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But that’s not the only reason the BPRA has generated this outpouring of emotion. The act previously failed twice in New York. After the failure in 2021, TNR staff writer Kate Aronoff wrote, 

its backers within and without the legislature worked on expanding their coalition, opening up conversations with environmental justice and labor groups, among others. New language added as a result of those conversations aims to safeguard low-cost power for low-income New Yorkers and those who live in disadvantaged communities and ensure that projects don’t violate Indigenous sovereignty. The bill also provides project labor agreements for the construction of clean energy projects and would democratize the process by which NYPA approves and locates new projects. Strengthened labor provisions … helped to move labor groups from oppositional to neutral, and some from neutral to supportive.

So when, after all this work, the legislative session ended in June 2022 again without the proposal making it to law (despite passing the state Senate), this was seen as a particularly depressing signal for U.S. climate policy—all the more so because it wasn’t “Republicans to blame,” Kate explained, “but Democrats ostensibly committed to climate action.” If Democrats couldn’t manage to pass a policy to reconfigure energy generation and make good on their 2019 climate goals in New York while controlling the Senate, Assembly, and the governorship, Kate reasoned, it’s hard to imagine them making much progress anywhere else.

All of which brings us back to this year’s drama. Legislators at long last managed to finalize and pass the 10-bill series for the state’s budget, including the BPRA in the package, on May 1, a full month after the original state budget deadline of April 1. As of early April, it wasn’t at all clear that the BPRA was going to make it in—at least not in anything like its original form. And it seemed that Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul might be one of the people standing in the way. “If New York finally does start passing bills to make good on its four-year-old climate law,” Kate wrote in an update on the fight, “it’ll be the result of near-constant pressure from outside groups and having certain kinds of Democrats—those who’ve sworn off fossil fuel cash, for instance—making the case and whipping votes on the inside.”

The passage of the BPRA on Monday without one of the loopholes that was under discussion (letting municipalities opt out) is therefore credited as a victory not just for climate activists in general but for the specific progressive organizers and their legislative allies who refused to give up on this policy. It’s likely to be considered proof of concept for battles in other states. TNR will have more on this shortly.

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor

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