Share This Article
“The Legislature must hold firm and not buckle by letting Hochul off the hook. It’s time to move New York forward, not double down on expensive, polluting oil and gas.”
In the past three weeks, I’ve been arrested twice for sitting in front of the entrance to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office, as she tries to amend the state’s climate law, which she is breaking. State politics is indeed strange, and its issues sometimes incomprehensible. Nonetheless, our future depends on people waking up and demanding better.
Right now, Hochul wants to gut the state’s climate law after years of delaying legally required action, following a court order to reduce pollution and cut down on energy bills.
Instead of doing her job by following the law, Hochul wants to weaken it. And as she proposes to gut the climate law, she’s made the Trump-style self-aggrandizing claim that, “No governor in modern times has done more to protect our environment than I have.” She even went as far as to blame “climate activists” for the legal problems she created for herself.
No wonder a top gas industry lobbyist calls Hochul their top asset in New York.
The Legislature can’t let her get away with it. They can’t roll over under the governor and corporate polluters’ pressure.
Energy bills are rising and pollution isn’t dropping. That’s great for oil and gas companies, utilities, and their fat cat executives—not so great for everyone else. Hochul has consistently promoted their interests over the public’s.
Hochul is not the first. New York governors have engaged in a familiar charade for years. They announce lofty climate goals for the headlines, only to retreat quietly when the cameras go away and serious action is required. Then years later, when they’re safely out of office, the old goal is missed. A future governor then restarts the charade with a new set of seemingly-bold targets. Everybody gets good press but nothing happens.
The state’s 2019 climate law was supposed to end this farce. It enshrined what were previously mere executive orders or verbal announcements into law, setting a target for reducing pollution by 40 percent by 2030 from 1990 levels. That requirement matches the pace needed worldwide to avoid cooking the planet.
Even more importantly, the 2019 climate law required the governor to issue regulations to achieve results by 2024 (while also reducing energy costs for working people and protecting disadvantaged communities). The law required the governor to make a plan and then act on it. It granted Hochul almost five years.
The Hochul administration’s own plan is now gathering dust, with almost none of its provisions undertaken. She refused to act on it by 2024, as she was required to do. Then, in January of 2025, after years of careful work by administrators, Hochul shelved the plan’s key element: a cap and invest program. The program was ready to go, but Hochul halted it, much like her “pause” on congestion pricing. By balking at implementing cap and invest, Hochul disregarded her own administration’s analysis, failed to reduce energy bills for working New Yorkers and ended up increasing pollution.
Seeing no alternative option, some advocacy groups sued to enforce the law. By the fall of 2025, they won: a judge issued a decision ordering Hochul to regulate. Instead of complying, Hochul appealed the decision. But the law is crystal clear: she was required to act by 2024, and if the legislature doesn’t step in to change it, she is highly unlikely to win her legally-flimsy appeal. Rather than follow the law, she is now trying to amend it in order to get herself off the hook.
That’s why, along with a few dozen others, I was arrested for sitting in to block the entrance to Hochul’s office. We then returned two weeks later with more people. This isn’t “just” protests. We’ve generated thousands of calls to legislators, held rallies, and met directly with many legislators. It is a dire situation.
After all, the stakes are pretty damn high: we must avoid global-level catastrophe. Meanwhile, in the here and now, energy bills are soaring because oil and gas, and the networks that deliver them, are expensive. Solar is the cheapest form of energy. Energy efficiency also reduces bills.
Yet the governor wants to keep New Yorker’s shackled to expensive and polluting oil and gas, even as Trump’s war on Iran triggers yet another oil and gas crisis.
The key amendment Hochul wants to the climate law is to change the 2024 date by which she was obligated to act into the future. Such an amendment would eliminate the lawsuit, which hangs on that specific deadline. She has proposed moving that date to 2030.
Unfortunately, some legislators now act as if shifting 2024 to 2027 or 2028 might be acceptable to them. But any shift eliminates the lawsuit and restarts the charade of phony goals. The governor has already ignored the law. If the legislature rewards her fealty to the oil and gas lobby by moving the 2024 date at all into the future, the message will be clear: the governor can ignore her obligations. It would once again restart the goals clock charade. Moving that critical date kills the current lawsuit and court order, which is compelling the governor to act.
Of course hindsight is 20/20: New York missed a big opportunity in 2019 to pass something that, by now, would have produced major tangible results. Instead, the 2019 climate law is on the verge of becoming a debacle of phony commitments and big talk followed by years of inaction. Instead of setting goals and a process that allowed the governor to delay action, the law should have set specific, enforceable requirements and delivered funding to achieve them.
While the state government continues to dither, New York City has moved forward. It enacted its landmark Local Law 97, also in 2019. But in contrast to the state’s law, Local Law 97 set specific, enforceable standards backed by penalties on the city’s top polluters. The city’s law is delivering lower utility bills, thousands of jobs, and reducing pollution. The city also divested its enormous pension funds from fossil fuel corporations and its ban on oil and gas in new buildings, Local Law 154, has been in effect for years already. It’s quite a contrast with the state government under Cuomo and now Hochul.
Instead of pushing her own version of a Trump energy agenda, Hochul should follow the law and court order and take concrete, major action to tackle pollution and rising energy bills. The state should set enforceable, specific requirements and fund generous subsidies tied to labor standards to get off fossil fuels. The state can lower energy bills for working New Yorkers, create good jobs and cut pollution all at the same time.
The Legislature must hold firm and not buckle by letting Hochul off the hook. It’s time to move New York forward, not double down on expensive, polluting oil and gas. The Legislature should not enact a budget that aligns with Trump by rolling back the climate law.
Pete Sikora is the climate and inequality campaigns director for New York Communities for Change, which organizes for housing affordability, good jobs, civil rights and a clean and safe world.