A New York Senate panel this month signed off on legislation that would require large corporations to disclose their greenhouse-gas emissions — a move supporters say could, when combined with a similar 2023 California law, result in a de facto national reporting requirement.
The Senate Environmental Conservation Committee unanimously advanced the bill, known as the Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act, to the Finance Committee. A companion measure is pending in the Assembly.
Under the corporate emissions measure, companies doing business in the state with revenue of at least $1 billion a year must report three levels of emissions: the direct emissions from their facilities, known as Scope 1 emissions; emissions generated as a result of the company’s electricity needs, known as Scope 2; and all other indirect and supply chain-related emissions, known as Scope 3. Companies would begin reporting Scope 1 and 2 emissions in 2027 and Scope 3 emissions the following year.
The legislation is similar to California’s 2023 emissions disclosure law, which made it the first state to adopt one, and a companion law requiring companies to disclose climate risk. California’s reporting requirements become effective a year earlier than New York’s. New York is also considering a climate risk reporting measure.
Jon Weinberg, senior legislative counsel to New York Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal (D), the bill’s main sponsor, said the bill is needed to ensure companies, which frequently make pledges to lower emissions, are sticking to those promises and are not simply attempting to curry favor with the public, a practice known as greenwashing.
“A lot of companies made a series of corporate pledges and have at least purported to take measures to reduce their carbon footprint,” Weinberg said. “However, the senator has found that oftentimes those are a lot of bluster and there isn’t a lot of transparency and data to support those assertions.”
The disclosure policy was also part of the Senate’s budget proposal, indicating the momentum behind it. “It’s a signal the Senate will hopefully be prioritizing passage this year,” Weinberg said.
Some of the nation’s and the world’s largest corporations have made pledges, including Amazon, Google, Apple and BlackRock. Weinberg said the bill would “hold companies accountable to their pledges” and ultimately help reduce emissions.
Similar corporate climate disclosure legislation was introduced this year in Colorado, Illinois and New Jersey, which advanced its bill last month.
But Weinberg said there would be national implications if New York passes its bill, given that it and California have the eighth- and fifth-largest economies in the world.
“The California bill is a great first step, and will take in a lot of companies within its scope, but we want to gapfill,” Weinberg said. “There are going to be companies that do business in California, but don’t do sufficient business there to qualify. And we think that we will capture a large number of those companies with our New York threshold … [and] effectively create a national reporting requirement for the vast majority of companies.”
The legislation comes as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last month voted to abandon its legal defense of a proposed rule that would have required publicly traded companies to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions.
The rule had been challenged in a lawsuit filed by nine Republican attorneys general arguing that only Congress could make a disclosure requirement. The rule was also the subject of intense lobbying from business interest groups and was weakened in its final iteration so that it did not require Scope 3 emissions disclosure.
In a statement explaining the SEC’s decision to stop fighting the suit, acting Chairman Mark Uyeda said: “The goal of today’s Commission action and notification to the court is to cease the Commission’s involvement in the defense of the costly and unnecessarily intrusive climate change disclosure rules.”
The state disclosure legislation also comes as the Trump administration has repealed a raft of Biden-era climate policies through a series of executive orders and instead focused on loosening regulations to allow for more domestic energy production, including those seeking to reinvigorate the coal industry and seeking to speed the permitting process.
The administration is also ramping up pressure on states to fall in line with his agenda to increase domestic energy production, particularly of fossil fuels such as oil, coal and gas, and challenge in court what he sees as barriers to domestic energy production.
The U.S. Department of Justice is assembling an inventory of state climate policies that run counter to Trump’s energy goals and could sue in an attempt to block them from being implemented.
But many Democratic states remain undeterred and intend to push forward with their efforts to address climate change.