Northeast States Set Big Climate Goals. Now Those Plans Are in Trouble. Many blue states are rethinking ambitious strategies to cut emissions as they struggle with rising electricity costs and new hurdles for renewable energy.

The big problem is that rising electricity costs are caused by fossil fuel prices going up, and can be avoided with large-scale wind and solar deployment. The US federal government is working to make that hard; state governments don’t need to go along, even if some politicians are trying to use it as an excuse to avoid deploying renewables.