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NY Renews climate coalition launches campaign to fund initiatives
Lissa Harris reports for the Times Union that NY Renews, a coalition of more than 300 climate, justice, and labor groups is calling for $10 billion in state spending to help meet the goals laid out in New York state’s climate law. The group held rallies Nov. 16 in Albany, New York City, Kingston, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Ithaca, and Long Island. The group is pushing for the Climate, Jobs, and Justice legislation, bills that would establish a new fund for New York’s climate plan, align public service law with a transition away from fossil fuels, eliminate fossil fuel subsidies, lay groundwork for decommissioning fossil fuel power plants, empower the New York Power Authority to build renewable energy projects, and create new oversight and accountability for all of these projects and proposals. The NY Renews coalition helped pass the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act in 2019, to decarbonize New York state’s $2 trillion economy and slash greenhouse gas emissions 85 percent below their 1990 levels by 2050. Environmental advocates see several benefits from the plan including energy independence from foreign fossil fuel and longer lives and less illness from fossil-fuel-driven particulate pollution, which currently sickens and kills thousands of New Yorkers, concentrated in low-income Black and brown neighborhoods. Read more about this story in the Times Union.