To The Reader’s Forum:

A recent letter from a National Fuel analyst to NY industrial consumers of natural gas suggests that its customers have two options:

¯ Get out of New York state while you can.

¯ Stay and fight Governor Cuomo’s new Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA).

In the letter, National Fuel says that the legislation could “effectively eliminate the use of natural gas in New York by 2050,” adding, “renewables alone cannot now or in the future reliably meet the demand to heat homes, fuel businesses, and maintain and grow the state’s economy.” The advisory letter continues: “As a result, energy-intensive businesses and their jobs may be challenged to remain in New York.”

The National Fuel letter shies away from questioning the Governor’s assumption that the trace gas carbon dioxide is a pollutant. Nor does it challenge the false notion that wind and solar significantly reduce CO2 emissions. Instead it focuses on wholesale gas prices having dropped 60 percent over the last decade, savings that have been passed on to consumers. Cuomo’s CLCPA “could potentially undo all of that savings and then some,” National Fuel says.

The national fuel analyst, Jeff Kwiatkowski, notes that New York will implement a carbon tax in a year. The “Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) will establish by January 1, 2021 a ‘social cost of carbon’ for use by state agencies.” DEC is to be given police powers to enforce the carbon tax, and NYSERDA is the agency that buys up overpriced wind energy (taxpayer money), selling it at a loss in order to keep the wind industry seemingly viable.

Kwiatkowski states, “the CLCPA has the potential to radically alter the vehicles we can drive, how electricity is generated within our state. Many of our large industrial customers can’t feasibly convert from natural gas to electricity for all energy necessary for manufacturing especially for high temperature industrial processing or where natural gas is used as a feedstock in a manufacturing process. As a result, energy-intensive businesses and their jobs may be challenged to remain in New York.”

The National Fuel letter makes the argument that Cuomo’s determination to drastically reduce carbon dioxide emissions is too expensive, and the industry intends to say so at the upcoming rigged Climate Action Council (CAC) hearings. It would be more useful if the energy industry stood up to non-scientific ideology that carbon dioxide is a pollutant, and that an increase in CO2 (anthropomorphic or otherwise) drives climate change.

Roy Harvey,

Mayville