As the “Theme from New York, New York” said, in Liza Minelli’s original, “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere,/ Come on, come through, New York, New York.” But when it comes to the green energy transition, it didn’t. As Steve Everley argues on David Blackmon’s substack, and as the Manhattan Contrarian had long warned, “The grand experiment has failed.” Instead they’re desperately trying to get a natural gas pipeline in place in less than a year because, Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul’s office said, “we need to govern in reality”. The governor’s office explained, as if it were some kind of revelation, that the “top priority is making sure the lights and heat stay on for all New Yorkers as we face potential energy shortages downstate as soon as next summer.” Now cast your mind back to New York on V-J day 1945, when the musical action starts, a city on top of the world, the bright lights of Broadway unquenchable and the future brighter still. How can the enlightened, nay anointed, have led it from one dream to another until suddenly they’re not sure the light switch will work?

Well, as Everley explains:

“For years, campaigners insisted the Northeast could stop investing in natural gas and keep energy costs in check. Many actually claimed the result would be lower prices for homes and businesses, contrary to basic economics and physics. An activist with the Sierra Club said nearly a decade ago that ‘if we can forestall gas infrastructure being put in the ground and locking in that demand for the next 60 years, the hope is that renewables will come in and be cost competitive in all markets.’”

Yeah. The hope. Not the calculation. And unfortunately:

“New York and New England took the bait. Fracking bans and permit rejections for new pipelines were sold as the path toward a cleaner and cheaper energy future. None of that happened.”

No indeed. Instead:

“In 2024, the price that New York homes paid for natural gas was $2 more than the national average. Over the past decade, prices in the Empire State have increased by nearly 50 percent. In Massachusetts, prices have increased a whopping 67 percent. Other New England states have seen similar increases that outpaced the rest of the country.”

Nor can it plausibly be put down to coincidence that they are also among the jurisdictions that most enthusiastically embraced not only the development of wind and solar but also the banning of gas stoves and new power plants. After all, if wind and solar don’t work you just lose other people’s money. If they don’t work and you got rid of the alternatives, you lose their votes.

As Everley concluded:

“you can’t limit access to the most affordable fuel and expect lower energy prices. Those who continue to say so are not arguing with ‘the industry,’ but rather the overwhelming amount of data in front of us.”

Or with yourselves. Canary Media sees the data and tries to disbelieve, writing:

“Massachusetts lawmakers have advanced an energy-affordability bill that opponents say would undo years of work on policies to fight climate change and promote energy efficiency, all without actually saving consumers much money.”

It’s always fishy when some version of “critics say” is the lead, not the thing that happened. After all Massachusetts isn’t exactly a hotbed of MAGA. In fact the state House of Representatives currently has 134 Democrats and one Independent who caucuses with them as against just 25 Republicans, while the state Senate has 35 Democrats and 5 Republicans. And yet, and yet:

“The legislation, which a House committee approved 7 to 0 on Wednesday, would make the state’s 2030 emissions target nonbinding, slash funding for energy-efficiency programming, reinstate incentives for high-efficiency gas heating systems, and limit climate and clean-energy initiatives that impact customers’ utility bills. It would also prevent projects in cities and towns with natural-gas bans from claiming energy-efficiency incentives for all-electric construction. The bill’s author – Democratic state Rep. Mark Cusack, the House chair of the Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy – has said these steps are necessary to get ballooning energy bills under control.”

Slash. Brutal. But unlike journalactivists, these folks have to get reelected and at some point a bunch of city talk can’t get around this reality:

“Electricity prices in Massachusetts have been trending upwards for a decade and are among the highest in the country.”

It didn’t work.

The temptation, of course, is to send more words to undo the damage. But as Heatmap just wrote of another of the new wave of pseudo-sane-on-climate Democrats, “New Jersey Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill made a rate freeze one of her signature campaign promises, but that’s easier said than done.” Gosh. Ya think?

So to give the last word here to the Manhattan Contrarian, who has earned it, the problem for New York politicians is that they passed a deeply crazy Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act back in 2019 and then ignored its provisions when it turned out they were, um, crazy. So of course they got sued, and the court said the law is the law (itself something of a novelty in these troubled times) and brushed aside the administration’s argument that it couldn’t be done so do we hafta?

The whole thing is unraveling.