U.S. House, NY-17
Mike Lawler has a 17% lifetime score on the LCV National Environmental Scorecard, falling to 12% in 2025. Before his 2020 election to the New York State Assembly, Lawler was the founding executive director of New Yorkers for Affordable Energy, an oil-and-gas-industry-backed lobbying group whose funders include the American Petroleum Institute — the trade association representing both the oil and natural gas industries — alongside Williams Companies and utilities Con Edison, National Grid and Avangrid, and which lobbied against New York’s 2019 climate law and to keep gas infrastructure in new buildings; his own financial disclosure shows he personally continued lobbying for a NY4AE member, the Engineers Labor-Employer Cooperative, through 2021. Lawler voted for the Big Ugly Bill and voted to defund Department of Energy clean-energy and efficiency programs and to block water-heater and appliance efficiency standards. Since returning to the campaign trail, Lawler has blamed New York’s climate law for rising utility bills while continuing to draw contributions from utility-linked PACs, including roughly $18,000 since mid-2025.
