(DCNF)—Environmental activists celebrated the closure of a key nuclear power facility in New York state, but the state’s power sector emissions have increased in the years since the plant shuttered.
State officials finally closed the Indian Point nuclear facility in 2021, a development that climate activist groups commended because of purported safety and environmental risks posed by the facility. However, about three years after the plant shuttered, the state has seen a sharp increase in the greenhouse gas emissions attributable to power generation due in large part to increased reliance on natural gas to make up for the closed plant’s output, according to a March 2024 analysis conducted by JP Morgan.
“In 2020 and 2021, New York State shut down Indian Point’s nuclear plants with the intention of replacing its generation with renewable energy,” JP Morgan wrote in its analysis. “That’s not what has happened so far: three new natural gas plants (Bayonne Energy Center, CPV Valley Energy Center and Cricket Valley Energy Center) have filled the gap along with mostly gas-fired electricity imports from states like Pennsylvania.”
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New York state has established goals of producing 70% of its electricity with green generation by 2030 and having its grid reach zero-emissions by 2040, according to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). Proponents of the Indian Point closure frequently asserted that the retirement of zero-emissions nuclear generation presented a prime opportunity for green energy to step up in the void, but JP Morgan’s analysis demonstrates that natural gas and imports have plugged the gap much more than wind or solar, for example.
This outcome is not the one that environmental activists cheering the plant’s closure expected.
“Once Indian Point is closed, we won’t need to rely on fossil fuels to make up for its energy. Peak demand in the region will have declined by more than the 2,000 megawatts the plant generates, and the replacement power will be carbon neutral as the State further increases its clean energy investments,” Paul Gallay, the president of Riverkeeper — an organization that was involved in the 2017 agreement to eventually shutter Indian Point — said in a statement after the agreement was finalized. “There will be little impact on electricity bills — between $1 and $2 dollars a month — which is a small price to pay for minimizing the risk that this plant poses. Going forward, new efficiency and renewable energy projects will drive still greater savings for consumers, thanks to aggressive energy investments by the state. It’s a new day for New York and the Metro region.”
Natural gas has largely filled in the supply gap opened by Indian Point’s retirement rather than the wind, solar and hydro power projects that officials planned to pick up the slack, the JP Morgan analysis demonstrates.
The change in New York’s energy profile has also altered the emissions intensity of its energy, especially the energy fueling New York City and Long Island, according to JP Morgan.
In 2019, before the plant was shut down, the power fueling New York City and Long Island emitted less than 600 pounds of carbon dioxide for every megawatt hour (MWh) of electricity generated, a figure well below the U.S. average and the average carbon intensity of electricity powering Texas, according to JP Morgan. At the end of 2022, the electricity flowing to New York City and Long Island emitted nearly 900 pounds of carbon dioxide per every MWh generated, significantly more than the averages of the U.S. writ large and of Texas.
“While Texas is more ‘red’ than New York City, it’s now more ‘green’ as well,” the JP Morgan report states.
The carbon intensity of the electricity keeping the lights on in New York state’s most densely-populated area is not the only metric to have increased since Indian Point shut down.
In March 2021, the month before officials shuttered Indian Point for good, electricity in New York City costed consumers about 15 cents per kilowatt hour (KWh) on average; as of December 2023, the average cost per KWh of electricity in New York City had increased to nearly 18 cents, according to data aggregated by Y Charts. That jump represents an increase of approximately 20%.
The New York Independent System Operator did not respond immediately to request for comment.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.