The advancement to a second-tier committee is a big step for legislation in the state assembly. “It is finally moving in both houses. Before the issue was it moved in the Senate but not the Assembly,” Assemblymember Anna Kelles tells The Block. “Once a bill starts moving then it’s really live. We have over 12,000 bills a year and most go nowhere.”
The version heading to the committee now is much more focused on the surge in massive proof-of-work operations in New York. Part of that is a compromise the bill's author, Assembly Member Anna Kelles, made with an electric workers' union that. The new version features a two-year moratorium that is much more specific, barring the state from issuing new permits to:
This significantly narrows the scope of the moratorium to plants like Greenidge, which took center stage in the current debate when it jump-started a mothballed coal powerplant on Seneca Lake in upstate New York, complete with natural gas outfitting and a carbon offset program, to mine Bitcoin. Even then, the new language takes aim at the expansion of operations and doesn't target those within existing levels.
the_postman_ Good 🙂