Governor Hochul: “We've already committed money to lead an ambitious pathway to zero emissions, net zero emissions by 2050. $35 billion from the State of New York in large scale renewable projects … That is what we can achieve. We also have the largest offshore wind projects in the nation going on right now off the shores of Long Island.”
Hochul: “You know our challenges, and perhaps you even have ideas. It is our responsibility to leave this gathering with those lanterns held high to show others the path forward. That's what this gathering is about. And as the Governor of the State of New York, I welcome all of you, and I thank you for sharing your commitment to saving this planet because if we don't, who will?”
Earlier today, Governor Kathy Hochul delivered remarks at the 2023 Concordia Annual Summit in New York City.
VIDEO of the event is available on YouTube here and in TV quality (h.264, mp4) format here.
AUDIO of the event is available here.
PHOTOS of the event are available on the Governor's Flickr page.
A rush transcript of the Governor's remarks is available below:
Good morning. What a topic to wake everyone up with – climate change. Well, I'm telling you, those who've been in New York slopping around in the rain and the puddles for the last couple of days, the weather is at least changing. It's getting a little bit better. So, we welcome those of you who are not New Yorkers and all those who are New Yorker wannabes. We're delighted to have you here.
I also want to thank all my friends at Concordia. This is a premier gathering at a time when there's many events of people gathering from around the world to really push the world forward and to address the challenges that we're all facing collectively as residents of this great planet. But Concordia certainly attracts the best and the brightest, and the policy forums are really seminal in our efforts to find the path forward. And that's what I'm here to do is seek from all of you any advice you have governing a state like New York through these turbulent times with respect to climate change.
I have another great friend here. I got to know Caroline Scullin, Vice Chair of the board, who is a fellow Upstate New Yorker. You don't see a lot of us around. So, I want to give a special shout out to – there's another part of the state outside of Manhattan if you've not had a chance to explore. So, Caroline, thank you for the introduction. Nick Logothetis is a great friend of ours and he's the one who introduced me to this whole idea of the most brilliant people gathering to share ideas and I was delighted when he asked me to participate.
Yes, I was asked to address climate change. I've been Governor exactly two years. I know a little bit about climate change because my first ten days on the job as a brand-new Governor, I had not one, but two hurricanes hit the City of New York. More hurricanes than it hit the State of Florida that year. So, we had a spring into action and deal with the result of the effect. We are now vulnerable actually to hurricanes on top of everything else in the State of New York.
But when you think about extreme weather, sometimes extreme almost seems like an understatement. Just think about what we've gone through in 2023. And we're only on day 259 of 2023. I'm nervous about the rest of the year. Because what we have experienced, we started out the year with the most snowfall in the State of New York in a 24-hour period in its history. From an area called Buffalo, I know a little bit about it. We had the worst blizzard recorded just nine months ago. Several months ago, we had a not 100-year event, and we have 100-year flooding events all the time, it seems. I don't know how the math works out. How do you have a 100-year event every two years? We also had our first 1,000-year event, and I had the audacity to ask the question, like, how do we know it's a 1,000-year event? Who was tracking this 1,000 years ago? But they said it sounds really bad, so just say it. Okay, it is really bad. It wiped out some beautiful communities in Upstate New York.
I went to one, Highland Falls, in the aftermath. We're all slopping around the flooded streets and seeing the washed away cars and the homes that were just – fell into the river, washed away. And I stopped into a little diner downtown. Everybody was eating breakfast there. They had power, they had a generator. The rest of the community wasn't eating because there was no power for days. And I had in my arms a sobbing woman who had just lost one of her best friends, a 30-year-old woman who was swept away in the raging floodwaters when she was trying to find her dog when the rain started. So, there is also human tragedy associated with all of this. And people are starting to talk about eco anxiety. The stress of saying, “Is my house going to be washed away? Is that air that we were breathing just back in June from the wildfires up in Quebec that made New York City and Syracuse be the worst places for air quality on the planet, just a couple months ago?” People are stressed out about what does that do to their kids’ lungs during that time when the air was just orange? What does it mean when you have to worry about the wildfires coming? What about people who died during a blizzard? There is real time anxiety going. This is not anxiety about what's going to happen in the future to our kids and our grandkids. That's what we used to think about.
Now we're thinking, “Am I going to survive the rest of 2023?” So, I bring this sense of urgency to all of you as someone who is going through this in real time and knowing that this is a place that we never had extreme weather to the degree we do now. Other parts of our world battered with earthquakes stripping the lives of so many people in Morocco, what happened in Hawaii. I'll be seeing the Governor of Hawaii in a couple of hours talking about how the extreme weather, the dryness that they never experienced before led to the decimation of an entire community, burnt to the ground. So, the effects are real. You can't deny it. And if you're a denier, I'd like to just meet you and talk to you about this and say, you know, I won't say what I would say. But I'll tell you, the reality is hitting us right in the face, right? We can no longer ignore this.
And we think about the words of Rachel Carson, who was one of the early harbingers of saying, gloom and doom and everybody said, “Well, this is so dire, is this really going to happen to our environment?” But she was ahead of her time, and she said, “The balance of nature is not a status quo. It's fluid, it's ever shifting, it's in a constant state of adjustment. And man, too, must be part of that balance. Man just cannot continue doing what man,” and I'm using the word man intentionally, it's men who were running the companies that created the pollution that destroyed many parts of our planet. And I refer to mankind's assault on Mother Earth. Okay, that's real. But mankind allowed so much to happen without stopping it. And I know a lot about this as well because I grew up in a community called Lackawanna, New York, on the shores of Lake Erie. What Lackawanna was known for was a place where very poor immigrants, like my grandparents coming with nothing from Ireland, they could get a job working in a steel plant called Bethlehem Steel.
So, here we are, positioned on one of the most beautiful lakes, one of the Great Lakes of the world. And every night as a child swimming in that lake, we also watched in wonder as Bethlehem Steel discharged this molten, lava-looking substance right down the road from us. And the air was so orange. Those who are here, when the skies turned orange back in June, I thought, this reminds me of my childhood. I didn't know the skies were supposed to be blue because we're always enveloped in this orange cloud of pollution. And then just down the road was Love Canal. I'm amazed I'm still alive. Think about the people who grew up in that environment. Talk about Asthma Alley, that was Asthma City. So, that's the world I grew up in. But guess what? Just a few weeks ago, I went swimming in that lake again. It is pristine. It is, you can see to the bottom, you can see fish swimming. Life came back because people made a decision, mankind made a decision to say no more. We can no longer keep polluting the air. We can no longer keep polluting the waters. We have to stop this.
And the 20,000 people who worked at the steel plant, and everyone said the jobs were worth it, all of a sudden, they're gone. And we're spending billions of dollars to clean up what had happened. But progress was made. There was a decision that we could no longer keep the status quo. Men and women and businesses and government had to be part of the shift, and they accomplished it. So that's why I'm not a fatalist. I'm realistic, I'm seeing what's going on, because my emergency management team rarely sleeps through the night, because they're always giving me reports on what's going on with the climate, and our emergency response, and how we're protecting people.
These are tough times, but I believe. That we have the power, still in our hands, to start to reverse what has been happening. Because for those who don't believe, just open your eyes, see the news, read the papers, however you consume your intelligence from. So, the State of New York had to step up. We teamed up with other states like California and other enlightened states, 25 states came together, because you may not have heard this, but we had this Paris Agreement, goals we were going to achieve. And the United States was part of that until the previous president decided, we'll just pull out of that. I'll let you pass judgment on that decision. But 25 states banded together and said collectively we represent over 40 percent, 50 percent of this nation.
And we can make a difference on our own. So, that's what we've been doing, is working together. We've already committed money to lead an ambitious pathway to zero emissions, net zero emissions by 2050. $35 billion from the State of New York in large scale renewable projects. Transmission projects, I'm leaving here to go over to Queens. Why am I going to Queens? Because we're building the transmission center for hydroelectric power coming down from Quebec that will power one million homes in New York City. That's the future. That is what we can achieve. We also have the largest offshore wind projects in the nation going on right now off the shores of Long Island.
So, my friends, we are transitioning to that new economy. There will be thousands of jobs created in the process. And my job with those jobs is to make sure those jobs are in the hands of people that are underserved today. This is how we start changing the condition of our residents, allowing them to have access to good paying jobs as part of the energy revolution that is happening right here in the State of New York.
We are doing so much more. I'm excited about it. We're doing cap-and-invest, making the polluters have to pay, allowing me to have a fund where I can help offset the cost for ratepayers for the higher cost of this transition. And we'll get there. We'll absolutely get there. I want to leave you with one thought. And again, with a great appreciation for those who are using your time and your talents to come together to help us shape policies, because I look at this through a few lenses. I am the Governor of the State of New York. I have to protect 20 million people. But we also have a responsibility to the rest of the country and the rest of the world ourselves in what we do.
And I want to make sure that we lead the way. And not just because I'm the first woman Governor, I'm a mother too. And as a mother, I am very focused on what the world would be like for my children and their children. We all are. And I think about the fact that there's a lot of influence here from the great country of Greece. We think about some of the philosophers of the early Greek civilization and what guidance they have for us here today, in the here and now, in this epic year of 2023. Plato once said, “If we are to have any hope for the future, those who have lanterns must pass them on to others.”
My friends, you have the lanterns. You are seeing the way. You see into the future. You know our challenges, and perhaps you even have ideas. It is our responsibility to leave this gathering with those lanterns held high to show others the path forward. That's what this gathering is about. And as the Governor of the State of New York, I welcome all of you, and I thank you for sharing your commitment to saving this planet because if we don't, who will?
Thank you very much.