The New York Public Service Commission is hosting a virtual public hearing allowing community members to make a statement about the project on Tuesday, April 29, at 1:00 pm and 5:30 pm. RSVP to attend and voice your support for a clean, reliable, affordable power grid for the Long Island and New York City area!

How to get involved:

Virtual Public Hearings: Tuesday, April 29th at 1:00 pm and 5:00 pm. Sign up here!

Submit Comments: Online by May 23rd. Submit comments here!

Anne Marie Garti, (718) 601-9618

CT, ME, MA, NH, NJ, NY, PA, RI, VT — Over 200 organizations, citizens groups, farms, and businesses wrote to nine Northeastern governors today, urging them to stand firm and united against the Trump administration’s goal of reviving gas pipelines that were proposed in the region years ago and then abandoned by the project proponents.

The letter thanks the governors for their role in moving the region “towards a cleaner energy system that is protective of our environment, and of our rights to self-determination as states, communities, and landowners.”

The organizations that drafted the letter are Stop the Pipeline (STP), which spearheaded the legal and political grassroots effort in New York that defeated the Constitution Pipeline, and the Pipe Line Awareness Network for the Northeast (PLAN), which coordinated legal, regulatory, and grassroots pushback against Kinder Morgan’s Northeast Energy Direct project in multiple states (chiefly Massachusetts and New Hampshire).

Trump declared a “national energy emergency” on Inauguration Day, and followed up with another executive order on Valentine’s Day establishing a “national energy dominance council.” He has subsequently pressured NY Governor Hochul to allow the Constitution Pipeline to be built. This strong-arming is reverberating throughout the region as proponents of gas pipelines put pressure on other governors, such as Massachusetts’ Governor Healey, who has been a strong opponent of expensive and destructive pipeline proposals in her state.

“These pipelines did not move forward when they were proposed because they were being funded by gas drillers and pipeline companies who had no respect for state laws that guarantee protections of our natural resources, particularly our pristine and irreplaceable water quality,” said Anne Marie Garti, a founder of STP and co-counsel of the group (with the Pace Environmental Litigation Clinic).

After years of resisting these energy conglomerates, people of the region are familiar with their playbook. As the letter states, “Today, more people than ever are awake, engaged, and resolved to stand up against the tyranny of greed. We have real solutions, and we are implementing them.”

Kathryn Eiseman, PLAN’s president, explains: “Over-reliance on natural gas makes consumers captive to the fluctuations of commodities markets. Diversifying our energy resources – particularly by expanding non-commodity based resources such as wind, solar, energy efficiency and other demand-side solutions – is what ultimately can free us from price spikes.”

The letter’s core message to the governors: “The 233 undersigned organizations ask you, as the leaders of our States, to stand united with each other and with us, to protect our hard-fought victories against the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure and to focus on fulfilling our climate goals. … Our stance against the buildout of gas infrastructure, after all we have achieved, is non-negotiable.”

Katherine Alford and Pat Almonrode, two of the demonstrators, were facilitators for the group Third Act NYC, which engages people over age sixty in pro-democracy and pro-environment action, often working in coalitions with other groups. “Everyone always thinks that people over sixty just get more conservative, and that’s just not true,” Alford said. “It’s ironic that, as a pro-democracy and pro-climate group, we’re protesting against electric cars. But you cannot sacrifice our democracy for one piece of the thing.”

Almonrode was happy to see members of the international press covering the demonstrations. “We want to make sure that the world understands that America is not Donald Trump, it’s not Elon Musk, it’s not doge, it is not the Republican lackeys in Congress,” he said. “It’s people like us, out in the streets.” He added, “They call people like us domestic terrorists.” Not so. “Trump himself is the biggest domestic terrorist.”

On Friday afternoon, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration cannot shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — and must undo the actions already taken to dismantle it — while the case proceeds.

Here are a few things the judge said in her 112-page ruling (when she says “plaintiffs” she is talking about our side):

Trump officials were “fully engaged in a hurried effort to dismantle and disable the agency entirely … in complete disregard for the decision Congress made 15 years ago, which was spurred by the devastating financial crisis of 2008 and embodied in the United States Code, that the agency must exist and that it must perform specific functions to protect the borrowing public.”

“Before it can step in, the Court must conclude that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on their claims, that they would suffer irreparable harm in the meantime if the Court lets the lawsuit run its course, and that an injunction would be in the public interest. The Court has made those findings, and the answer is an overwhelming yes: the Court can and must act.”

“The elimination of the agency was interrupted only because plaintiffs sought and obtained the Court’s intervention on the day the overwhelming majority of the employees were going to be fired.”

The administration’s “contention they were intent on doing what the law required them to do collapsed like a balloon at the end of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.”

Here’s more about this case:

In 2008, Wall Street’s reckless greed set off a worldwide financial crisis.

So Congress, exercising its constitutional authority to regulate commerce, established a new federal agency — the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) — to protect the American people from wrong or unfair conduct by Big Banks and other giant financial institutions.

Public Citizen played a major role in the creation of the CFPB.

Since its creation in 2011, the CFPB has recovered billions for everyday Americans and helped create a fairer, more transparent financial marketplace.

Donald Trump has openly declared his intent to “totally eliminate” the CFPB.

The Trump administration cannot lawfully dismantle the CFPB — its attempt to do so is in defiance of the Constitution’s separation of powers.

The attempt to eliminate the CFPB has imposed significant harm on consumers all across the country.

Based on a careful review of the facts showing the administration’s unlawful conduct, the judge issued an order requiring the administration to maintain “the agency’s existence until this case has been resolved on the merits, reinstating and preserving the agency’s contracts, work force, data, and operational capacity, and protecting and facilitating the employees’ ability to perform statutorily required activities.”

Public Citizen, along with co-counsel, is representing the National Treasury Employees Union, CFPB Employee Association, NAACP, National Consumer Law Center, Ted Steege, and Virginia Poverty Law Center in this case.

This is one of seven active lawsuits Public Citizen is pursuing against the Trump regime so far. If the cases are starting to blur together, don’t worry — you don’t have to read every email or keep track of all the ins and outs. We will keep sending updates so you have at least an overall sense of how we’re fighting back against the Trump/Musk/DOGE/MAGA onslaught.

Thank you for being part of this shared project called Public Citizen.

For progress,

– Robert Weissman & Lisa Gilbert, Co-Presidents of Public Citizen

Six days earlier, she had convened an emergency meeting with 75 faculty members after the university had cravenly surrendered to the demands of the Trump administration in the hopes of recovering $400m in federal grants and contracts. The president and her staff called their predicament “heartbreaking” and sought to reassure faculty that academic freedom and departmental autonomy remained intact.

A transcript of the meeting was leaked. Two days later, the president was “returning to lead” the university’s medical center. She was replaced by a trustee.

For a member of the board of trustees to assume leadership of the university, without even the fig leaf of faculty consultation, has never occurred in the 271-year history of Columbia. Unprecedented in its own right, the episode also exposes a deeply worrisome problem of governance in American higher education. This has been building for years, but now the stakes are higher than ever: the very survival of the university as we know it.

American universities, in their recent dealings with the federal government – and with their own trustees – have repeatedly shown themselves incapable of preserving the core values of academic freedom and shared governance. This failure has been widely noted, but unasked is who bears responsibility. Who precisely decides to surrender those values, whether at private institutions like Columbia, Harvard or the University of Pennsylvania, or at public ones like the University of North Carolina or the University of Minnesota?
The Trump administration’s roundup of student protesters is genuinely shocking
Jameel Jaffer
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The ultimate decision-maker at colleges and universities is the board of trustees. And these boards, as the explosive events of the past year demonstrate, have serious problems, both in how they are constituted and how they lead. Those committed to the distinctive strengths of the university as a maker, teacher and custodian of knowledge, both old and new, must at long last try to grasp why these boards are failing and figure out how to fix them.

Trustees (sometimes called governors, regents, visitors or “members of the corporation”) have a lofty function: to ensure the financial health and stability of the institution, partly through their own donations. This fiduciary responsibility has extended to the recruitment, appointment and retention of the school president, and sometimes of other senior administrators, usually (as at Columbia) with little substantive faculty consultation required by the norms of shared governance. Trustees play an increasingly active role in academic decisions through the levers of cost, donor power and financial austerity. In our fraught times, these levers are in increasing use, especially by the Trump-driven Republican party, to target disciplines, departments and individual professors. Many boards have become political wolves in the guise of fiduciary sheep.

Boards of trustees are essentially private clubs, which follow their own, always confidential, norms to determine who is asked to join, who controls key committees, and who is gently persuaded to resign when they do not meet the criteria of the most influential trustees. (In some private institutions, presidents may have a say in who gets selected as trustees, but presidents themselves are appointed by trustees.) At public universities, these boards are directly tied to the powers of state legislatures and administrators and thus are at the mercy of state politics in key matters. At private universities, the club is dominated by heavy hitters in business, law and technology; the number of alumni, academics and students is vanishingly small. These business-oriented trustees (a majority being white and male) treat their board meetings as golf parties; they schmooze, network and discuss deals while going through the motions of discussing university policies and priorities.

The most urgent need today, as the Columbia case shows, is to create a new social contract on boards of trustees

Who becomes a trustee? At Columbia there are 21, all of them from business, law and technology, with the exception of a former journalist. Although they are in charge of an academic institution, none of them is an academic. None has ever led a classroom or a lab meeting or medical rounds with interns. None has gone through the process of tenure, where their teaching, publication record and service are rigorously assessed by colleagues in the field both from within the institution and outside it. None has ever had their work peer-reviewed by anonymous readers or panels of experts. None has ever published in academic or scientific journals or presses and had their ideas debated in the public sphere. None has ever framed a hypothesis and tested it on the basis of evidence they have collected. None, in short, has sought truth and had their search confirmed by objective scholars and scientists.

How, we ask, can people be entrusted with running a university when they have no lived experience with or understanding of its core functions and aims? What qualifications do such trustees bring to their office beside the capacity and expectation to donate? And what do those qualifications, which pertain to private profit, have to do with the concerns of scholars and scientists and doctors, which pertain to the public good? Universities are replicating the plutocratic domination of the Trump administration.

Is it any wonder, then, that Columbia’s trustees are prepared to ignore the foundational values that constitute a university – academic freedom and shared governance – in order to reach an accommodation with the federal government?

The Columbia board is by no means unique. The same situation prevails, with few exceptions, across the Ivy League and its peer institutions (exemplary is the University of Chicago). As far as public universities are concerned, though there are some variations among several of the flagships, such as the regents of the universities of California, Michigan and Wisconsin, they are typically composed of lawyers, politicians and businessmen, and generally appointed by governors of individual states. Their accountability is hard to locate in their charter documents, and their near-autonomous powers are wide-ranging. In these regards, they are very much like their private counterparts.
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These facts would be sobering enough as evidence of the longstanding privilege and exclusivity of boards of trustees and their role in bringing bigger political and economic agendas into the heart of academic governance. But there is an even more worrisome issue.

Boards are accountable to no one – only to themselves, and to some vague set of norms, often unwritten, about their obligations. Accountability is for faculty, administrators and students.

Given the remarkable absence of any mechanism for assessing, monitoring or auditing their performance, should we be surprised if trustees bring the most intense political agendas into the heart of the institutions they oversee? With their powerful connections to local, state, and federal agendas and networks, trustees become conduits for politicians and finance-driven values that affect the core life of academic institutions rather than buffers against these forces. (A Penn trustee was accused by the faculty last year of attempting a “hostile takeover” of the university.)

The most urgent need today, as the Columbia case shows, is to create a new social contract on boards of trustees, who have become too craven to be watchdogs and too self-interested to be trusted. This change will require hard community-based activism that balances lawyers, hedge fund managers and tech bros with professors, schoolteachers, researchers, scientists and students. For public institutions, this may require legal support, as well as a powerful alliance between communities and state governors. Without such changes in boards of trustees, the current capture of colleges and universities by an unholy alliance of wealthy alumni, rightwing billionaires and bureaucrats is likely to become entrenched.

Creating this new social contract will require two crucial steps. The first is to bring the full force of public scrutiny to bear on boards, their membership, their accountability and the checks on their powers. The second is to demand that all academic governing boards both reflect and defend the fundamental values of universities in a liberal democracy: freedom of academic speech, opinion and inquiry; procedural transparency; and demographic diversity.

There are many universities left on the government’s hit lists, and before they lose their souls, their boards of trustees must be held to account.

Arjun Appadurai, professor emeritus at New York University, is the former provost of the New School. Sheldon Pollock is professor emeritus, Columbia University, and former chair of its department of Middle Eastern, south Asian and African studies

Twenty Lessons, read by John Lithgow
Key selections from On Tyranny, for viewing and sharing
Timothy Snyder
Mar 30, 2025

Here is my best guidance for action, rendered beautifully by the great John Lithgow. I first published these lessons more than eight years ago, in late 2016. They open the twenty chapters of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Millions of you, around the world, have put these lessons to good use; it has been humbling to learn how from courageous and creative dissenters, protestors, and oppositionists. I am delighted to have this special chance now to share the lessons again. I was honored when John, a wise advocate for civil discourse and civic engagement, volunteered to read them aloud.

Above is his film. Below is the text, excerpted from the book. Do share this.

Share

1. Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

2. Defend institutions. It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about — a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union — and take its side.

3. Beware the one-party state. The parties that remade states and suppressed rivals were not omnipotent from the start. They exploited a historic moment to make political life impossible for their opponents. So support the multiple-party system and defend the rules of democratic elections. Vote in local and state elections while you can. Consider running for office.

4. Take responsibility for the face of the world. The symbols of today enable the reality of tomorrow. Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate. Do not look away, and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.

5. Remember professional ethics. When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important. It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor.

6. Be wary of paramilitaries. When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.

7. Be reflective if you must be armed. If you carry a weapon in public service, may God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things. Be ready to say no.

8. Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.

9. Be kind to our language. Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books.

10. Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

11. Investigate. Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on the internet is there to harm you. Learn about sites that investigate propaganda campaigns (some of which come from abroad). Take responsibility for what you communicate with others.

12. Make eye contact and small talk. This is not just polite. It is part of being a citizen and a responsible member of society. It is also a way to stay in touch with your surroundings, break down social barriers, and understand whom you should and should not trust. If we enter a culture of denunciation, you will want to know the psychological landscape of your daily life.

13. Practice corporeal politics. Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them.

(Nota bene, jumping away from the text for a moment: there will be chances to practice corporeal politics all over the USA on April 5th).

14. Establish a private life. Nastier rulers will use what they know about you to push you around. Scrub your computer of malware on a regular basis. Remember that email is skywriting. Consider using alternative forms of the internet, or simply using it less. Have personal exchanges in person. For the same reason, resolve any legal trouble. Tyrants seek the hook on which to hang you. Try not to have hooks.

15. Contribute to good causes. Be active in organizations, political or not, that express your own view of life. Pick a charity or two and set up autopay. Then you will have made a free choice that supports civil society and helps others to do good.

16. Learn from peers in other countries. Keep up your friendships abroad, or make new friends in other countries. The present difficulties in the United States are an element of a larger trend. And no country is going to find a solution by itself. Make sure you and your family have passports.

17. Listen for dangerous words. Be alert to use of the words “extremism” and “terrorism.” Be alive to the fatal notions of “emergency” and “exception.” Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.

18. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it.

19. Be a patriot. Set a good example of what America means for the generations to come. They will need it.

20. Be as courageous as you can. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny.

Like a mob boss, the government threatens to cut off two of the university’s fingers: academic freedom and faculty governance
Wed 19 Mar 2025 05.00 EDT

On 15 March, Columbia University received what can only be described as the most dangerous letter in the history of higher education in America. The sender was the United States government. Like a ransom note, the government letter insists that Columbia comply with a list of Trump administration demands in order to even have a chance at recovering the $400m in federal funding for scientific research that the government canceled on 7 March.

Oddly, one of the specific targets identified in the letter was Columbia’s department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies (Mesaas), a small humanities department devoted to studying the languages, cultures and history of those regions. The government demanded the Mesaas department be put into “receivership” – basically, be taken over by the university – as a precondition to further negotiations.
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The battle against the authoritarianism taking hold in Washington now appears to turn in part on the fate of Mesaas.

Why Mesaas?

The Trump campaign to destroy the independence of American higher education began when an obscure federal agency, the General Services Administration (GSA), in collaboration with the Departments of Health and Human Services and Education, coordinated the extraordinary move to rescind $400m in federal funding for scientific research at Columbia, since Columbia “has fundamentally failed to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment”.

After threatening some 60 other universities with the same fate, on 13 March the government sent their ransom note to Columbia alone. Their conditions were to be met within seven days, and not in return for the release of the funds, but merely as “preconditions”. Further demands would then be presented for “formal negotiation” – which would not be an actual negotiation, because the GSA would continue to hold back the university’s money, like a mobster.

The preconditions concern mainly the policing of student protest on campus. Their imposition likely violates both federal law and the US constitution, as Columbia law faculty have made clear. But in a startling and equally unlawful move the government took another hostage in its letter: Mesaas. For a period of five years, Columbia must place the department in academic receivership. The university was given the same seven-day ultimatum by which to specify “a full plan, with date-certain deliverables” for enforcing the receivership.

This is an unparalleled attempt to seize control over people and ideas in a US university. Universities do find it necessary sometimes to place an academic department in receivership, typically when the department’s self-governance breaks down. Normally the administration will appoint as chair a member of another department, for one academic year. Mesaas’s current self-governance is outstanding, and there have been no problems in all the years that that I chaired the department.

For the United States government itself to intervene directly in faculty governance – specifying the extraordinary five-year period, and with “deliverables” on whose performance the future funding of the entire university might depend – is without precedent in the history of US higher education.

Why has the government chosen to single out this department?

The answer is clear: because its faculty have not voiced steadfast support for the state of Israel in their scholarship. The US government stands almost alone in the world in its unwavering ideological and financial support for the violence of the state of Israel against the people of Palestine. Most recently it has provided the consent, the justification and the arms for Israel’s destruction of Gaza. (Just this week, the destruction was relaunched, to condemnation from around the world but not from Washington, which alone gave its support.)

In contrast, academic research by prominent scholars in the field of Middle Eastern studies, including those in Mesaas, has reflected deeply on the complexity of the situation and has long since questioned the versions of history and racial ideas fueling Israel’s actions. Mesaas professors ask hard but entirely legitimate questions about Israel – and our government wants to ban that.

The Mesaas department played no role in organizing student protests for Gaza. But Washington has decided that in addition to dictating how a university should govern political protest, it should control how the university governs academic research –intensifying a broad attack on research on the Middle East across US universities.

With its demands to essentially seize control of Mesaas, the federal government is undermining two fundamental principles of the American university: the right of academic departments to self-government and the freedom of members of the faculty to express their views, without fear, both as authorities in their fields of inquiry and as private individuals.
Trump is setting the US on a path to educational authoritarianism
Jason Stanley
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Columbia is required to decide by Thursday 20 March how to respond to this ransom note, with the government threatening to cut off two of the university’s fingers: academic freedom and faculty governance. If the Columbia administration capitulates, it will mark the beginning of its own destruction and that of the American university as such – precisely what the American Enterprise Institute, which supplied the template for the note, has called for.

The courts have so far paused more than 40 of the administration’s initiatives, though it remains unclear if the mob boss will obey. So long as we do have a functional judicial system, however, Columbia’s answer to Trump can only be: see you in court.

Sheldon Pollock FBA is the Arvind Raghunathan professor emeritus of South Asian studies at Columbia University and former chair of the Mesaas department. He currently has no role in department or university administration and writes only in a personal capacity.

Just fill out this form, print it, and mail it (address provided). DOGE will then have a legal obligation to respond. At the very least, you might learn something interesting about how Musk and his minions are collecting and using your data – and if enough of us file these requests, we might at least slow down their rampage through our public institutions.

This is an effort led by Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, who asks that you let his office know once you’ve submitted your request.

It’s all about volume, so please share widely!

As climate disasters like floods, fires, and hurricanes intensify, our communities are paying billions to deal with climate impacts. That’s why a growing number of cities and states are filing lawsuits or passing new legislation that would make the fossil fuel industry pay their fair share for climate damages. Afterall, Big Oil knew for decades they were causing this crisis, but lied to the public and lobbied against climate solutions.

Now, Big Oil is turning to its allies in Congress to try and secure a “liability waiver” that would give them blanket immunity from any efforts to hold them accountable for their climate crimes. This “get out of jail free” card would allow them to keep raking in record profits while we all pay the price of their pollution. This is the same type of legislation that the gun industry was able to pass in 2005 that makes it so they can’t be held responsible when their product kills people.

Sign this petition to Congress telling them to oppose this Big Oil bailout. We can’t give this toxic industry any more free passes when our communities are burning, flooding, and being destroyed by climate change.

Together we can win this fight and protect our progress.
Motivated by the enactment of legislation last year to establish a climate change superfund, first in Vermont and then New York, proposals to make polluters pay for their role in driving the climate crisis are gaining momentum in states across the nation. These climate change adaptation cost recovery programs require the biggest polluters that have contributed significantly to the buildup of climate-warming greenhouse gases to begin paying their fair share of the repair costs of damages to municipal infrastructure from extreme storms. The funds also finance infrastructure investments to mitigate against future storms and a wide range of efforts to tackle the impacts of climate change.

Legislation is also being introduced in several states, including New York’s Climate Liability Act (A72 Solages / S4799 Myrie), to establish a private right of action, allowing any person, government entity, firm, corporation or association harmed by a climate disaster or extreme weather attributable to climate change, the right to file a lawsuit in state court against responsible parties.
Nevertheless, rather than owning up to their responsibility and being accountable for past actions and the consequences that follow, Big Oil companies are calling on their drill-baby-drill allies in Congress to secure a liability waiver that gives them blanket immunity from any efforts to hold them accountable for their climate-changing emissions.

The idea that biofuels are a panacea to climate change is a fallacy, as they have significant environmental and economic drawbacks.
The Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act – our landmark NYS Climate Law – went into effect in January 2020 and its implementation plan was published in December 2022, and ever since then our efforts to fully fund and implement the Act have been afflicted by incrementalism… then inaction… and now attempts to partially undo the law.

This deceptively named “clean fuel” bill would in fact impede achievement of the mandates in the Climate Law by incentivizing the continued use of carbon-based biofuels in the transportation sector.

The Clean Fuel Standard legislation offers harmful short-term false solutions. To reach net-zero emissions, New York must transition to solar, wind, geo-thermal and hydro not from one burnable fuel to another.

If your assemblymember is listed below, send an email message to them today and request that they drop off as a co-sponsor of the Clean Fuel Standard bill – A472.
Sample email: I write to ask that you withdraw your co-sponsorship of the Clean Fuel Standard legislation – A472. The perception that biofuels are a panacea to climate change is a fallacy, as they have significant environmental and economic drawbacks. This deceptively named “clean fuel” bill would in fact impede achievement of the mandates in the Climate Law by incentivizing the continued use of carbon-based biofuels in the transportation sector.

Assemblymembers currently listed as co-sponsors:

Woerner, Sayegh, Williams, Magnarelli, Stirpe, Carroll R, Rivera, Simon, Hevesi, Vanel, Dinowitz, Hunter, Barrett, Seawright, Hyndman, Benedetto, Jackson, Burdick, Lunsford, Braunstein, Clark, Bronson, Simpson, Ra, Brown K, Durso, Kim, Bichotte Hermelyn, DeStefano, Gibbs, Bores, Raga, De Los Santos, Gandolfo, Epstein, Lee, Simone, Rosenthal, Forrest, Eachus, Levenberg, Meeks, Pheffer-Amato, Davila, Slater, Tapia, Walsh, Shimsky, Colton, Stern, Reyes, Jones, Lupardo, Weprin, Rozic, Santabarbara, Walker, Cook, Jacobson, McMahon, Burke, Anderson, Peoples-Stokes, Rajkumar, Cruz, Fall, Taylor, Dilan, Buttenschon, Conrad, Mikulin, Steck, Lavine, Cunningham, Novakhov, Zinerman, Septimo, Zaccaro, Bendett, Alvarez, Chandler-Waterman, Blumencranz, McDonough

Additional information from Third Act Upstate NY