On June 1st, the well-named Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA) passed the New York State Senate. Five days later, the bill was put on ice in the State Assembly when Speaker Carl Heastie ended the legislative session for the year without even bringing it up for a vote. The Democratic Party holds a trifecta in New York with the governorship and supermajorities in both chambers of the legislature, so for a party that claims to care about the climate crisis and swiftly transitioning to renewable energy, this is a resounding abdication of their stated values.
In order to understand how and why BPRA got to this point, I will start back in 2018, when the members of the NYC DSA Ecosocialist Working Group decided to prioritize fighting for a state-level climate justice bill, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) as part of the NY Renews coalition. The fact that a socialist organization was added to this broad progressive coalition was a sign of their growing power. But while DSA organizer Aaron Eisenberg told me that the experience of winning with this coalition was great, it was also instructive regarding the limitations of this type of work for their broader, long-term goals:
We really quickly found out being the small coalition partner without any kind of autonomy or decision-making ability [meant] you couldn't scale membership, you couldn't grow, you couldn't organize with that.
After CLCPA passed, the working group voted to prioritize energy utilities as a site of struggle because of their strategic viability and importance. NY’s investor-owned utilities (IOUs) are making little progress on transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy—the state currently sits at 5% wind and solar generation—and have high rates, frequent outages, and pollution that all disproportionately burden the working class and people of color. This makes for relatively easy openings for organizing conversations—why should IOUs like ConEd get to screw you over for profit? Additionally, the way that energy is regulated makes it strategically enticing. As DSA organizer Patrick Robbins explained to me:
It's also an area where we felt we had the potential to really build power and win tangible changes in the conditions of people's lives because it is largely governed at the state level.
Eventually they formed the Public Power NY coalition, which included DSA chapters around the state along with a handful of other organizations. This coalition would be driven by socialists from the ground up, with a commitment to democratic decision-making. They started with a fight against a large rate increase proposal from ConEd, which would drive up energy bills to line the pockets of wealthy shareholders and executives. The New York Public Service Commission, the state’s utility regulators, ultimately approved a rate hike, albeit one that was lower than ConEd had initially asked for. The natural next step for Public Power NY was to thoroughly assess their political terrain to see how they could best go on offense.
They determined that they were not yet powerful enough to try to take over the distribution part of the grid that IOUs mostly control, but fighting for more energy democracy in generation seemed doable because of the New York Power Authority (NYPA), a product of the New Deal and the largest state-owned public utility in the US. NYPA currently generates a quarter of the state’s power, mostly from hydroelectric dams, but is unable to add any new large-scale projects by law. Thus, their task would be to remove these restrictions and expand and democratize the NYPA so it could be a tool for climate justice and build new, publicly owned wind and solar in order to meet the 70% renewable energy by 2030 mandate set by the CLCPA. This is an example of building from strength: public ownership is necessary but insufficient, an opportunity to fight for the world we want.
And so the BPRA was born. As both a means and an end for developing the best possible legislation with enough support to push it through, Public Power NY has done extensive outreach, as Patrick described:
We had painstaking conversations with many, many different constituencies with many different kinds of expertise across the state, including labor, ratepayer advocates, consumer advocates, environmental justice organizations.
Labor unions were a particular focus given their ideological and strategic importance for socialists. The final version of the bill has robust labor and just transition provisions with language taken directly from unions. But one issue that Public Power NY ran into early on in their efforts was non-responsiveness, which Aaron attributed to a lack of power. But they continued reaching out and talking to every union they could—not just utility workers or building trades—using a public goods framework because the climate and ecological crisis affects everyone. Their biggest success was a resolution in support from New York State United Teachers, one of the largest and most powerful unions in the state. They also were able to move some unions from opposed to neutral, which can be a huge and undervalued step; rebuilding a radical, democratic labor movement will take some time.
The BPRA campaign has also realigned the NY climate movement and drawn clear dividing lines. Some big environmental NGOs have remained on the sidelines, while many others have moved left in fighting for it. Public Power NY has pushed the necessity of public control into the mainstream: the health of people and the planet should not be left in the hands of profit-seeking interests. Aaron summarized the sea change:
It's not being dictated by foundation money. It's not being dictated where money has historically gone into. Pushing those priorities is being dictated actually by a mass movement, which is really exciting.
DSA is a democratic organization that is funded and directed by its members, which is why it is not only ideologically but structurally capable of pushing where other organizations can not. This is also why the working group chose to focus on a slate of state-level primary candidates this year: two years of extensive work on BPRA—planning, lobbying, outreach, education, direct action—taught them a great deal about how Albany works, clarifying that they needed to both remove powerful politicians standing in the way and replace them with movement leaders who could push from the inside.
But earlier this year, well before the 2022 primary elections, Public Power NY saw an opening where it looked like BPRA could actually pass, and they chose to mobilize to press it. The bill started to move through committees and had Senate staff working with them on edits, which was a sign it was getting real. That is when serious opposition started to coalesce from private energy companies and their lobbying organizations, including a shady and shoddy misinformation campaign. This is a revealing case study in the contradictions of so-called “green capitalism,” with renewable energy companies feeling threatened enough to spend their resources fighting against a bill that would introduce a publicly owned competitor and build more wind and solar with significantly stronger worker benefits.
Despite the legislative session ending, Speaker Heastie has scheduled an unprecedented special hearing on BPRA for July 28th. This seems like both a sign of growing movement power and an attempt to diffuse it. Public Power NY is pushing for a special legislative session immediately after the hearing to have a vote on the bill. Whether or not they are successful remains to be seen, but I am certainly rooting for them.
Is BPRA an example of the promise of legislative organizing campaigns for the Left, or further evidence of their ineffectiveness? What if their call for a special session fails, and what if their electoral campaigns fail? Repeated failure is just part of Left organizing—the cards are very much stacked against us—so winning should definitely not be the primary criterion for assessing strategies and campaigns. Unfortunately, we do not have a blueprint for transforming the world in our present conditions and nuanced analysis is required.
One important thing to be cognizant of in any advocacy campaign is that, win or lose, we should be building muscle for future fights, particularly in the form of durable organization and bringing in and developing new organizers. To that end, it seems that Public Power NY has built out a well-oiled machine that is threatening the powers-that-be in New York. With that being said, legislative fights can be ephemeral and technocratic, and electoral campaigns require enormous resources. Some would say that positive policy changes are more of a reflection of power than a way of building it, so we should focus mostly on building organizational muscle outside of the legislative arena. It is possible that this would be more successful for both our short- and long-term goals, but the reality is that none of us truly know what is going to work and we probably need some of everything.
Contrary to what you may have heard, there is no reason to think that if we just sit back, the forces of the “free” market will transition to 100% renewable energy and stop global warming—much less the rest of our socio-ecological crises in which it is intertwined. The urgency of planetary crisis combined with the staggering inequality both driving it and preventing us from doing anything meaningful about it puts us in a tricky place: there are no shortcuts to building power, which is slow and arduous work that we also do not have time for. The question of how and where we intervene and build will be a process of experimentation, looking for openings and pressing our advantage when they appear. More than anything, I think the fight for BPRA is an example of organizers collectively and thoroughly assessing their particular conditions to figure out where their efforts might be most effectively channeled, then trying it. Wherever we are, we all need to be doing the same.