Howarth’s Adverse Impact on New York Cap-and-Invest

In January 2023 I wrote an article describing Dr. Robert Howarth’s statement supporting his vote to approve the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (Climate Act) Scoping Plan.  Roger Pielke, Jr. recently did an interesting piece on the Biden Administration decision to halt the permitting of the continued expansion of U.S. liquified natural gas (LNG) export capacity that featured a link to Howarth and his position on methane.  It provides more evidence that a “Professor of Ecology & Environmental Biology” is unqualified to be considered an expert on methane emissions.  His misleading guidance adversely impacts the New York Cap-and-Invest program.

I have followed the Climate Act since it was first proposed, submitted comments on the Climate Act implementation plan, and have written over 400 articles about New York’s net-zero transition. The opinions expressed in this post do not reflect the position of any of my previous employers or any other organization I have been associated with, these comments are mine alone.

Overview

The Climate Act established a New York “Net Zero” target (85% reduction in GHG emissions and 15% offset of emissions) by 2050.  It includes an interim 2030 reduction target of a 40% reduction by 2030 and a requirement that all electricity generated be “zero-emissions” by 2040. The Climate Action Council (CAC) is responsible for preparing the Scoping Plan that outlines how to “achieve the State’s bold clean energy and climate agenda.”  In brief, that plan is to electrify everything possible using zero-emissions electricity. The Integration Analysis prepared by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and its consultants quantifies the impact of the electrification strategies.  That material was used to develop the Draft Scoping Plan outline of strategies.  After a year-long review, the Scoping Plan was finalized at the end of 2022.  In 2023 the Scoping Plan recommendations were supposed to be implemented through regulation, PSC orders, and legislation.  Not surprisingly, the aspirational schedule of the Climate Act has proven to be more difficult to implement than planned and many aspects of the transition are falling behind, and the magnitude of the necessary costs is coming into focus. 

Howarth and the Climate Act

Howarth takes pride in his role in the Climate Act.  I previously explained that the statement of Robert W. Howarth, Ph.D., the David R. Atkinson Professor of Ecology & Environmental Biology at Cornell University was very illuminating relative to the motives of the Climate Act authors.  He reiterated his claim that he played a key role in the drafting of the Climate Act, developed the methane requirements, and credited one politician for getting the Act passed:

Assembly Person Steven Englebright was hugely instrumental in the passage of the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act that established the Climate Action Council. I thank him for his leadership on this, and particularly for his support of the progressive approach on greenhouse gas emissions that is a central part of the CLCPA. I originally proposed this to Assembly Person Englebright in 2016, and he enthusiastically endorsed and supported it through multiple versions of the bill that finally led to passage of the CLCPA in 2019. In this accounting for greenhouse gases, a major government for the first time ever fully endorsed the science demonstrating that methane emissions are a major contributor to global climate change and disruption. Further, in passing the CLCPA New York recognized that consumption of fossil fuels (and not simply geographic boundaries) is what matters in addressing the climate crisis. New York wisely banned the use of high-volume hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) to develop shale gas in our State. But since the time of that ban, the use of fossil natural gas has risen faster in our State than any other in the Union. Methane emissions from this use of shale gas are high, but much of that occurs outside of our boundaries in the nearby states of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio. Through the CLCPA, the citizens of New York are taking responsibility for these out-of-state emission caused by our use of fossil fuels, particularly for fossil natural gas. The way to reduce these emissions is to rapidly reduce our use of fracked shale gas.

Unfortunately, Howarth’s influence on Climate Act implementation also extended into the Climate Action Council. As a member of the Climate Action Council, Howarth was considered a subject matter expert and most members unquestioningly accepted whatever he said.  This deference to his concerns is also apparent in the Integration Analysis and Scoping Plan.  In my previous article I explained why many of his claims were not supportable.

Methane

At the time the Climate Act was written it incorporated unique emissions accounting requirements that elevate the importance of methane to Climate Act compliance.  In particular, the Climate Act specifies that the global warming potential (GWP) must be calculated over a 20-year time horizon.  The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) describing time horizons and the GWP[1] notes:

“The GWP has become the default metric for transferring emissions of different gases to a common scale; often called ‘CO₂ equivalent emis­sions’ (e.g., Shine, 2009). It has usually been integrated over 20, 100 or 500 years consistent with Houghton et al. (1990). Note, however that Houghton et al. presented these time horizons as ‘candidates for discussion [that] should not be considered as having any special sig­nificance’. The GWP for a time horizon of 100 years was later adopted as a metric to implement the multi-gas approach embedded in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and made operational in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The choice of time horizon has a strong effect on the GWP values — and thus also on the calculated contributions of CO₂ equivalent emissions by component, sector or nation. There is no scientific argument for selecting 100 years compared with other choices (Fuglestvedt et al., 2003; Shine, 2009). The choice of time horizon is a value judgement because it depends on the relative weight assigned to effects at different times.”

---

Howarth and others argued that it was necessary for the Climate Act to use 20-year global warming potential (GWP) values because methane is estimated to be 28 to 36 greater than carbon dioxide for a 100-year time horizon but 84-87 GWP over a 20-year period.  Because of these high potentials they assumed that meant that the effect of methane on expected warming would be significant.

I have noted that this irrational obsession with methane that is incorporated in the Climate Act is inappropriate. The fundamental flaw with the basis for vilifying methane is that it is based on selective choice of the science and ignores inconvenient aspects of radiation physics which indicate that the laboratory measurements of global warming potential do not translate to the atmosphere where it counts. 

LNG Export Terminal Pause

I originally was going to include this link in my fortnightly “Articles of Note” post but decided to elevate it into a focused post because of a reference to Howarth.  Roger Pielke, Jr did an interesting piece on the Biden Administration decision to halt the permitting of the continued expansion of U.S. liquified natural gas (LNG) export capacity.  He describes the activist rationale for the LNG export expansion halt “included in a letter to President Biden from a group of activists, including the University of Pennsylvania’s Michael Mann and Stanford’s Mark Jacobson”:

Taken together, if all U.S. projects in the permitting pipeline are approved, they could lead to 3.9 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually, which is larger than the entire annual emissions of the European Union. A forthcoming study by Cornell University climate scientist Robert Howarth shows that, even in the best-case scenarios, LNG is at least 24 percent worse for the climate than coal. Increasing LNG exports will mean increased extraction of fossil fuels and climate pollution and directs us away from a renewable energy future.

[1] Reference: Myhre, G., D. Shindell, F.-M. Bréon, W. Collins, J. Fuglestvedt, J. Huang, D. Koch, J.-F. Lamarque, D. Lee, B. Mendoza, T. Nakajima, A. Robock, G. Stephens, T. Takemura and H. Zhang, 2013: Anthropogenic and Natural Radiative Forc­ing. In: Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Stocker, T.F., D. Qin, G.-K. Plattner, M. Tignor, S.K. Allen, J. Boschung, A. Nauels, Y. Xia, V. Bex and P.M. Midgley (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA.

Pielke, Jr. writes that this policy decision raises three concerns. 

1. “The Biden Administration made a decision before producing the evidence on which such a decision is supposed to be based.
2. The Biden Administration decision ignores the “geopolitical and security implications of the decision”.
3. Finally, there appears to be no consideration of the economic impacts of the decision.

I recommend reading the article in its entirety.

The reason I turned this into a focused post is because Pielke, Jr. included a previously unknown to me reference regarding Howarth. His quote from the activist letter mentions a forthcoming study by Howarth which Pielke, Jr. described as follows:

The study referenced above suggesting that LNG is worse than coal in terms of greenhouse gas emissions is by Robert Howarth of Cornell University, and is both contrary to a broad scientific consensus on this issue and a lone outlier.

Of particular interest is the footnote associated with the “lone outlier” label.  Pielke, Jt. states:

The story behind the new Howarth study is for another day. I’ll just note here that in 2012 Howarth told a reporter that he was performing anti-fracking research for hire — The reporter explained: “In an interview, Howarth told me his goal was to make the anti-fracking movement mainstream and fashionable. He said he met with the Ithaca-based [Park] foundation two years ago, agreeing to produce a study challenging the conventional wisdom that shale gas is comparatively clean…Howarth hired an aggressive PR firm, the Hastings Group, to promote his politicized viewpoint.”

This is smoking gun evidence that New York’s unique characterization of methane and Climate Act policy requirements is based on the politicized and financially advantageous work of a for hire scientist. 

Discussion

On January 23, 2024, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and the New York Energy Research & Development Authority (NYSERDA) hosted the first webinar of this year’s New York Cap-and-Invest (NYCI) Program stakeholder engagement process.  One of the points made in the first webinar was that under Governor Hochul’s direction, New York’s cap & invest program will incorporate these guiding principles:

• Affordability. Craft a program to deliver money back to New Yorkers to ensure energy affordability
• Climate Leadership: Catalyze other states to join New York, and allows linkage to other jurisdictions
• Creating Jobs and Preserving Competitiveness: Protect existing jobs and support new and existing industries in New York
• Investing in Disadvantaged Communities: Ensure 35%+ of investments benefit Disadvantaged Communities
• Funding a Sustainable Future: Support ambitious clean energy investment

There are ramifications of the reliance on Howarth’s work for the first two principles: affordability and climate leadership links to other jurisdictions.

Last spring I described a Climate Act Revisions Kerfuffle when the Hochul Administration floated the suggestion to revise the emissions accounting methodology to use the Global Warming Potential over 100 years instead of 20 years because of a concern with cost.  Climate Action Council co-chairs Doreen Harris and Basil Seggos argued that:

“First and foremost, the governor is trying to maintain New York’s leadership on climate. It’s a core principle that she brought into office and we have been carrying that out for several years,” said Seggos.

But Gov. Hochul instructed both the DEC and NYSERDA to look at the affordability of Cap & Invest.

“We began running the numbers on that, based on some of the metrics being used by Washington state and some of our own, and revealed some…potentially extraordinary costs affiliated with the program,” Seggos explained. “So that’s really what this is.  It isn’t a focus necessarily on methane itself, or any particular pollutant. It is how do we implement the CLCPA in a way that doesn’t put extraordinary costs on the pockets of New Yorkers.”

The climate activist organizations went ballistic and the Administration bowed to the pressue.  Activists claimed:

“When Governor Hochul tried to sneak in a fossil-fueled methane accounting method that would gut New York State’s Climate Act during the final push of budget negotiations, New York’s climate and environmental justice movement responded swiftly and powerfully. NY Renews is proud to stand with a movement that stopped—for now—changes to New York’s progressive 20-year methane accounting method as written in law.” 

The Summary Report for the 2023 Statewide GHG Emissions Inventory  explains the effect of GWP-20 accounting and other policy requirements of the Climate Act on emissions:

When considering emission sources only within New York State and using a GWP100, CO2 is a much greater component of total emissions (Figure 3). The main difference is the CLCPA’s focus on shorter-lived methane and HFCs, which appear much larger using the 20-year GWP, although the actual mass of these emissions has not changed. The other key difference between the accounting frameworks is out-of-state emissions. Over time, New York State has imported more natural gas and has exported more waste. Methane is a major source of emissions for both the natural gas system and waste management.

In 2021 total GHG emissions were 367.87 million metric tonnes of CO₂ equivalent using the Climate format (GWP-20) and to the best of my review of the data (it does not appear to match Figure 3) the GWP-100 total is 214.4 million metric tonnes of CO₂ equivalent.  If the allowance costs per ton for NYCI remain the same, then costs to the state will be 72% higher using the Howarth inspired accounting.

The second Hochul principle is “climate leadership” which is described as “catalyze other states to join New York and allow linkage to other jurisdictions”.  I think it is a heavy lift to catalyze other states to join New York if most of the rest of the world is using a different accounting system, particularly when the rationale for that approach does not stand up to scrutiny.  I know that it will likely be impossible for New York to link to the California/Quebec and Washington cap-and-invest programs.  The different accounting methodology is a high hurdle and when combined with the upstream emissions accounting with the potential for double counting, it just won’t happen.

Conclusion

With all due respect to Dr. Howarth, it is appropriate to consider why a “Professor of Ecology & Environmental Biology” is qualified to be an expert on methane emissions.  Combined with the revelation that he set out to “make the anti-fracking movement mainstream and fashionable” in conjunction with the Park Foundation, the motives for his methane obsession suggest his analyses are biased to get a particular answer.  The State of New York has failed to rein him in so reconciling the inconsistencies with his pseudo-science and Hochul’s principles is a problem of their own making.  It matters to all New Yorkers because it will increase costs directly and indirectly because links to other jurisdictions could make the allowance market stronger and cheaper.