Contentious debate about New York's climate law, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), has been going on since the law was passed in 2019. Now the Governor and the Legislature need to work together to move from debate to action.
It’s time the law was updated. Amid federal policy headwinds and inflation slowing the ramp-up of renewables, omissions in the CLCPA's definition of what counts as renewable energy and gaps in its carbon accounting system have held New York’s progress back while other states have pulled ahead.
Governor Hochul supports updating the law. But action by the Legislature is also needed to unlock an important form of clean energy development that the law overlooked.
When the CLCPA was written, it envisioned a clean energy future built entirely on electrifying everything, with no role for liquid or gaseous fuels of any kind. But by focusing narrowly on that goal, the law paid scant attention to the state's organic wastes, which continuously emit large amounts of methane, a climate super-pollutant many times more potent than carbon dioxide.
Now this oversight can be corrected. Processing New York's enormous quantities of food waste, agricultural manure, wastewater, and other organic materials in purpose-built plants called anaerobic digesters can capture the methane that decomposing organics emit and upgrade it to renewable natural gas (RNG). RNG is a clean, non-fossil fuel with the lowest carbon emissions of any fuel available today. But before New York can realize its benefits, the Legislature needs to do two things:
First, it should update the CLCPA's definition of renewable energy to explicitly include energy derived from organic waste. Right now, biogas and RNG do not qualify under the CLCPA as “renewable” like wind, and solar do— not because they aren’t clean or renewable, but because the law was written without them in mind.
Writing them back in would send a market signal and enable incentives and investment that RNG project developers currently don’t have. It would also allow biogas-powered electricity generation to be recognized and appropriately valued as a baseload renewable resource that runs around the clock, complementing the intermittent output of wind and solar in ways that strengthen grid resilience and affordability.
The second change the Legislature should make is to revise the CLCPA’s carbon accounting system to reflect the difference between smokestack vs. lifecycle emissions. Currently the CLCPA counts only the carbon a fuel emits when burned within New York, not the carbon emitted across its whole lifetime of extraction/production and use. As a result, CLCPA carbon accounting makes renewable natural gas captured from a dairy farm or a municipal landfill look identical to fossil gas.
That’s obviously wrong; they’re not remotely equivalent. Fossil gas releases methane and carbon stored underground for millions of years. RNG captures and prevents the release of methane generated above ground by huge organic waste streams, including municipal wastewater from 20 million New Yorkers, and farm waste from our vibrant agricultural sector. A full lifecycle accounting framework — standard practice in most other major jurisdictions — would recognize that difference, properly crediting RNG for the climate benefits of methane capture.
These two changes — broadening the definition of renewable energy and updating the carbon accounting system —are targeted, practical fixes for a seven-year-old law that hasn't kept pace with the full range of clean energy tools now available. Together, they would transform the incentive landscape for organic waste-derived energy in New York, spurring economic development and jobs in rural communities across the state, reducing the cost of economy-wide decarbonization, making the grid more resilient, and delivering deep emissions reductions.
We’ve debated New York's climate future long enough. Now it's time to act -- not to gut the CLCPA or relitigate its ambitions, but to amend it in practical, targeted ways, to unlock critical solutions for organic waste recycling. The CLCPA was designed to lay a foundation for long-term climate progress across the entire economy. Transforming New York’s organic waste stream from a major methane emitter into a major clean energy asset is essential to reaching the CLCPA goal, and the Legislature can help get it done.
Joanna Underwood is founder and trustee of the environmental nonprofit Energy Vision, which researches and promotes strategies necessary for a low-carbon, sustainable future.
