Requiring electric-only building heat will slam New Yorkers

Requiring electric-only building heat will slam New Yorkers

By: Steve Levy

The Legislature is about to require that, no later than 2027, all newly constructed residential and business buildings under seven stories in New York State be heated through massively expensive electric heating systems.

The measure was quietly included in Gov. Hochul’s budget proposal with little or no input from the residents who will take a shellacking if and when it becomes law.

While the governor’s version lists an implementation date that’s five years away, legislators are lobbying to accelerate the effective date to as early as 2024. And as noted by state Sen. Mario Mattera, a leading opponent of the mandate, even as written in the governor’s budget, the legislation gives state agencies the authority to kick in the requirements any time prior to 2027.

This is yet another example of where Hochul has gotten ahead of her skis and put forth unwise legislation at the behest of the many progressives who have her ear.

She now admits that she prematurely submitted a proposal to radically change the suburbs by requiring towns to accept two-family zoning schemes. The pushback to this idea, which had insufficient input from suburban legislators, was so severe that even her Democratic colleagues on Long Island begged her to withdraw the proposal, which she eventually did.

You would think she would’ve learned her lesson, but instead she’s still going full throttle to pander to climate extremists who want to make heating one’s home with oil and gas so expensive that people will be required to use other means.

If you’ve ever had to heat your home using electricity alone, you know how terrifying this can be. According to Suffolk County Legislator Anthony Piccirillo, many residents in one condominium complex in his Holbrook, L.I., district were so overwhelmed with the sky-high cost to heat their homes through electricity that they installed kerosene heaters just to avoid freezing.

Where do the climate extremists think that the power comes from to run plants that generate electricity? As of today, it comes overwhelmingly from burning oil and natural gas.

And so, this moronic proposal will do nothing to reduce greenhouse gases, but will contribute to making New York even less affordable, thereby accelerating the fleeing of our residents to the other more affordable states.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine finally woke up feeble European leaders who allowed themselves to become dependent on Russian oil. In the case of Germany, leaders ceded power to the extremist Green Party, clamping down on their own oil and gas facilities and their cleaner nuclear plants.

Did this clean their environment? No. Household power bills rose to become 43% more expensive than the average across the 27-member European Union.

Germany learned its lesson. Chancellor Olaf Scholz has now conceded that his nation’s radical energy policies of overly relying on “not ready for prime time” renewables and becoming dependent on the Russian Nord Stream 2 pipeline was a mistake of historic proportions.

Yet our leaders in New York are doubling down on this policy. When will this state’s progressives understand that you can’t save the world by destroying America? Or its middle class, which will be the segment of our population most devastated if this electric-heat-only bill is not shelved.

Levy is executive director of the Center for Cost Effective Government. He served as Suffolk County executive and as a state assemblyman.