Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins | AP Photo
ALBANY — Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins made three appointments Monday to a climate change panel crucial to achieving New York's dramatic emissions reduction targets.
Stewart-Cousins has appointed Anne Reynolds, a representative of renewable energy developers; Raya Salter an attorney with an environmental justice coalition; and Dennis Elsenbeck, a Buffalo-based energy consultant and former utility executive. Now, Gov. Andrew Cuomo is the last official to publicly appoint members so the council can begin its work.
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Reynolds, who is the executive director of the Alliance for Clean Energy New York, has members among developers and owners of renewables in the state, and she has advocated for more power transmission to support the state's electricity goals and changes to the siting process for new generators to accelerate progress.
Salter, with NY Renews, is a former attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund, who was also editor of "Energy Justice," a book on environmental justice policy. Years before Democrats took control of the state Senate in 2019, NY Renews, a coalition of environmental and community advocates, pressed a measure that ultimately became the basis of the state's climate law. Salter was hired in late 2019 to lead the coalition's scrutiny of the law's implementation and work on additional climate justice policies.
Elsenbeck, a consultant with Phillips Lytle LLP based in Buffalo, is head of energy and sustainability for the firm's energy consulting service. He was previously head of National Grid's operations in the Buffalo region.
“New York State has set the bar in terms of how our country should respond to the threat of Climate Change via aggressive goal setting," Elsenbeck said in a statement. "An equally aggressive implementation plan is required to ensure that we maintain both economic and environmental sustainability that will support New York’s green economy. It should be our priority to not only achieve our stated goals, but also act as a leader in the Global Climate economy."
The Climate Action Council has until Jan. 1, 2022 to develop a plan that will lay out how to achieve New York's emissions goals — an 85 percent reduction from 1990 levels by 2050, with the remaining 15 percent offset or captured. Cuomo has to make two appointments and the remaining members of the 22-person council are executive branch agency heads or other state energy officials.
Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie made his three appointments last week: Peter Iwanowicz, a former commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation and current head of Environmental Advocates of New York, a prominent and influential group in Albany. His group is a member of the NY Renews coalition.
Heastie also tapped Bob Howarth, a well-known professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell who regularly weighs in on natural gas infrastructure issues and fought fracking in New York.
The third Assembly appointee was Paul Shepson, the dean of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University.
The two other members named so far to the council are Gavin Donohue, head of the Independent Power Producers of New York representing existing generators including fossil fuel plants, and Donna DeCarolis, an executive with National Fuel Gas.
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