New Englanders are paying 29.42 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity. The national average is 18.56 cents. That's 59% more for the privilege of living in a state that spent two decades declaring war on affordable energy.
Now those same states want their natural gas pipelines back.
Governors across New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New Jersey are reversing course on the green energy mandates they spent years championing. Renewable portfolio standards, 100% clean energy targets, and Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative commitments are all being quietly reconsidered — not because the politicians had some philosophical awakening, but because the bills came due.
New England energy costs rose 29% over the last five years. New York's electricity rates are now 70% higher than the national average. Energy analysts projected that without policy changes, New England states face an additional $815 billion in energy costs by 2050. The alternative — embracing natural gas and nuclear — would save roughly $700 billion.
So naturally, after burning through a decade of virtue signaling, they're choosing the $700 billion option. Bold leadership.
New Jersey lifted its decades-long moratorium on nuclear power on April 8, 2026. Massachusetts announced a commitment to "explore" advanced nuclear energy. States that fought pipeline projects for years — New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts — are now warming to the very infrastructure they blocked. The governors who told their constituents that wind and solar would deliver cheaper, more reliable power are now rediscovering that natural gas exists.
An Independent Women's Forum poll of New England women found that 53% felt "intentionally misled" about whether climate policies would actually deliver lower prices and reliability. Half the women in the region said the people selling them this policy knew it wasn't true.
The broader reversal goes beyond state capitals. A November 2025 Heatmap News report acknowledged that analysts across the energy sector now consider 100% clean energy goals cost-prohibitive. Bloomberg opinion declared the net-zero climate movement "effectively dead."
Then, on May 19, 2026, the UN's own climate panel retired its most extreme modeling scenario — the one predicting a 4.5-degree Celsius temperature spike by 2100 — calling it implausible. The scientific basis for the emergency that justified all these mandates is being walked back by the very institutions that created it.
The green lobby will frame this as temporary pragmatism. A strategic pause. A recalibration to get the transition right. What it actually is: states admitting that the Federal Power Act of 1935 gave them authority over their own electricity markets, and they used that authority to make electricity unaffordable. Every blocked pipeline, every killed nuclear project, every mandated wind farm that couldn't keep the lights on in February — those were choices. Political choices made by politicians who knew the costs would land on someone else's electric bill.
Governor Kathy Hochul spent years making New York the flagship of green energy ambition. New Yorkers now pay 70% above the national average and the state is reconsidering pipelines. Nobody's holding a press conference to apologize for that.
They banned the cheap stuff, promised the expensive stuff would get cheaper, watched it get more expensive, and are now unbanning the cheap stuff. They called it a clean energy transition. It was a round trip.
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