SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
climate week
Climate Week Showed What’s Possible; Now New York Has to Deliver
The conversations I had suggested very few participants left New York Climate Week with a clear sense of New York State’s potential to lead on climate—and the extent to which we’re failing to meet the moment.
Oct 28, 2025
During the last week of September, as Climate Week turned New York City into a hub of panel discussions, protests, and policy announcements, I felt both inspired and unsettled. It is always energizing to watch tens of thousands of people come together from around the world to discuss solutions, progress, and roadblocks at every level of climate action—from households to national governments—alongside the global leaders convening at the United Nations at the same time.
But as I review what we’re doing here at home, in New York State, to respond to climate change, I’m impatient that we haven’t made more progress—and I’m determined to press our state to step up faster.
While the name “New York Climate Week” suggests a focus on climate action in, around, and by New York State, the topic of what exactly New York is doing to respond to the federal government’s assault on climate programs didn’t come up nearly enough. “States are the frontlines for climate action” was repeated over and over by speakers throughout the week, but the conversations I had suggested very few participants left New York Climate Week with a clear sense of New York State’s potential to lead on climate—and the extent to which we’re failing to meet the moment.
Once upon a time, our state was an early climate leader. In 2019, the organization I now lead, Environmental Advocates NY, worked with a coalition of legislators, partner organizations, labor unions, businesses, and then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo to enact the nation-leading Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), laying the groundwork for slashing greenhouse gas emissions, building renewable energy, and centering equity in the process. Even as climate denier Donald Trump sat in the White House during his first term, they made history.
Leadership is not measured by the speeches we give or even the laws we pass, but by how we follow through and the impact of our legislation.
A single state might feel small, but what New York does is important. New Yorkers power the world’s eighth-largest economy, if we were a nation. Our government purchases, priorities, and preferences move markets and change corporate behavior. Our energy policy sets an example for the nation, and under the CLCPA we’ve seen real clean energy progress. The Empire Wind project, if it goes forward, will generate 800 megawatts of renewable energy in the current phase and another 1.2 gigawatts in later phases. By last year, solar capacity had reached 6 GW, on the way to our 2030 10 GW solar target. Funding is flowing to climate-resilient infrastructure, green jobs, and innovation.
But we can, and must, do even better.
Overall, we’re only about a quarter of the way to our legally mandated 2030 emissions reduction goals, and our current path won’t get us over the line. We’re approaching 30% renewable energy, which is progress, but we won’t reach our 70% 2030 target. We failed to pass corporate reporting mandates this year, and the state’s top politicians have ground progress to a halt on Cap-and-Invest, the law’s primary revenue generation program.
Every day we delay sets us back. And what’s worse, fossil fuel projects we’ve already rejected are coming back from the dead: Just last month, the environmentally dangerous NESE underwater pipeline moved closer to approval.
New pipelines lock us into a future we can’t afford, and will mean decades more dependence on oil and gas, at the very moment we should be accelerating our clean energy transition. Every dollar we spend expanding fossil fuel infrastructure is one we’re not spending to advance clean power, climate resilience, and real energy independence.
Leadership is not measured by the speeches we give or even the laws we pass, but by how we follow through and the impact of our legislation, by what we choose to build or not build, by what we invest in and what we avoid, by how we make sure everyone benefits from our resilient future.
The good news: We know what we must do.
During Climate Week, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced further details about the historic $1 billion commitment she’s made to the newly created Sustainable Future Fund, which will fund energy efficiency upgrades for homes and schools, clean transportation, new renewable generation, and more.
But the state still hasn’t implemented the much larger (and legally required) Cap-and-Invest program to generate revenue for climate investment. That needs to happen now. We need to redouble our commitment to the clean energy transition, modernize our electrical grid, help the communities carrying the heaviest climate impact burden, and—most importantly—draw a clear line against fossil fuel expansion.
The thousands of climate leaders who filled New York’s streets and stages last month all know that transformation is possible. Our state’s lawmakers and governors have backed them up with rhetoric. The outstanding question: Will New York ramp up our commitment to follow through, and lead?
Keep ReadingShow Less
Climate Week Is Here; Our Governors Are Still Siding with Polluters
Frontline communities are exposing blue state governors that sell themselves as climate leaders while favoring polluters.
Sep 23, 2025
I grew up in New Mexico, where oil rigs appear in every direction and wildfire smoke fills the summer air. For years, I’ve sat through state climate hearings and planning sessions, believing our leaders might finally act with courage. Instead, what I’ve seen is a machine built to protect industry and silence communities.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham sells New Mexico as a climate leader, but her record tells another story. This year alone, her administration advanced industry schemes like the Strategic Water Supply Act, moving forward with rules to recycle toxic fracking waste.
This comes in addition to leaving basic protections like a drilling setback law off the table and welcoming Wall Street giant Blackstone to place a bid to take over PNM, our largest utility in New Mexico—handing over our energy future to corporate profiteers.
This isn’t climate leadership. It’s industry power dressed up as progress—at the expense of our health, water, and future.
So here is our challenge to Governors Lujan Grisham, Shapiro, and Newsom: If you truly oppose Trump’s fossil fuel agenda, prove it.
Pennsylvania and California tell a similar story.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro brands himself as a pragmatic moderate. In reality, he green-lit new gas plants, advanced fossil fuel-powered data centers, and supported liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals—projects that lock in fossil fuel expansion while exposing Pennsylvanians to deadly risks.
Worse, his administration is backing legislation like HB 502 and SB 939 that strip municipalities of the power to reject harmful facilities, in direct violation of Pennsylvania’s constitutional right to clean air and water. Families already sick from fracking are being sacrificed so Shapiro can keep industry happy and court national credibility. That isn’t pragmatism. It’s siding with polluters over people.
Gov. Gavin Newsom positions himself as a global climate champion. But in California, frontline communities experience a different reality. Basic health protections like the oil drilling setback law remain under attack, while projects like the Sable Pipeline continue to threaten communities and ecosystems.
Newsom touts his “climate leadership” on the world stage, yet at home he delays, waters down, or sidesteps measures that would phase out fossil fuels. Recently, Democratic lawmakers—backed by Newsom—passed a “climate” package that extends California’s cap-and-trade system for another 15 years while also permitting new drilling. It’s yet another regulatory giveaway to Big Oil. California is sold as a model of climate action, but the truth is clear: Fossil fuel power still dictates the terms.
The pattern is undeniable: governors who pose as climate leaders while protecting fossil fuel interests. Their playbook is the same—adopt the language; sign onto climate alliances; and then push carbon capture, cap-and-trade systems, produced water, hydrogen, and LNG as “solutions.” These are not solutions. They are lifelines for oil and gas, designed to extend extraction.
This is not accidental. It is a deliberate political strategy—a blue-state echo of US President Donald Trump’s fossil fuel agenda. Yet the result is the same: communities poisoned, democracy sidelined, industry shielded. The message to frontline communities is clear: Our lives are expendable if they threaten the profits of fossil fuel companies.
That’s why this Climate Week in New York City, frontline communities from New Mexico, California, and Pennsylvania are coming together to expose the truth. Behind the speeches and pledges, our governors are siding with polluters. They cannot continue to market themselves as climate champions while advancing the fossil fuel agenda at home.
We know what real climate leadership looks like. A just transition—led by communities and workers, not corporations—can phase out fossil fuels, create union jobs, and protect public health. It means rejecting false solutions. It means putting water, air, and people before industry. It means confronting the political power of fossil fuels head-on.
As the 2026 gubernatorial races approach, young people like me are paying attention. We don’t just want new leaders. We demand leadership that stands up to polluters and delivers a future worth living in.
So here is our challenge to Governors Lujan Grisham, Shapiro, and Newsom: If you truly oppose Trump’s fossil fuel agenda, prove it. Stop greenwashing. Stop silencing frontline communities. Stop pushing industry scams dressed up as climate policy.
Because climate action without justice isn’t action—it is betrayal. And frontline communities are not backing down until we win the future we deserve.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Look Up: The Scariest Part When We See the Big, Big, Big Picture
As a new study once more makes clear, raising the temperature is by far the biggest thing humans have ever done; our effort to limit that rise must be just as large.
Oct 23, 2024
This is “Climate week” in New York City, and my inbox has been awash recently in the latest press releases about start-ups and noble initiatives and venal greenwashing. Much of it’s important, and I’ll get to some of it later, but there’s a big new study that came out last week in Science that sets our crucial moment in true perspective. Let’s step back for a moment.
This new study—a decade in the making and involving, in the words of veteran climate scientist Gavin Schmidt “biological proxies from extinct species, plate tectonic movement, disappearance in subduction zones of vast amounts of ocean sediment, and interpolating sparse data in space and time”—offers at its end the most detailed timeline yet of the earth’s climate history over the last half-billion years. That’s the period scientists call the Phanerozoic—the latest of the earth’s four geological eons (we’re still in it), and the one marked by the true profusion of plant and animal life. It’s a lovely piece of science, and it’s lovely too because it reminds us of all we’re heir to in this tiny brief moment that marks the human time on earth. So staggeringly much—strange and extreme and fecund—has come before us.
But it’s also scary as can be, for two big reasons.
The first is that it shows the earth has gotten very very warm in the past. As the Washington Post explained in an excellent analysis yesterday, “the study suggests that at its hottest the Earth’s average temperature reached 96.8 degrees Fahrenheit (36 degrees Celsius).” Our current average temperature—already elevated by global warming to the highest value ever recorded—is about 60 degrees Fahrenheit, or 15 degrees Celsius. For most of the 500 million years the study covers, the earth has been in a hothouse state, with an average temperature of 71.6 Fahrenheit, or 22 Celsius, much higher than now. Only about an eighth of the time has the earth been in its current “coldhouse” state—but of course that includes all the time that humans have been around. It is the world we know and we’re adapted to.
In every era, it’s increases in carbon dioxide that drive the increases and decreases in temperature. “Carbon dioxide is really that master dial,” Jess Tierney, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona and co-author of the study, said. And so the study makes clear that the mercury could go very high indeed as humans pour carbon into the sky. We won’t burn enough coal and oil and gas to reach the very highest temperatures seen in the geological record—that required periods of incredible volcanism—but we may well double the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and this study implies that the fast and slow feedbacks from that could eventually drive temperatures as much as eight degrees Celsius higher, which is more than most current estimates. Over shorter time frames the numbers are just as dramatic
Without rapid action to curb greenhouse gas emissions, scientists say, global temperatures could reach nearly 62.6 F (17 C) by the end of the century — a level not seen in the timeline since the Miocene epoch, more than 5 million years ago.
Now, you could look at those numbers and say: well, the earth has been hotter before, so life won’t be wiped out. And that’s true—there’s probably no way to wipe out life, though on a planet with huge numbers of nuclear weapons who knows. But these temperatures are much higher than anything humans have experienced, and they guarantee a world with radically different regimes of drought and deluge, radically different ocean levels and fire seasons. They imply a world fundamentally strange to us, with entirely different seasons and moods—and if that doesn’t challenge bare survival, it certainly challenges the survival of our civilizations. Unlike all the species that came before us, we have built a physical shell for that civilization, a geography of cities and ports and farms that we can’t easily move as the temperature rises. And of course the poorest people, who have done the least to cause the trouble, will suffer out of all proportion as that shift starts to happen.
But that’s not the really scary part. The really scary part is how fast it’s moving.
In fact, nowhere in that long record have the scientists been able to find a time when it’s warming as fast as it is right now. “We’re changing Earth’s temperature at a rate that exceeds anything we know about,” Tierney said.
Much much much faster than, say, during the worst extinction event we know about, at the end of the Permian about 250 million years ago, when the endless eruption of the so-called Siberian traps drove the temperature 10 Celsius higher and killed off 95 percent of the species on the planet. But that catastrophe took fifty thousand years—our three degree Celsius increase—driven by the collective volcano of our powerplants, factories, furnaces and Fords—will be measured in decades.
Our only hope of avoiding utter ruin—our only hope that our western world, in the blink of an eye, won’t produce catastrophe on this geologic scale—is to turn off those volcanoes immediately. And that, of course, requires replacing coal and gas and oil with something else. The only something else on offer right now, scalable in the few years we still have to work with, is the rays of the sun, and the wind that sun produces, and the batteries that can store its power for use at night.
Another new analysis this week, this one from the energy thinktank Ember, shows that 2024 is seeing another year of surging solar installations—when the year ends there will be 30% more solar power on this planet than when it began. Numbers like that, if we can keep that acceleration going for a few more years, give us a fighting chance.
That’s what all those seminars and cocktail parties and protests in New York over this week will ultimately be about—the desperate attempt to keep this rift in our geological history from getting any bigger than it must. As this new study once more makes clear, raising the temperature is by far the biggest thing humans have ever done; our effort to limit that rise must be just as large.
We need to stand in awe for a moment before the scope of earth’s long history. And then we need to get the hell to work.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular