Opinion: Children, Parents & Grandparents Call for Hochul to Move Faster on Climate Action

“While I cannot always prevent pollution from entering my kids’ lungs, I can call on Gov. Hochul to move forward with cap-and-invest and pass strong climate legislation.”

It’s every parent’s nightmare: knowing something is harming your child but feeling powerless to stop it. Yet it’s a nightmare that replays every single day when I turn on our gas stove, open our rented apartment’s window to the heavy air outside, or navigate our traffic-choked streets in search of space to play. When your child huffs over to you after running around in the park to tell you he’s finding it hard to breathe again, the guilt and helplessness is crushing.

There is very little the average parent in New York can do on an individual level to remove pollution from their child’s environment, especially as many families are struggling simply to make ends meet in an increasingly unaffordable city. 

Most of us can’t close down the dirty “peaker” power plants scattered throughout the city, or make policy to ramp up the transition to renewable energy. Most of us aren’t able to incentivize and fund widespread electrification of the buildings that produce 70 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions in our city. But there is one parent who has more power than most: our Governor, Kathy Hochul. 

We’ve heard her use encouraging rhetoric around climate and the threat it poses to her grandchildren, but our progress under her administration remains painfully slow. Her flip-flopping on congestion pricing last summer delayed the program until after the general election, putting it squarely in President Donald Trump’s crosshairs. Now Trump wants to kill it. Her hesitation to sign the Climate Superfund Bill in December signaled weakness to the corporate polluters who are challenging it and has us wondering: whose interests come first—ours or theirs? 

This year she’s sitting on another important program—cap-and-invest—that would make big corporate polluters pay for their emissions, then use that revenue to invest the estimated billions into climate solutions. Despite having proposed the program two years ago, the governor has now hit pause and is refusing to make public the draft of the long-promised regulations, upon which the program would be based. 

Not only must Gov. Hochul move forward with cap-and-invest, she must do it right. Climate “solutions” that involve moving pollution from wealthy, politically powerful communities into underserved neighborhoods are not solutions at all; outsourcing the green transition to corporations without any input from New Yorkers, or favoring economies of scale over community skillsets equally won’t get our state where it should be. 

Carbon emissions and the air pollution that comes with them are not family-level problems for parents to tackle alone, they’re society-level problems that need society-level solutions. This is why parents and caregivers like me are choosing to turn away from helplessness and towards building collective power and taking action to push Gov. Hochul to tackle the climate threats facing our kids—threats that are escalating with each passing year.

Last month, local families with Climate Families NYC gathered outside Gov. Hochul’s Manhattan office dressed in snail costumes to tell her to stop being so slow—and to hurry up on tackling the climate crisis. Parents found temporary solace in taking action while the children enjoyed a tale from a giant storybook. Its pages tell of a snail called “Governor Slochul” who has the power to make polluters pay for clean energy and a safer planet but is just being way too slow.

Along with the children in the story, they cheer the snail on as she wakes up and starts to speed towards the finish line of a cleaner and greener state. Because every generation is feeling the effects of climate change, our kids were joined by grandparents from Third Act NYC and teens with the Fridays for Future movement. But, most of all, it’s our children who will reap the consequences of inaction.

To succeed in this mission, families will need our elected representatives in our corner. That’s why we had our last action in Assemblymember Deborah Glick’s district and have contacted our state legislators with our message about the Fund Climate campaign, a spending plan that focuses on cutting pollution and making corporate polluters—not people—pay for climate action. The plan includes programs for affordable climate-ready homes, community-directed grants to climate resiliency projects, and support for policies like the NY HEAT Act and the Cap-and-Invest Guardrails Bill.

More than ever, families are feeling the urgency of this issue. In the past two years, our kids have had to wade to school through unprecedented floods, see the sky turn orange with wildfire smoke, or sit sweltering in classrooms that were not designed for it to be 98 degrees Fahrenheit in June. Despite that, we’re not interested in doom and gloom. Done right, we see an opportunity to make strides towards clean energy and climate resiliency. We see good union jobs, healthier schools, cleaner air, and a more affordable and equitable city. 

So while I cannot always prevent pollution from entering my kids’ lungs, I can call on Gov. Hochul to move forward with cap-and-invest and pass strong climate legislation. Together with other families, we can cut through the smog of corporate interests and hold our leaders accountable for delivering a city where all of us can breathe easier.

Ella Ryan is a member of Climate Families NYC.