New York State Climate and Environment

Climate Deadline Stripped from Hochul’s State of the State Agenda at Last Minute

The change was among a handful of eleventh-hour tweaks to Hochul’s policy briefing book.

Colin Kinniburgh · January 17, 2025

Initial reporting on the State of the State book, based on the advance copy, noted the one-year deadline for regulations on greenhouse gas reporting. It was easy to miss that it had since been removed. | Photo: Governor Kathy Hochul / Illustration: New York Focus

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When Governor Kathy Hochul’s office sent reporters an advance copy of her 2025 policy agenda before her State of the State address on Tuesday, it contained surprisingly few details on what was expected to be the centerpiece of her climate agenda: a carbon pricing program known as cap and invest. The brief, vague mention of the program implied that she was shelving it, in a major setback for climate action.

There was one concrete commitment left to hang onto. The governor said her agencies would release a portion of the rules to structure the program by the end of the year.

A few hours later, though, when the final version of the book was published online, that self-imposed deadline had disappeared. The document said only that regulators would “take steps forward” on the regulations “over the coming months.”

Initial reporting on the State of the State book, based on the advance copy (including New York Focus’s), noted the one-year deadline for regulations on greenhouse gas reporting. It was easy to miss that it had since been removed.

Patrick McClellan, policy director of the New York League of Conservation Voters, was dismayed to learn of the change.

“There’s really no reason why that rule couldn’t be done this year,” he told New York Focus by text. “If the Governor is unwilling to set a deadline even for that then I think it’s a total capitulation on her part.”

Photo collage of Governor Kathy Hochul in front of a yellow gas pipe on a residential street.

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Most of the changes in the final book were minor tweaks without apparent policy implications. One other green commitment did disappear: An initiative to supply power to promising industrial sites initially was supposed to focus on supporting clean energy companies, but that language was stripped.

Hochul spokesperson Avi Small said the version that had been sent to reporters on Tuesday morning was the one that had been sent for printing the previous night, since the state still prints a small number of copies of the briefing book.

“Obviously, when you send a book of that length to the printer, you have to make a decision to send it at some point,” he said. “But we caught some stuff after that version.”

Some Albany veterans weren’t surprised by the last-minute changes.

“It’s not pencils down until, literally, the speech is loaded into the teleprompter,” said Judith Enck, president of the advocacy organization Beyond Plastics, who served as New York’s deputy secretary for the environment under governors Eliot Spitzer and David Paterson. “The governor’s office is always free to do last-minute edits…. but I think it’s fair to ask why was the change made.”

Without the deadline, the climate text is ambiguous; it could mean Hochul intends to release the initial draft rules before the end of the year and move ahead with other parts of the program from there. But Enck said that was unlikely. “It means it won’t happen by the end of the year,” she said.

Morgan Hook, who served as Paterson’s communications director and now works as a lobbyist at the firm SKDKnickerbocker, said eleventh-hour edits are “as common as there is.”

“The stories of Andrew Cuomo were that they were making changes until he walked out into the spotlight, and then sometimes making changes at that point too,” Hook said. Staffers in the Cuomo days were “taking whole sections out” of the book the morning of the speech, he said.

Like any important political document, the State of the State book represents the work of a hidden army of staff — in this case, many of the 300-odd members of the governor’s office and more employees at state agencies.

In past years, Hochul has hired pricey consultants to help write the speech, but Small said that was not the case this year. “This was all done in house,” he said.

The image shows a collage with Kathy Hochul in the foreground and grey smokestacks in the background, with dollar signs among the smokestacks.

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While last-minute tweaks may not be uncommon, it was the first time in at least three years that the book saw policy-level edits between the advance and final copies, New York Focus found.

As for the larger backpedaling on her carbon pricing program, known as cap and invest, Hochul told reporters on Wednesday that the extended timeline would ensure that the state has the necessary data to design the program well.

“I’m not walking back on all of our commitments… I’m not letting these projects go unfunded,” Hochul said, referring to the stopgap $1 billion in climate funding she announced on Tuesday.

“I’m not going to have the details in place right now,” Hochul continued, when asked whether the program would be in place before the November 2026 gubernatorial election. “All I know is that I said to my team, ‘While you’re studying this and getting it right, we have to get it right. We have to get this right. Because I believe that other states will be looking at us as a model as well.’”