Could New York Fight Fascism with Climate Policy?

It’s fitting that NYPA was founded by Governor Franklin
Delano Roosevelt in 1931, as Americans—and people worldwide—were struggling for
economic survival in the Great Depression and the Nazi Party in Germany was beginning
to win elections. The following year, just before Hitler came to power, FDR won
the U.S. presidential election. He was savvy about how to fight fascism. “Democracy
has disappeared in several other great nations—not because the people of those
nations disliked democracy,” he said in 1938,
“but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing
their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government
confusion and government weakness…”. In NYPA, FDR’s legacy lives on and New
York has an opportunity to once again fight fascism by democratizing energy.

Besides the founding of NYPA, something else that happened
in New York during this decade of ideological and global military struggle
between democracy and fascism was that the New York City subway system expanded
dramatically, with several entirely new lines added during this period. We have
an opportunity to do the same now.

Governor Kathy Hochul has just-revived congestion pricing,
the long-delayed and much-litigated scheme to charge a toll to motorists
driving into Manhattan (in her new proposal, the toll is reduced from $15 to
$9). This policy has been far more demonized
than BPRA, lending itself to a populist
critique in a way that BPRA does not, since it does force some costs and
inconvenience onto regular people. (Lawsuits
by several unions attempting to block it certainly underscore that reality.) Republicans
are vowing to make
sure the Democrats pay a price for congestion pricing if it happens, boasting
that the policy could give their party a shot at the governor’s office next
time round. If ordinary New Yorkers don’t see much benefit from the toll, I’m
sorry to say the Republicans could be right.