I was and remain an odd one to be writing about the state of America's urban areas. If you've been reading my work at all, you know I grew up in a rural setting in Iowa and am a content rural dweller myself now. I have little time for cities, despite having lived in them for four decades. I find them unpleasant; crowded, noisy, and, to be honest, they smell bad. I like the clean country air of the Susitna Valley, and if that means I have to put up now and then with waiting for a moose to leave my driveway before going outside, that's fine.
With that being true, why am I still worried about America's cities? Because our cities are the beating hearts of our nation. Much of the country's economic activity happens there. Urban areas contain a lot of the country's industry and academia. What's more, our cities used to be the pride of the nation, but that's not so much the case anymore. Rampant open-air drug use, huge homeless encampments, and rampant crime, including rioting against federal immigration officers, are taking their toll.
New York has another problem on top of all that: The state's insane energy policy. The Empire State, in 2019, passed and implemented the 2019 Climate Act, which intended to cut the state's greenhouse gas emissions by a quarter by 2030. The problem is that the state is nowhere near this goal, but the state is still shutting down reliable, clean energy sources that already exist - and that's going to affect the city most of all.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul has spent much of her four and a half years in office facing a time bomb left by her predecessor: drastic, legally binding greenhouse gas reduction targets that the state has no practical means of meeting.
The 2019 Climate Act requires New York to cut statewide greenhouse gas emissions by about one-quarter from that year’s levels by 2030. The state has made little progress toward this goal, in part because officials shuttered New York’s largest nuclear power plant in 2021.
Now this is dumb enough all on its own, especially the closing of the nuclear power plant; nuclear power, after all, is everything the climate scolds claim to want: Reliable, high-density, virtually emissions-free.
Here's the onion:
The law has saddled the state with three related but distinct problems: threats to the grid’s reliability, rising electric bills, and a looming surge in fuel prices.
The most ominous—and the least visible—is the growing risk that New York City might have difficulty keeping the lights on as soon as June. Last summer’s heat wave, when temperatures reached 100 degrees in some neighborhoods, put the electric grid under extreme stress.
The city may very well, by this summer, be summarily projected back into the pre-air-conditioning days. But it gets a lot worse than that.
Read More: The Downfall of America's Cities: Plague, Plague, and More Plague
The Downfall of America's Cities: Homelessness, Crime and Blue Jurisdictions
New York - the city, that is - is already one of the most expensive places in the country to live. A rise in electricity rates won't much affect the gilded elites in Central Park South penthouses; they can afford to live with the consequences of clueless lefty virtue-signaling. But the general run of New Yorkers is about to have a very bad time.
It's not just the cost. It's the supply. Note the comment above that New York City may have problems keeping the lights on. Consider what that means for the people living in the cheaper parts of town. Consider what rolling blackouts, or possibly even longer-term blackouts, would mean in a city already suffering under a catch-and-release justice system - a system that Mayor Mamdani has promised to make more feckless and irresponsible than it has ever been. Consider the effects of a blackout on a city increasingly characterized by smash-and-grab robberies, home invasions, and rampant homelessness marked by increasingly aggressive panhandling.
Consider also that this will increase the exodus of what's left of New York's middle class, the productive, and even many more affluent people who will still feel the pain of increased electricity rates and gas prices. The remaining residents will be the dependency class, to whom Mayor Mamdani has promised a never-ending stream of free Schiff, along with the criminal classes, the few people who can't afford to leave and who are clinging to their homes, and, of course, the elites in their towers, who are largely unaffected.
And, finally, we note that energy prices, set to skyrocket under this law, are at the heart of everything else in the economy, of a city, a state, or a nation. New York, with this law, has dropped a sea-anchor overboard, one that will drag the Big Apple's economy to a shuddering halt.
New Yorkers will be paying the price for this stupid law, and this time there will be no eyepatch-wearing Kurt Russell to come sort things out.
