With a two-front struggle over energy and climate change raging both in public discourse and the halls of government in both Kingston and Albany, Ulster County's citizen activists have joined the fray.

The latest flash points in this fight come out of our state’s fourth capital, where Gov. Kathy Hochul has been publicly musing about the fate of the state's Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) and its State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA), saying the first's ambitious goals are proving too costly to achieve and the second is making home-building prohibitively expensive.

So, as local electeds here in deep blue and very green Ulster County took to the podium last week in support of the CLCPA, Kingston resident Rebecca Martin hosted an online “Save SEQRA” symposium in response to Hochul's “Let Them Build” proposal (“New, common-sense reforms [that] will streamline approval processes without superseding local zoning and environmental protections,” per the governor's office),

It wasn't Martin's first rodeo. For 20 years now her website kingstoncitizens.org has served as a research library and meeting post for local progressives, tackling virtually every major public issue of the day.

Martin's meet-up last week featured a presentation from Drew Gamils, senior attorney at Riverkeeper, the long-running Hudson River-centric watchdog group, who first spoke of the importance of SEQRA.

“It's not just about the environment,” Gamils said. “It is a holistic local analysis of issues that includes environmental issues, but also issues like traffic, noise, cumulative impacts, impacts to schools and other local infrastructure. It is the only tool in New York State that requires that kind of review. It's also the only tool that requires applicants to incorporate mitigation measures into their project designs if they are going to have a potential environmental impact.”

Gamils pointed to many areas of concern with Hochul's proposal including exemptions for development in New York City's 100-year floodplain, failure to identify appropriate non-residential uses, lack of affordability requirements, exemptions for projects on contaminated sites, failure to require projects be zoning compliant, failure to encourage urban infill development and failure to address sprawl.

Lack of definition is a major shortcoming of “Let Them Build,” according to Gamils. “Without clear definitions you could get a developer who comes at this going to build a data center and build it with a residential building. There's nothing that restricts that except maybe your own local zoning code. ... So we continue to emphasize the importance of clarifying what uses should really be exempt, what uses truly don't have a significant environmental impact. But there's no clarity, no definition to provide guidance on that in the legislation.”

Another concern was the fact that, as per state government tradition, Hochul has tied her streamlined SEQRA to the state budget process, limiting public comment. (Though the way state budgets are enacted almost invariably involves repeated delays, meaning the public will have time to be heard.)

Gamils’ highly detailed and multifaceted examination of Hochul's proposal, including a tutorial on SEQRA processes, as well as a complete video recording of Martin's seminar can be found here.

While neither Assemblywoman Sarahana Shrestha (D-Esopus) nor state Sen. Michelle Hinchey (D-Saugerties) have yet publicly declared their stances on SEQRA reform, on Friday, County Executive Jen Metzger stated in a letter to the editor to Kingston Wire that she’s for it but would like to see two changes. One would be, she wrote, “The housing exemption should be modified to apply to housing in which the majority of units are affordable, in the range of 30-80 percent of area median income.” The other: “Second, exempted projects should be required to meet New York State Homes and Community Renewal Sustainability Guidelines or other baseline standards aligned with New York's Climate Act to ensure they deliver needed climate and energy-savings benefits.”

“Properly structured, the SEQRA exemption would incentivize the kind of housing we most need, at a time when housing and energy costs are unaffordable to our residents,” Metzger wrote.

A Mystery Memo; Yes Nukes!

A good deal of fuel for the flare-up over CLCPA and SEQRA comes from the late February disclosure of a memo from the New York State Energy Research and Development Agency (NYSERDA) that placed estimated annual energy costs of CLCPA to an average New York family at $2,400-$4,100.

The memo swiftly became a talking point for the GOP and anyone else skeptical of green thinking and/or climate change. At the same time, it became an object of suspicion in the environmentalist camp, as in, “Who leaked it and why?” The suspicions are not abated by the memo's lack of detail, especially as to the conclusion's underlying calculations and methodology.

For what it's worth, according to a well-placed Albany insider the memo was not, strictly speaking, “leaked.” It was, the source said, sitting unnoticed on the NYSERDA website until highlighted for the benefit of media whose inquiries included inaccurate data on CLCPA costs.

The memo is being treated as gospel, however, by another, lesser known Kingston activist organization. That’s the New York Energy Alliance (NYEA) which, according to co-founder Alex Panagiotopoulos, consists of himself, his life and business partner Fox Green and a website for which they pay $10 a month and self-administer, and whose professionalism and media savvy reflects the pair's day jobs as marketing consultants.

Fervent advocates of nuclear energy, skeptical of conventional environmental thinking and nostalgic for 19th century America's prodigious growth of industry and transport, the most recent of NYEA's public outreach efforts was a Phoenicia screening last week of their film Catskill Energy Future. The film depicts the CLCPA as an extension of a century's worth of exploitation of the Catskills by New York City elites, originally by closing off much of the region to economic development in order to secure a water supply for the metropolis, now by opening it (as is under consideration in Albany) to renewables in the form of solar arrays and battery energy storage facilities.

Audience members who scoffed at the idea of mountainsides blanketed with green installations were told to consider how unlikely it would have seemed to 19th-century Ulsterites that whole towns could be bought, evacuated and drowned for the sake of reservoirs, the local memory of which Margaretville-based veteran journalist Lissa Harris refers to as “landscape trauma.”

The film was not without its fans. “The only thing the Catskills have got going for them is tourism,” said Dr. Mike Zagata, a one-time oil company executive and former commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation under Gov. George Pataki. “And I don’t know about you, but I don’t get excited looking at solar and wind farms. That's because I’m a scientist and I know neither of them work.”

Shandaken resident Karen Charman saw things differently. “I've been here 27 years,” she said. “New York City paid for my septic system. I’m grateful for that and to have the Catskills ... I want to know what your vision is.”

Green replied by asking Charman if she would be “into having them covered with solar panels?”

“They’re not going to be covered with solar panels,” Charman replied. “I think what you're saying is absolute crap.”

Green brushed that off and, when asked again about his vision replied, “The vision is to return to Hamilton and say, look at the Erie Canal. Look at when we did development projects. We could do hydro plants. We could do nuclear plants.”

That fell flat. “That's really nuts,” Charman replied, while an unidentified audience member announced, “You f--king blew it right there.”

In the increasingly hostile exchanges that followed Green was again called out on his agenda — a frequent occurrence at the duo's events, they say, often finding themselves accused of being paid operatives for Big Oil or Big Nuke — and he replied by taking the highest ground around.

“My agenda is to reduce poverty all over the world, including the Catskills,” Green said. “And the only thing that can do that is forms of energy like fossil, like nuclear, which most environmentalists, the saner ones, love, because it's emissions-free. It’s got a tiny footprint, it’s abundant, it’s awesome, it’s a godsend.”

A full catalog of NYEA thought can be found here.