government services, plus top priority issues.  For example, in reaction to the federal tax law changes, the governor’s plan to offer an alternative tax system to allow interested employers to change the way taxes are collected was adopted.

Yet, despite the unrelenting revelations of government corruption, not only were there no new reforms enacted, there wasn’t even a debate.

In fact, the argument was made that the current system “worked.”  After all, the perpetrators were arrested and convicted.  But that argument is really just an excuse for inaction.

The vast majority of convictions were the result of investigations launched by federal prosecutors and the violations were of federal laws.  What happened to the state investigators and the violations of state laws?

According to the proceedings in the federal courts, top members of the state Senate and Assembly and top aides to the governor used their public offices for private gain.  And in most cases, they did it for years.  They were able to use their power to ensure that they operated secretly without worry.  Had it not been for the U.S, Attorney’s office, it is likely they would still be involved in their corrupt schemes.

Will the U.S. Attorney’s investigations keep up?  There is no way to know if the new Trump Administration will keep fighting government corruption with the same zeal as the Obama Administration.

But why should New Yorkers spend millions on state-based ethics enforcers that are unable to deter high-level government corruption?  Shouldn’t Governor Cuomo and legislative leaders ask and answer that question?

It’s fair to say that the dozens of ethics crimes are evidence that they system does not work.  A system that allows secrecy in decision-making, raises the risk of corruption.  A system that limits the power of government watchdogs to enforce state laws, raises the risk of corruption.  And the watchdogs themselves are creatures of the same political entities that they are supposed to monitor; that structure raises the risk of corruption.

It’s clear that those increased risks have resulted in unprecedented scandals.  But for the work of federal investigators, it is likely that virtually all of the schemes would still be in place.

What is clear is that the system does not work.  Despite the public pronouncements that all is well, to any reasonable New Yorker it is clear that all is not well.

Yet the governor and the legislature continue to do nothing.

In a representative democracy, voters send individuals to federal, state and local offices to represent the public interest.  The job of these representatives is to solve, to the best that they can, problems that plague society.

Corruption in New York is a big problem.  Public officials should be trying to solve it, not ignore it.  A political calculation is in play, the calculation is that the public, while disgusted by the scandals, is not ultimately going to vote elected officials out of office based on the issue of corruption.

They believe that they can rely on the power of their incumbency – rigged district lines, massive campaign finance war chests, taxpayer funded public relations machinery, just to name a few – to win reelection.

We should expect, and demand, more.

Governor Cuomo and state lawmakers have three months until the scheduled end of the legislative session.  Curbing corruption should be at the top of their “to do” list.

Governor Cuomo and state lawmakers are now into the final week of the fiscal year.  New York’s fiscal year starts on April 1^st.  Given the holidays this year, there is a push to get a budget agreement in place by Thursday, March 29^th.

During the Cuomo tenure the state budget agreement has occurred either by April 1^st or within hours of the deadline.  Getting a budget in place more or less on time has been used by the governor to make the case that he has brought order to chaos in Albany.  Yet last year, the budget was nine days late.  Was last year an aberration or the beginning of a new trend?

New Yorkers will soon see.

Of course, there are other metrics to measure whether chaos besets state government – such as the number of public officials indicted and convicted of corruption, which tells a different story.  But the governor does rightfully get credit for pushing through state budgets that are “on time” or close to it, while keeping spending within growth estimates set by the governor.

This year’s budget, however, is being crafted in the shadow of the tax changes enacted by the Trump Administration and the Republican Congress.  And those tax changes could have a big impact on some New Yorkers.  Thus, how New York’s political leadership reacts to those changes (if at all) is one of the big questions looming over budget talks.  The governor has proposed significant tax changes to respond to the new federal laws, most of which have been untested, and which have not – to date – been publicly debated in Albany.

But the challenges created by Washington are not the only problems the governor and the legislature must tackle.  There are a number of big state issues still under consideration.

First, what will the state do about climate change?  The biggest issue facing the planet is the result of the burning of coal, oil and gas.  New York took an important step forward a few years ago when it became the first state with any appreciable natural gas reserves to ban fracking.  The state has taken some additional steps – some forward and some backward – when it comes to allowing the development of new fossil fuel infrastructure – like pipelines – within New York.  Allowing such construction slows down the movement toward a fossil fuel free future since new pipelines are usually financed in a way that requires decades of use before debts can be paid off.

The world does not have years to wait for an end to the reliance on fossil fuels.

The track record of the Cuomo Administration’s investment strategies when it comes to new renewable power generation is also mixed.  The state has made many promises to push to generate half of its energy from renewable power (solar, wind, geothermal), but so far the investments don’t match the administration’s rhetoric.

The renewable power that the state touts is almost entirely generated by aging hydroelectric plants.  The state generates only one percent of its power from solar, for example.  Other states are doing much better, for example California generates about 10 percent of its electricity from solar; neighboring New Jersey gets nearly four percent of its electric from solar power.

It’s up to the governor to push New York into a national leader in solar power.  His first opportunity is this week, as New York wraps up its budget.  New York needs to invest more in solar power and it needs to do so now.  Will the new budget change that?

Second, will the budget reverse the Cuomo Administration’s cuts to college financial aid programs for struggling low-income students?  Last year, the governor advanced the Excelsior scholarship program, which made State University tuition free for those with incomes up to $125,000 and helped many middle income New Yorkers attend public college.

Yet, he has frozen state support for higher education overall and proposed cuts to programs to help lower income students.  Will the legislature reject the governor’s cuts on programs that are proven to help low-income students and will they reverse the governor’s stagnant support for SUNY?

Third, will anything happen to curtail political corruption?  A top member of the governor’s staff was recently convicted of corruption and the former top Senate and Assembly leaders will be retried for corruption in the next few months.  The governor’s proposed measures would add new ethics oversight, but by entities that are reportable to him, not independent watchdogs.

Given the silence surrounding reform plans, will Albany kick the can again?

Budgets are about meeting the demands of the public.  With limited resources, and faced with unlimited demands, budgets are also the government’s primary tool to set policy priorities.

How Albany answers the budget this year will determine the quality of life for all New Yorkers, not just those who rely on the state for direct public help.

Last week was Sunshine Week; an annual celebration of the benefits of open government and how to safeguard and expand upon current transparency laws.  If the success of a representative democracy hinges on the informed consent of the governed, it is critical that the public know as much as possible about the information used and the processes by which its representatives spend tax dollars and act on policy recommendations.

As we all know, the reason such a week is needed is that our public servants far too frequently mislead the public and make decisions that benefit favored special interests.  That spectacle has dominated the news of the actions taken by the federal government.

Sadly, a recent court case showed the problem of corrupting government to the benefit of hot-wired interests exists in Albany too.

Last week – Sunshine Week – saw the conviction of a former top aide to Governor Cuomo, a man who was once described as “brother” to the governor.

The aide, Joseph Percoco, was convicted in federal court of three felonies including solicitation of bribes and gratuities in connection with a “low-show” job given to his wife by an energy company with a proposed Hudson Valley power plant seeking various approvals from the Cuomo administration.  According to the conviction, Mr. Percoco got nearly $300,000 in bribes through the scheme.  He received another $35,000 from a Syracuse development firm to successfully override a government decision to protect labor union members.

In addition to the Percoco conviction, the head of the Syracuse development firm was convicted as well. The jury deadlocked over whether the Hudson Valley energy company knowingly broke the law.

The court proceedings and evidence laid bare serious flaws in the way the Cuomo Administration operates.  According to the testimony, when Mr. Percoco left government service to run Governor Cuomo’s 2014 re-election campaign, he used his old government office to do so, which is illegal. The trial also offered testimony that a lobbyist conducted government business with a number of high-ranking Administration officials through private emails – not through government email addresses – in an apparent attempt to avoid the state’s openness laws celebrated during Sunshine Week.

Of course, such high-level corruption taints the Administration and strongly suggests that the way it runs its internal operations is done to minimize public scrutiny, not maximize it.  One clear take away is that the state’s ethics oversight and openness laws were simply insufficient to curb such behaviors – a total overhaul is needed.

But the trial also raises other disturbing issues.  If a corrupt official was at the center of two controversial decisions, should those decisions be reviewed?

In the Syracuse case, the trial revealed that Mr. Percoco helped to remove a potentially-costly labor union agreement requirement from an Inner Harbor parking lot project in Syracuse and helped free up funds for work completed on the Central New York Film Hub.

In the Hudson Valley energy plant case, prosecutors argued that Mr. Percoco received bribes to help in the construction of a natural-gas power plant located in the mid-Hudson Valley.  That plant, whose construction is nearly complete, has been controversial and opposed by many local residents, environmental groups and public officials.

Opponents now make the reasonable argument that if the deal was underpinned by corruption as evidenced by the Percoco conviction, the state must stop the construction and review regulatory decisions in an open manner the steps that allowed the construction to move ahead.  They have a point and Albany must listen to them.

The Percoco conviction should serve as a wakeup call to the governor and the legislature that they must act to curb corruption at all levels of government, even in the offices of the governor himself.  It should also act as a spur to force review of both the Hudson Valley case and the Syracuse decision to ensure that labor, environmental, or health standards were not ignored.

It’s long past time that New York State and local governments comply with the highest standards of openness and public accountability.  Next year’s Sunshine Week should be a celebration of advances in good government in Albany, not another week of disgrace.

Last weekend was the seventh anniversary of the disaster at the Japanese nuclear power plant located in Fukushima.  On March 11, 2011, an earthquake occurred in the Pacific Ocean that spawned a huge tsunami.  The quake itself caused considerable damage to the Japanese islands near the center of the quake, but the tsunami’s impact was catastrophic.

The waves caused by the earthquake hit the Fukushima area with such force that over one million buildings were partially or completely destroyed and about 19,000 residents were killed.

At the same time, eleven reactors at four nuclear power plants in the region were forced to shut down.  However, the tsunami disabled the emergency generators that would have provided power to control and operate the pumps necessary to cool the superheated reactors.  The insufficient cooling led to three nuclear meltdowns, hydrogen-air explosions, and the release of radioactive material during the next few days after the tsunami hit.

The result of this disaster forced tens of thousands of Japanese to relocate from the area and the uncontrolled release of radioactive materials into the area and the Pacific Ocean.

The power plants in Fukushima are of the same design as some in New York State, which are located on Lake Ontario.  While no one would expect the same scenario to occur, those plants have been the focus of state policies in recent years.

The plants, built in the 1960s, have exceeded their expected useful lifetimes.  Generally, plants of that design and era are expected to be used for roughly 40 or so years.  Yet those plants continue to operate under a deal negotiated largely outside of public view.

In the summer of 2016, negotiators from the Cuomo Administration and the plant owners agreed to a multi-billion dollar bailout of the plants – which were slated for closure.  At that time, the state did not reveal the estimated costs, but subsequent analyses estimated that the costs could run anywhere from $2.9 billion to $7.6 billion over a 12-year period.  The negotiation contained no new safety requirements for the plants, just a guarantee that virtually all New Yorkers would be required to pay to make the nuke plants profitable – whether they received power from the plants or not – to keep them open.

The safety records of the plants came under new scrutiny in a report issued last week by the Alliance for a Green Economy, an upstate New York nuclear watchdog organization.  The report analyzed recent inspection reports and Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) documents and identified three issues of concern:

• The group identified regulatory violations without penalties: 18 violations of Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulations were reported between March 2017 and February 2018 for the four Upstate reactors, but no penalties or fines were assessed.
• The group identified examples of weakened regulations at the request of nuclear operators. For example, at the request of one of the plant’s owners, the National Regulatory Commission changed the requirement for what constitutes an “unusual event” regarding Lake Ontario flooding. As we all know, there had been extensive flooding last year in the Lake Ontario area.
• Lastly, the group identified missed deadlines for fixing known safety and maintenance issues: one plant near Oswego does not have a containment vessel likely to be able to contain the pressure and radiation released by a meltdown and installation of a required vent has been delayed; the plant’s owner is behind schedule for fixing numerous maintenance issues.

New York State should learn the lessons of the dangers of relying on nuclear power and follow the path set by California: move to shut down these aging facilities, and instead move toward greater reliance on solar, wind and geothermal power.  Those power generators have been starved of adequate support since so much of the state’s wealth is tied up in propping up the Lake Ontario plants.  New York energy efficiency programs are anemic and lag far behind neighboring states and currently solar only generates about 1 percent of the power for the state.  Instead of mandating that New Yorkers subsidize aging, inefficient, 20^th century nuclear plants, that money should be redirected to 21^st century conservation and renewable energy programs.