Taylor Swift’s frigid wedding inside a well-cooled Madison Square Garden is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Hollywood celebrities and their climate double standards. Would you believe that a particular Marvel movie star is actually behind making sure Manhattan is sweating it big time during the latest heat wave?
New York City’s latest heat emergency has produced a striking image: Mayor Zohran Mamdani asking businesses and residents to help protect grid reliability by setting thermostats to 78 degrees and avoiding major appliance use during peak demand. The city says the request is part of an emergency response to a dangerous heat wave, with heat indices expected to reach 109 to 112 degrees and hundreds of cooling centers opened across the five boroughs.
But it also raises a larger question that New York’s political class has spent years avoiding: what happens when a city removes a major source of dependable, carbon-free power and then discovers it still needs electricity on the hottest days of the year?
The answer is increasingly uncomfortable. And it has everything to do with a Hollywood celebrity effort to get New Yorkers off of nuclear power just a few years ago!
This is a BIG deal – the first of Indian Point’s nuclear reactors is shutting down this month & New York State is moving toward a 100% #RenewableEnergy future!
Be sure to check out @Beyond_IP and their incredible campaign! #BeyondIndianPoint https://t.co/eUf8VS8rJV pic.twitter.com/X3hGjS9dFU
— Mark Ruffalo (@MarkRuffalo) April 16, 2020
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NYC did not merely lose an old power plant when Indian Point closed. It lost roughly 2,000 megawatts of firm nuclear generation located near the downstate region that needs power most. Indian Point’s final reactors were shut down in 2020 and 2021 after years of pressure from environmental groups, elected officials and celebrity activists, including Mark Ruffalo, who celebrated the shutdown and urged New York to move “beyond Indian Point.” And the first big summer temp spike to hit since that point is putting the decision to lower energy output in a well-deserved hot seat.
That slogan sounded green. The aftermath has been far less clean.
As The Guardian reported in 2024, the void left by Indian Point was filled largely by gas, not by wind and solar. The result was an increase in greenhouse-gas emissions, even though the shutdown had been hailed by opponents of nuclear power as an environmental victory. The irony is hard to miss: a plant opposed in the name of environmental protection was replaced, in practical grid terms, by more fossil-fuel generation.
This is the core contradiction now hanging over New York’s heat emergency. The same political culture that spent years demonizing nuclear power is now asking New Yorkers to ration comfort during summer peaks. To be clear, asking people to conserve during extreme heat is not inherently unreasonable. Utilities and governments have long used demand-response messaging to prevent outages, and vulnerable residents genuinely need protection during severe heat. But when conservation becomes a recurring substitute for adequate generation, it stops looking like emergency prudence and starts looking like policy failure.
And when it comes at the hands of celebrities who campaigned for such a horrible outcome, while they themselves suffer none of the results, it reeks of elitist foibles using average people as their playthings.
New York ISO just issued an early warning that we must alleviate the strain on our energy grid statewide.
Please do your part in keeping our power on by:
•Setting your AC to 78 degrees.
•Turning off lights and unplugging electronics you’re not using.
•Waiting until early… https://t.co/7jthuhofjQ
— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) July 2, 2026
New York’s own grid operator has been warning that the system is operating with thinner margins. NYISO’s 2026 Power Trends report says emergency procedures were used more often than in prior years, that the grid is under increasing strain, and that the system will continue to operate with “shrinking safeguards” until major transmission projects and new resources are operational. It also notes that fossil-fuel plants still provide many essential reliability attributes, including fast ramping, inertia, voltage support and dependable dispatchable supply.
That is the great energy-policy trap New York set for itself. The state wants to retire fossil-fuel generation. It also shut down a major source of nuclear generation. Meanwhile, new renewable, storage and transmission resources have not arrived at sufficient scale to replace the reliability services provided by the old system. NYISO is blunt about this gap: renewable and storage resources are important for decarbonization, but they do not yet provide comparable reliability attributes at scale during long-duration or severe-weather conditions.
The result is not a clean-energy triumph. It is a city leaning harder on conservation appeals, older fossil units and emergency planning.
Marvel actor Mark Ruffalo – YouTube, The Graham Norton Show
That is why the Mamdani administration’s thermostat request is politically explosive. The city is not merely asking residents to be civic-minded. It is revealing that New York’s energy transition has become fragile enough that a heat wave requires public appeals to reduce demand while the city scrambles to protect the grid. The mayor’s office specifically said New Yorkers and businesses should set thermostats to 78 degrees, delay major appliance use and reduce Times Square sign brightness to help protect energy reliability.
This is where the Mark Ruffalo-era anti-nuclear activism deserves renewed scrutiny. Indian Point opponents argued for years that nuclear power was too risky, too old, too close to New York City and environmentally unacceptable. Those concerns were not invented; Indian Point had a long and controversial history involving safety fears, groundwater issues and environmental complaints related to Hudson River cooling. But the anti-nuclear movement treated closure itself as victory, without first ensuring that an equivalent amount of firm, clean replacement power would be ready on the day the reactors went dark.
That was the fatal sequencing error. New York did not replace Indian Point with a fully built clean-energy system. It replaced it largely with gas while promising that the cleaner future would arrive later.
Now, during hot summers, “later” is the problem. Air conditioners do not run on aspirations. Hospitals, elevators, subways, data centers, grocery refrigeration, senior housing and apartment buildings all require electricity in real time. A modern city cannot treat firm power as an ideological inconvenience. It either has enough dispatchable supply, or it asks people to use less when they need it most.
Mark Ruffalo speaking at the 2017 San Diego Comic Con International, for “Thor: Ragnarok” Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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The most charitable interpretation is that New York is caught in a difficult transition. Climate change is making heat waves more dangerous. Electrification is raising demand. Transmission projects take years. Large-scale storage remains insufficient for prolonged stress events. Under that reading, Mamdani’s request is a responsible short-term move during an extreme emergency.
The less charitable interpretation is that New York’s leaders are now managing the consequences of symbolic energy politics. They removed a major carbon-free generator, increased dependence on fossil fuels, and now ask ordinary New Yorkers to make do with less cooling during dangerous heat. The burden falls especially hard on people without efficient buildings, modern AC units or the means to relocate during peak heat. Wealthier residents can often absorb discomfort with better insulation, private generators, second homes or newer HVAC systems. Working-class New Yorkers are more likely to experience conservation politics as a direct reduction in quality of life.
That is the lesson New York should take from Indian Point. The question is not whether solar, hydro, batteries or efficiency should be part of the future. They likely should. The question is whether a city of more than eight million people can afford to discard firm, zero-carbon power before the replacement system actually exists. And should eight million people suffer because a bunch of Hollywood movie stars campaign to wipe out the energy grid?
The past few years suggest the answer is a resounding no.
Mamdani roasted for telling New Yorkers to set their ACs to 78 degrees as blistering heat wave bakes Big Apple https://t.co/xqr3L249G5 pic.twitter.com/OWCNtFzMg9
— New York Post (@nypost) July 2, 2026
Mamdani’s 78-degree appeal is not just a heat-wave management tactic. It is a symbol of a deeper energy contradiction. New York wanted to be post-nuclear and post-fossil at the same time. Instead, it became more dependent on fossil fuels after losing nuclear power, while still facing reliability strain during peak weather. That is not a model for climate leadership. It is a warning to every state that thinks energy policy can be built around slogans first and physics second.
New Yorkers were told that getting rid of Indian Point would help deliver a cleaner future. Years later, the city is burning more fossil fuel than it wanted, leaning on aging power plants it hoped to phase out, and asking residents to limit air conditioning during dangerous summer heat. That is not “beyond Indian Point.” That is living with the consequences of having gone beyond it too soon.
How do you feel about New York Mayor Mamdani’s air conditioner demands? Sound off and let us know!
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