The Legislature passed some bills that are obscure but significant, in the view of climate activists.

Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll look at several low-profile yet important climate laws that Gov. Kathy Hochul signed into law this week. And we’ll hear about a sense of déjà vu as monkeypox spreads in the city, along with confusion over how to get the so-far scarce vaccine.

New York has the nation’s most ambitious legally enshrined climate goals, but its Democratic leaders are under growing pressure from a highly engaged segment of the party to move faster to make them reality.

You’ll be sure to hear more in the coming weeks about calls for a special session to vote to to allow the state’s power authority to build publicly owned renewable energy projects — a measure that advocates say had the votes to pass but was never brought to the Assembly floor.

Climate activists are pushing Gov. Kathy Hochul to sign a two-year moratorium on certain energy-hungry fossil-fuel burning cryptocurrency mining facilities. They’re also frustrated that a bill to curb installation of gas hookups in newly constructed buildings across the state failed to pass this year.

But some nitty-gritty climate bills, so nitty-gritty that they got little coverage, did make it into law. And while they don’t sound as juicy, they are essential building blocks, experts say, for reaching the state’s goals: essentially, by 2050, to stop the entire New York economy from emitting the planet-warming gases driving the climate crisis.

Here’s what those laws do:

Allow the state to set new energy-efficiency standards for buildings, appliances and machinery.

Without the Codes and Standards Act, agencies could not fully enforce the overarching climate law.

The new law allows them to make rules that govern the greenhouse gas emissions from buildings and the activities inside them, something that was never part of such codes before.

Allow utilities to get into a new business: thermal heating and cooling.

This one is important because it gives gas utilities something to do as the use of gas is phased out — hopefully, advocates say, lessening their intense lobbying efforts against other bills and actions that would limit its use.

It allows pilot development of utility-scale projects to heat and cool buildings by pumping air, much as heat pumps do, but on a scale that could work for whole blocks or large building complexes. Geothermal pumps and other systems can heat and cool without burning fossil fuels, but need large investments to test and build.

Require prevailing wage for more renewable-energy projects.

Gov. Hochul also signed a bill to require the use of union workers in more jobs like installing solar panels and building renewable energy infrastructure.

Like the thermal utility bill, this legislation, advocates say, helps expand the political coalition in support of climate action by bringing more of the state’s powerful unions on board.