What's wrong with New York State? Try this latest little piece of legislative failure. A solar power bill had been pending in the state legislature. It would have created 20,000 or more jobs, and pumped up the solar industry in the state by a factor of ten times. The economic output from this endeavor would have been about $20 billion. And what do we need most in New York these days? Jobs. And what could be better than jobs in a new, forward-looking sector of the energy market, one that is bound to grow exponentially as the world, and even antiquated New York State, switches over to renewable energy sources wherever possible?

Sounds like a no-brainer.

Alas, the bills, S-7093a and A11004, died on the vine. The legislation was not brought up for a vote this session.

The crippling dysfunction in Albany is to blame. The chaos there in this year of budget cutting and gubernatorial vetoes was said to have taken up too much of the legislature's time and energy. Complicated legislation was "shunted aside" as our state elected officials couldn't seem to walk and chew gum at the same time.

But there was more to it than that. Because, after staying silent about the bill for most of the past year or so as it worked its way through the process towards a final vote, our power utilities — Central Hudson, Consolidated Edison, Orange & Rockland, Rochester Gas and Electric, and New York State Electric and Gas — suddenly came out in opposition to the legislation, despite having previously paid lip service in favor of it.

They said their opposition came from worries that the bill would increase costs and strain the state's regulatory bureaucracy. They produced figures to back up this claim. But the figures were from old data sets — and, one has to suspect, close to irrelevant.

What they feared, in reality, was a challenge to their business model: Burn fossil fuels, extract a small fraction as usable energy and send that to customers down the transmission cables. It's a late-19th century model, and it's way out of date.

And the suspicion has to be that what was really in play was the natural gas frenzy currently sweeping the northeast. The huge profits associated with the Marcellus Shale gas is the focus of the industry right now. Meanwhile, New Jersey is beating the pants off New York State, with a commitment to install 4,600 megawatts of capacity by 2024.

The bill that died called for installing 5,000 Megawatts of capacity in New York State by 2025. That could be as much as 25% of the state's power use at that time.

It could also be a lifesaver, if, as many expect, global oil production is set to decline, and its price is set to increase dramatically.

And so we have a perfect example of how our state government continues to fail us.

But what this really means is that three men — Governor Paterson, Assembly Leader Sheldon Silver and Senate Leader John Sampson — have yet to agree on the details of what will be cut.

While they haggle over that, our future is at stake; and, as we have just seen, vested interests, with short-term bottom-line concerns, have more power than the rest of us put together.