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 demonizedthan 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. (Lawsuitsby 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.