Introduction
As human-driven carbon pollution continues to exact a deadly toll through natural disasters of increasing intensity and frequency, higher costs of living and working, and breakdown of planetary systems, New York State is failing to meet the challenges imposed by climate change. Though New York passed a nation-leading climate law in 2019, called the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), which set legal requirements that the state reduce carbon pollution, meet electricity needs with 100% emissions-free energy sources and to ensure equity for front line communities and workers, the state legislative and executive branches have dragged their feet in implementing laws and regulations to meet the CLCPA’s mandates.
Governor Kathy Hochul’s biggest proposal to reduce carbon pollution since taking office in 2021 is a “cap and invest” program that would set a limit on the amount of pollution that can be emitted which would decline every year, charge polluters a fee for each ton of pollution they emit, and use the proceeds from these pollution fees to fund investments to cut energy bills and further reduce energy use. A January 2025 report by the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance and the energy-focused think tank Resources for the Future found that the cap and invest program would generate between $910 million and $1.53 billion in dividends to be paid out to New York consumers in 2027 and between $1.65 billion and $3.52 billion in 2030.
Hochul first proposed the cap and invest program in January 2023, more than three years after the CLCPA was signed into law, but since then she has failed to release draft regulations to put the program into practice. Hochul’s administration is so behind in adopting regulations required by CLCPA that in March 2025, four environmental justice organizations sued Hochul’s Department of Environmental Conservation to compel the state to obey the law. In October, the court determined that Hochul was violating the CLCPA and ordered the administration to comply with the law by issuing regulations by February 6, 2026.
Since Hochul first announced cap and invest, the state has missed a number of deadlines related to the 2019 climate law, announcing in the summer of 2024 that New York is unlikely to meet its mandate to generate 70% of the state’s electricity from renewable sources by 2030. Hochul missed her own self-imposed deadline to release draft cap and invest regulations by the end of 2024 and in 2025 she quietly announced that she was delaying the program in the briefing book accompanying her state of the state address. In July 2025, after another state budget passed without meaningful action on key climate bills, Hochul declared that she had unilaterally decided to “slow down” the legally mandated timeline to reduce carbon pollution. Since then, Hochul has announced that she is also considering delaying implementation of another climate law, the All-Electric Building Act, which passed in 2023.
As she has stalled and backtracked on New York’s climate mandates, Hochul has embraced projects that threaten to dramatically increase the state’s dependence on fossil fuels. In a deal with the Trump administration to permit offshore wind power, Hochul agreed to revisit regulatory approvals for previously rejected fracked gas pipelines. As part of her economic development agenda, Hochul has embraced energy-intensive “AI” projects, announcing a $40 million investment in developing a supercomputer at the University of Buffalo and lauding Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s declaration that he would build a supercomputer at the publicly funded and state-owned factory leased to Musk’s company.
Why has Hochul backed away from taking action on climate change even as she has made grand pronouncements about the dire stakes “if we sacrifice mother nature on the altar of profit”?
A multi-million dollar political influence campaign by New York’s heavy polluters may be the reason. Corporations opposed to cap and invest – and indeed any meaningful action on climate change – have ramped up their lobbying spending in the years that New York has dithered on implementing its climate law, bringing on lobbyists with deep ties to Hochul’s administration. Some of the biggest lobbying spenders opposing the cap and invest program are New York’s gas and electric utility companies, which have seen ballooning profits over the past decade from expanding methane gas infrastructure. A September 2025 report from Renewable Heat Now found that corporate profits for New York’s five major investor-owned utility corporations – Central Hudson, Consolidated Edison, National Grid, National Fuel, and Avangrid which owns NYSEG and Rochester Gas & Electric – had risen by 63% since 2015 to about $3.17 billion in 2024.
This report examines the explosion in lobbying by polluting corporations as they have worked to delay and block New York’s cap and invest plan, polluters’ lobbyists’ revolving door connections to Hochul’s administration and the state government, and the campaign donations that polluters and their lobbyists have steered to Hochul’s campaigns since she became governor.
Key Findings
- Polluting corporations and their trade groups lobbying on cap and invest have made more than $15.9 million in lobbying expenditures since 2021. The 17 heavy polluting corporations and lobbying groups for polluting industries whose filings we analyzed reported spending $15,932,320 on lobbying from 2021 through August 2025, hiring some of New York’s top lobbying firms, like Brown & Weinraub, Bolton-St. Johns, Greenberg Traurig, and Ostroff Associates.
- Heavy polluters opposed to cap and invest have increased lobbying spending by millions of dollars in the years since the Climate & Community Protection Act became law. Across all 17 corporations and lobbying groups we examined, lobbying spending rose by more than 52% from $2,517,827 in 2021 to $3,835,548 in 2024. One corporation that has been at the center of the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to derail New York’s climate progress – the Buffalo-based utility National Fuel – has spent $2.3 million on lobbying from 2021 through 2024, an increase of more than 147% in that time period.
- Polluters are working with lobbyists with deep ties to the Hochul administration and New York State government. Prominent firms like Bolton-St. Johns, Brown and Weinraub, and Greenberg Traurig are working with corporations involved with the efforts to stop cap and invest, including the most important player, National Fuel. Bolton-St. Johns partner Michael Keogh is the spouse of Hochul’s top aide Karen Keogh and other Bolton-St. Johns lobbyists have had roles in Hochul’s administration. Todd Kaminsky, a shareholder and polluter lobbyist at another top lobbying firm, Greenberg Traurig, is a former New York State Senator who once chaired the Senate Environmental Conservation Committee.
- Lobbyists for polluting corporations are funding Hochul’s political campaigns. High-powered lobbyists are prolific donors to Hochul’s political campaigns. Polluter lobbyists Brown & Weinraub, Bolton-St. Johns, Hinman Straub, Ostroff Associates and Greenberg Traurig all held high-dollar fundraisers for Hochul in the first few months she served as governor.