New York, ever ambitious, now admits it will fall short of its law-mandated goal to generate 70% of electricity from renewables by 2030—current rates sputter at 23%, even with a few offshore wind dreams still afloat. Governor Kathy Hochul’s latest rollbacks and grid unreliability warnings suggest the only thing accelerating faster than climate deadlines is the pace at which exceptions become the rule.
New York City in brief
Top five stories in the five boroughs today
Governor Kathy Hochul is pressing pause on New York’s race to renewables, blaming inflation, war-driven fuel prices, and federal pushback, all while touting a curious love affair with both natural gas and nuclear. Local resistance and spiraling electricity demand—cheers, AI—mean stakeholders like Alicia Gené Artessa, Sana Barakat, and Didi Barrett juggle cleaner power with affordability. Truly, gridlock here isn’t just for Manhattan traffic.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority will soon swap out the aged, wheezing infrastructure that powers New York’s subway for a modernized electrical system, aiming to bolster reliability for some five million daily riders. The upgrade, decades overdue, promises fewer blackouts and interruptions—though as always, the challenge will be keeping everything on track beneath the tangle of Manhattan’s streets, where delays seem to run on their own special timetable.
The Fire Department of New York plans to raise ambulance ride fees by 29% and on-site emergency treatment charges by 42%, citing inflation and looming union pay hikes as justification, though the last fee increase was a mere year ago. As EMTs’ pay still lags firefighters’—provoking both union ire and a staffing headache—it seems in New York, the sticker shock may arrive faster than the ambulance itself.
An investigation by ProPublica found that in just seven months of Donald Trump’s presidency, ICE detained parents of at least 11,000 American children, averaging over 50 kids a day losing a parent to detention—far outpacing the Biden administration’s numbers, especially for mothers. Data beyond that window remain patchy, but the human toll clearly keeps pace, albeit with far less statistical fanfare than policy speeches.