A judge indicated Friday that he will likely rule that New York is breaking its climate law.

Ulster County Supreme Court Justice Julian Schreibman on Friday skewered a lawyer for the state Department of Environmental Conservation who argued that the state could not issue required regulations to cut greenhouse gases any time soon.

“It seems to me that the core of your argument is that we’re living in a time of change and uncertainty, and DEC needs to be given some leeway to accommodate that,” Schreibman said.

“That’s correct, your honor,” replied Meredith Lee-Clark, of the New York State Attorney General’s office, who was representing DEC.

“I don’t know that I've ever lived in a time that wasn’t one of change and uncertainty, so I don’t know how that is a governable standard,” the judge continued.

We live in strange times.

The rise of AI, the fall of local newspapers, the increasing willingness of politicians to bend the truth (OK, outright lie), the speed at which falsehoods spread on social media — it’s no wonder that the majority of Americans have a hard time separating fact from fiction.

New York Focus is helping to change that.

We’re partnering with Gigafact, a nonpartisan nonprofit that helps local newsrooms respond to common questions, rumors, and claims. Together, we’ll be publishing weekly “fact briefs” that provide a clear “yes” or “no” answer to the questions at hand and show the sources used to verify or debunk that claim. All in 150 words or less.

Experienced fact-checker Ferdi Ferhat Özsoy will produce weekly briefs, with claims sourced from social media, readers, and other avenues. Özsoy has spent more than a decade working to combat misinformation in both Turkey and the US, most recently as the deputy director of the International Fact-Checking Network, where he led strategic initiatives supporting more than 170 fact-checkers across more than 80 countries.

Read Özsoy’s first fact brief — published today — about whether working-class residents in New York City are fleeing faster than wealthy residents.

“One of the reasons we launched Focus was that we kept noticing New York politicians repeating things that weren’t true — and often, no one was calling them out on it,” said Akash Mehta, editor-in-chief of New York Focus. “We’re excited to add fact briefs to our toolbox of ways to hold power to account.”

"New York Focus is doing invaluable work investigating New York's state government, and we're so pleased that their offerings now include fact briefs,” said Robyn Sundlee, Gigafact’s co-founder and head of operations. “This program will provide New York residents with speedy access to important and useful facts regarding their state."

Got a claim you want us to check? Submit it below.

YES.

Working-class New Yorkers are leaving New York City at significantly higher rates than wealthy residents.

According to research by the Fiscal Policy Institute, affordability concerns — especially housing and the cost of raising a family — are major drivers of population loss in New York state. The report notes that 90 percent of this loss comes from New York City, with Black and Hispanic residents, households with young children, and low- to middle-income families most likely to leave.

In contrast, wealthy New Yorkers have left the state at much lower rates, with the exception of a temporary surge in their migration rates in 2020 and 2021 that was likely induced by the Covid-19 pandemic. In typical years, the average New Yorker has been four times more likely to leave the state than the top 1 percent of earners.

New York City added about 87,000 residents from July 2023 to July 2024, according to the US Census Bureau, but this growth was primarily due to international migration. The city’s planning department also attributed this growth to natural increase and new arrivals, not the return of displaced working-class residents.

In late June, Governor Kathy Hochul vowed to build New York’s first new nuclear power station in nearly four decades, advancing one of the most aggressive plans by any state to revitalize the US’s stagnant atomic energy industry.

Standing before the state’s largest generating station, the hydroelectric Niagara Power Project, Hochul announced that she was directing the New York Power Authority, or NYPA, to study where and how to build a plant that would add one gigawatt of atomic energy — enough to power 1 million homes — to the state’s grid by 2040.

New manufacturing, data centers, and electrification are set to cause a surge in New York’s electricity demand right as the closure of the Indian Point nuclear plant and older fossil fuel plants bring once-dependable generation offline. Progress on new renewables remains slow. If the state doesn’t “radically increase” its supply of electricity over the next 15 years, Hochul said, “we will see rolling blackouts.”

“Some people say you can’t clean the grid and grow it at the same time. Sounds like defeatism to me,” she said. “This is New York. That’s not how we think. We don’t back down from the hard problems. We solve them and we build bigger and bolder than anyone could have imagined.”

The announcement kicked off a process that will test whether New York is still capable of building megaprojects — like the giant Niagara hydroelectric station, which NYPA built in just three years in the 1950s.

Before New York can start work on its next nuclear plant, NYPA will need to decide what type of reactor technology to pursue and select a site. Then, the agency will have to select contractors, broker a deal likely worth billions of dollars that the governor may need to win from the legislature during budget negotiations, and potentially bring in a private partner to co-finance the project.

Will New York follow its climate law, once hailed as one of the most ambitious in the world? Or will it be allowed to keep stalling on its legal obligations to cut greenhouse gas emissions?

That may be up to an Ulster County judge, who on Friday will hear oral arguments in a lawsuit brought by four environmental and climate justice groups over the state’s failure to act on one of the core mandates of the 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.

The lawsuit comes after Governor Kathy Hochul in January slammed the brakes on what was expected to be her signature policy to implement the law: cap and invest.

The program would charge polluters for their carbon emissions and put the proceeds toward the clean energy transition. It was designed to meet one of the climate law’s key requirements, namely that the state issue regulations to achieve steep emissions cuts over the next several decades.

Those rules were supposed to be in place by 2024, a deadline the state blew past. The Hochul administration was finally gearing up to unveil the rules at the start of this year — but instead reversed course over concerns that the carbon pricing program would drive up everyday costs for New Yorkers.

Hochul promised at the time that she was just pressing pause. “We have to get this right,” she told reporters at the time. “Because I believe that other states will be looking at us as a model as well.”

As the year has gone on, though, Hochul’s administration has backed further away from the policy. A draft of the new state energy plan, released Wednesday, mentions it only in passing, as an option the state should “continue to evaluate.”

New York has become one of the slowest states in the country to pay unemployment benefits.

Only six states have been slower to start sending unemployment checks this year, according to federal Labor Department data. The agency considers a payment timely if someone receives it within 21 days of filing a claim.

New York paid 64 percent of eligible people within that time frame in the first half of this year — far below the 87 percent benchmark that the federal government considers “acceptable.”

Several unemployed New Yorkers who spoke to New York Focus described having to rely on savings or family members to pay bills while they waited weeks or months for their benefit.

“Workers have bills to pay,” said Amy Traub, a senior researcher with the National Employment Law Project who focuses on unemployment insurance. “Their landlord isn’t interested in a story about how their unemployment check is late.”

Top lawmakers don’t seem to be in a rush to figure out how to handle impending federal cuts.

On July 4, President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law, enacting over $1 trillion in historic cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and forcing states like New York to rethink their largest and oldest safety net programs.

So far, neither top legislators nor Governor Kathy Hochul have laid out a clear vision for what comes next. New York Focus spoke to fiscal advocates to get their take on how the state should move forward.