Last April, New York City marked its 51st Earth Day by suing fossil fuel companies over climate change. A week later, the city started burning even more fossil fuel when its largest source of zero-carbon power, the Indian Point nuclear plant, shut down.

The move put New York in league with California, Germany and other places that purport to view global warming and the air pollution from burning oil and gas as urgent crises, but have simultaneously shuttered nuclear facilities, which generate massive amounts of power without carbon emissions.

With Indian Point closed, roughly 90% of the citys grid is powered by fossil fuels. Now, New York faces yet another test of its legally mandated commitment to slash its planet-heating emissions by the end of the decade.

On Thursday, state regulators will decide the fate of a long-fought proposal to run a transmission line down the Hudson River from hydropower dams in Qubec to the New York City neighborhood of Astoria.

The project, called the Champlain Hudson Power Express, would replace half of the capacity lost when Indian Points reactors stopped running and provide the kind of fast, reliable electricity that weather-dependent renewables like wind and solar struggle to produce on their own. Unlike other proposals that competed for state approval, the transmission line, known by its acronym CHPE and pronounced chippy, has all its state and federal permits and support from the mayor, governor and president. Public comments overwhelmingly favored building the project. And its ready to begin construction with union labor in a matter of weeks, with the potential to deliver power as early as 2025.

Yet as the state Public Service Commission weighs whether the lucrative contract to build and operate the project is in New Yorkers interest, a small but vocal alliance of gas companies, environmental groups and Indigenous tribes has formed to persuade regulators to kill the transmission line. Their reasons for opposing the project range from concerns over the costs to New York ratepayers and competition to New York energy companies, to fears that Hydro-Qubec, the government-owned utility behind the project, might prioritize Canadians in a disaster or repeat its ugly history of seizing Indigenous lands in Canada to build more dams and increase its electricity output.

This is an unethical project, said John Lipscomb, vice president of Hudson Riverkeeper, an influential conservation group that previously supported the proposal. Referring to the hydropower as blood energy that would be stolen from First Nations tribes, he said, We talk in New York about how we want to support traditionally marginalized communities, but we find a way to overlook these fatal flaws so we can check a green box.

Instead, groups like Riverkeeper and Sierra Club , along with local gas-burning power generators, want the state to block the Champlain Hudson and kick off a new contest for alternative projects.