NY Senate's Bipartisan Vote Jump-starts $5B Green Jobs/Bldg Plan

by Emily Gertz

categories: Clean Energy, Consumer, energyefficiency, Environmental Justice, Greenhouse Gas, Jobs & Economy, Policy & Legislation, Solutions

Published September 15, 2009 @ 06:23PM PT

Start spreading the news: A newly-passed law in New York State will use the proceeds from auctions of carbon emissions credits to fund a massive statewide weatherization-and-green-jobs-creation program.

And a Republican state senator bucked the party line to help pass the bill.

Last Friday, the State Senate passed Green Job/Green New York Act. The legislation will channel $112 million in proceeds from auctioning carbon emissions credits (at the market created via the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative) into starting up a $5 billion energy-efficiency program -- which will lower energy costs for New York households, cut the state's greenhouse gas pollution levels, and create thousands of jobs.

Republican State Sen. Thomas Morahan co-sponsored the bill with Democratic colleague Darrel Aubertine. Morahan's support led to a resoundingly bipartisan vote to pass the bill.

(New York's State Senate has a bare two-vote Democratic majority, and a demonstrable tendency to grind to a halt.)

As David Sassoon reports on SolveClimate (emphasis mine),

The measure will finance upfront costs for one million homeowners to weatherize their houses, and let them repay the loans from the energy savings realized over time. The act, which makes funding available for job training, is also expected to create up to 16,000 new jobs.

...The policy design provides an alternative mechanism for providing consumer benefit from carbon revenues that federal lawmakers, wrestling with climate legislation, must now consider.
In addition, the almost unanimous support the bill received from New York's Republican lawmakers undermines the wisdom and validity of a ferocious national campaign being mounted by their right-wing brethren to halt the progress of green jobs legislation everywhere.

The plan has a strong free-market orientation. It calls for the government and the private sector to work together to kick off the weatherization program, which is intended to help one million New York households retrofit their homes for energy-efficiency, and then repay the costs over time in part from the money they save on energy bills:

The price tag for the project is estimated at $5 billion, most of which will be borrowed by property owners from private lenders. The state will use public money in part to fund a "loan loss reserve." The reserve would underwrite losses, providing security to lenders that participate and assuring a reasonable interest rate for property owners.

...All a homeowner will need to do to save on energy costs and increase property values is to call a state certified contractor to perform a free or low-cost energy audit. The audit would identify the repairs and upgrades (like air sealing, insulation, new boilers) that can pay for themselves through the energy savings they create. The program's Residential Retrofit Investment Fund would pay the full upfront costs, with consumers required to pay back the retrofit through future savings on their electricity bill. If the home is sold before the loan is paid off, the new homeowner takes over the loan agreement.

In sum, this New York State plan will:

• Use the proceeds from a carbon market to help consumers cut their energy costs by an aggregate $1.1 billion a year
• Create around 14,250 permanent, family-wage-paying jobs
• Give a boost to the state's economy in the wake of the mortgage crisis and the credit freeze
• Pioneer a joint public/private sector funding mechanism to help the program pay for itself
• Provide a funding model for other states, as well as the federal government, as they consider climate policy options

I love New York, more than ever.
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Image: "LOVE" sculpture by Robert Indiana, on the corner of 6th Ave. and 55th St. in Manhattan.  Via Wikimedia commons.