New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is an ardent climate alarmist who oversees the nation’s largest school district, the New York City Public Schools (NYCPS) system.
Frankly, NYCPS is failing on all fronts. It is doing an abysmal job of educating and protecting the 900,000 students in the district. It is also in massive debt and spends nearly 10 percent of its $42.8 billion budget on annual debt service payments.
Given the awful state of affairs at NYCPS, it is absurd that Mamdani is prioritizing a $3.3 billion program dubbed “Zohran’s Green Schools for a Healthier New York.”
According to a Mamdani policy memo detailing the program, “The Mamdani administration will fight to protect New Yorkers from the present and future impacts of the climate crisis while investing in our children, creating thousands of union jobs, and cleaning the city’s air. We will do this by revitalizing our public schools with healthy, green infrastructure.”
In a very telling phrase, the Mamdani administration notes in bold that “NYC public schools offer a key opportunity for comprehensive climate action.”
This is key because it reveals that the Mamdani administration views the nation’s largest school system as an instrument with “great potential for addressing climate change.”
Specifically, the program calls for the renovation of “500 schools with renewable energy infrastructure … to accelerate NYC’s energy transition and improve learning conditions,” the construction of “500 green schoolyards,” and a campaign “to combat environmental racism in NYC.”
Again, it must be stressed that this program has nothing to do with improving the awful performance of NYCPS but everything to do with climate alarmism, virtue signaling, and fueling the green energy industry with billions of taxpayer dollars.
Mamdani’s team asserts that “Transitioning our schools to renewable energy would also save the city around $275 million in energy costs for public school buildings each year.”
That is simply not true because renewable energy is much more expensive than conventional energy sources.
As Heartland Institute President James Taylor writes in a Policy Brief titled “Affordable, Reliable, and Clean: An Objective Scorecard to Assess Competing Energy Sources,” “Pricing data for competing power sources is more complicated than most people assume.” Taylor explains that the Levelized Full System Costs of Electricity (LFCOE) is the best metric because it accounts “for all the upfront and hidden costs of competing power generation sources.”
According to the LFCOE, “using the relatively wind-friendly and solar-friendly geography of Texas as a baseline,” Taylor notes that natural gas costs $40 per megawatt-hour, coal $90, biomass $117, nuclear $122, wind $291, and solar $413.
This is supported by the fact that New York, a state that has embraced the “green transition,” has some of the highest electricity rates in the nation.
In other words, the argument that greening schools will save NYCPS one penny is green gaslighting.
Perhaps most concerning is the fact that the memo outlines Mamdani’s plan to shut down fossil fuel plants, starting with those located near schools, because “fossil fuel plants cause asthma and other health problems in our communities.”
Mamdani claims that “prioritizing resilience hubs with battery storage” will “help move forward plant closures” and make the “energy grid” more “reliable.”
Like the propaganda about renewable energy being more affordable than fossil fuels, this is also easily discredited.
It does not take an engineering degree to understand that coal, natural gas, and nuclear power are obviously more reliable than sources dependent on sunlight and strong winds.
Lastly, the argument “that transitioning NYC public schools to renewable energy could reduce city emissions by more than 713,382 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MTCO2e) each year” must be debunked.
The problem here is that renewable energy advocates grossly underestimate the total carbon footprint required to build giant windmills and solar panels. They also ignore the environmental issues these behemoth structures impose on ecosystems and their proclivity to wreak havoc on wildlife. For an in-depth analysis of green energy’s shortcomings concerning reliability and environmental conservation, Taylor’s Policy Brief cited above provides ample evidence.
Typically, I do not like to wish failure upon people. However, I will make an exception in this case and hope to high heaven that Mamdani's Green Schools program absolutely fails to launch because it is an awful idea that will not help any of the 900,000 students in NYCPS learn how to read, write, or perform basic math, which should be the mayor's number one educational priority.
Chris Talgo ([email protected]) is editorial director at The Heartland Institute.
Editor’s Note: Zohran Mamdani is an avowed Democrat Socialist whose policies are wreaking havoc on New York City.
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