Governor Hochul: "I will never forget the images of those people trying to pick up a little piece of their lives, literally picking up baby shoes off the floor and washing them in a bucket of dirty water, so their child didn't go barefoot in the city of New York. So we're here, and I do believe that there are opportunities lying before us, and we just have to have the courage to seize them. And I'm not afraid of a fight. New Yorkers are not afraid of a fight, and this is the existential fight of our time. You cannot dispute that."
Governor Hochul: "I'm launching two major steps to accelerate the transition into a cleaner, greener future. And I told you, we're kind of ambitious here. We're not content to be nation leading anymore, we want to be global leading. And that means setting even more ambitious goals."
Earlier today, Governor Kathy Hochul delivered remarks and made an announcement at the opening ceremony for Climate Week NYC.
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 will be available on the Governor's Flickr page
A rush transcript of the Governor's remarks is available below:
Thank you, Carolyn, for the introduction. Thank you all for coming. Why do you always pick the busiest week of the year with traffic? Unbelievable traffic out there. So, those of you who have made it here in person, God bless you for your perseverance. Those of you who are zooming in from somewhere else in the planet, you're missing a great party here. We'll see you next year.
You know, a gathering like this, and I've spoken before in my former role as lieutenant governor, is always so inspiring. I mean, this is the gathering of the most ingenious, brilliant thought leaders who also have great compassion and heart, because you're not thinking about what's going on in the world today, as so many people do in their careers and their professions, you're thinking about the future and the responsibilities that we all have living in this day and age to the people who we'll probably never, ever get to know. People who live in the future, who perhaps will look back, hopefully will look back, and say, yes, we are grateful that we have a clean planet to live on because of the people, the last century or two centuries ago, where the visionaries who gathered at places like this. So, I put a lot of weight on your shoulders to get this right, and to give us the brilliant ideas that'll help charge that path forward. But I have a great optimism and hope and confidence in every one of you.
And, you know, we're talking about reaffirming our commitment to protecting mother earth. Now, mother earth has been pretty battered and bruised lately. When you think about man's assault on mother earth, and unfortunately, mostly it's man, I mean, I'm sorry, they built the factories, right? And they built all the smoke stacks. I didn't see any women building smokestacks or dumping polluted water, you know. I love the men too, though, we're good, we're good. But just, it's a statement of fact, right? It's man's assault on mothers and I want to stop that. I'm a politician. I understand what that means. People think, oh, you all talk big, right? And they'll talk big. We talk big, of course we do. But we also, in the State of New York, we act. We do big things. And there is no challenge whether it's throughout our history or our current challenges that we don't meet with an aggressive approach. That's what New Yorkers do it's in our DNA, get used to it.
But I want to tell you all of us come to this and we all come with our own perspectives. What led you to sit in these seats today, or be out there around the globe, participating in this incredible exchange of ideas? For me, it's deeply personal. It goes back to my childhood, which is a long time ago. I won't name any years, but it's all on Wikipedia, so go figure it out. I grew up in Buffalo. I grew up, I was born. Any Bills fans in the audience? Okay. Okay. Alright. Alright. Nice game yesterday, right? I was just going to say 35 to nothing against Miami, but I diverge.
My parents started at a trailer park and lived in Lackawanna, like many people do, working class people. And my playground was Lake Erie. At the time, late sixties, early seventies, Lake Erie was a cesspool. I mean, you literally could see the Bethlehem Steel Plant. By night, the sky was lit up with this lava-like glow, because as they are dumping, I don't even know what it was, toxic chemicals into the lake. And at night, you couldn't even imagine that people would be swimming in it by day, except we were. That's how we swam during the day into this toxic water, unbeknownst to our parents, obviously I hope.
Also, when you drove in a car through Lackawanna, you often couldn't see it, I'm not exaggerating, because you were in enveloped in an orange cloud of smoke that had just been discharged from the smokestacks and people lived in these. So, it's hard to believe I'm still alive when I think about this, but I'm healthy, I'm good. But so many people did succumb to environmentally induced illnesses. I mean, I grew up hearing every day for years about Love Canal, not far from where we lived. So the environmental movement and the whole idea of super funds emerged out of this environment that I was a child in and it was very much paying attention to.
I said to my father who worked at the steel plant as did his immigrant father and many others who escaped poverty by working at a steel plant, said, dad, didn't people know didn't people ask questions and people wonder why people live like this? He says, we didn't, we didn't. This is just how it was. These were jobs. Nobody knew better. We didn't know we could do better, even in the sixties and seventies, until we started having more enlightened people and even the beginning of Earth Day and I was a kid in school starting my first Earth Day club and they name my ecology club.
And all those fun things I did as a little activist, that I still am today, but that really does have an effect on you, which brings me to today and the depth of my passion for making sure that no one has to live in a contaminated environment, anywhere in this state, this country or this world. So I'm really proud to lead a state that has the nation leading climate goals.
But goals are goals. I want results. And that's what I'm going to talk to you about today. And I think about what I just dealt with as I've been governor, it will be four weeks tomorrow. It's amazing.
Of course, my first challenge, other than the entire subway system shutting down on my fifth day, and that's another story we got it, I'm not making this up. The first major challenge I had was an environmentally induced climate disaster. If you saw, well, no matter where you lived and if you're a New Yorker, you felt this deeply.
The skies literally opened up. Hurricane Ida was relentless. The forecasters did not see the track of it coming to the very populated Northeast I had literally the day before had called the governors of Mississippi and Louisiana to say any way I can help you. I'm only on the job a couple of days, but we're New York we always want to help, the next day, were calling me.
We did not foresee this coming. And what I saw was literally the skies opened up. And what is quite extraordinary. One week earlier, the previous hurricane from the week before. I mean, I feel like I'm living in Florida. We had a hurricane Henri, dumped nearly two inches of rain on Central Park.
Broke all records, shattered them. Oh my God. This is once in a 500 year event. Ten days later, we had over three inches dumped an hour on Central Park and our city was flooded and that just was a warning shot. I mean, it's just extraordinary what we went through and what is seared in my memory is not the Niagara Falls opening up and insane amount of rainfall hitting our streets, but the aftermath.
When I walked through the streets of Queens and sadly, it was Elmhurst, which had been the epicenter of the global pandemic for a long time. So this community had been hit hard, and I walked down an alleyway and I saw the people just picking up the pieces of their lives, the ones who were lucky enough to have survived I'm talking about, because people literally saw the water rushing into their homes. They lived in basement homes and there was no escape route out the back.
We had a dozen and a half people lose their lives in this environment. So you talk about my priorities, why I'm so intent on making sure we get this right. I will never forget the images of those people trying to pick up a little piece of their lives, literally picking up baby shoes off the floor and washing them in a bucket of dirty water, so their child didn't go barefoot, in the city of New York. So we're here, and I do believe that there are opportunities lying before us, and we just have to have the courage to seize them. And I'm not afraid of a fight. New Yorkers are not afraid of a fight, and this is the existential fight of our time. You cannot dispute that.
And I believe that every child deserves to grow up with clean air, clean water, clean life, and we owe that to them as adults. And I wish someone had felt they owed it to us when I was a child. And that's the wrong I want to correct here. So New York will lead in the green energy economy and good paying jobs.
And I'm not just talking about good paying jobs for people that you normally think of in these industries. I want to make sure that these jobs are populated by people from the most underserved communities in our state. This is how we put them on a trajectory, of having good sustainable jobs, that'll be there in the future, that they can support their families and lift themselves out of poverty because we got them into a job training program.
We got them a mentor from a company that's investing in clean energy. I believe we will do that and we'll do it very successfully. So we know, thank you. Let's give that a round of applause, and I want every state to do this.
But here's what we're going to do. And I'm going to make some announcements here because I could tell you stories all day, but I won't do that, I know you've got other really important people to hear from. We're going to take some major steps to build a more resilient New York and accelerate our progress toward nation leading emissions goals.
I already signed into law, again on the job four weeks here, I'll tell you what I have done in four weeks. We are accelerating the transition to more zero emission vehicles in New York by 2035, less than 15 years from now, we'll have zero emission vehicles, over a million vehicles will be on our roads by 2035.
And I'm excited about this. We are continuing to invest in electric vehicles. I want to give you a little quiz here. Where was the first electric vehicle invented?
Buffalo. It was called the Buffalo electric vehicle company. I'll tell you, it's a sad story. You can look it up, but, that would have been the wave of the future because it was hard for women to go out on the Sunday drive with their big gowns on the drive, the new vehicles, they wanted a little freedom from their husbands.
Maybe the guys are home watching football. I don't know, but they wanted to get out. And it was easier for them to crank up an electric vehicle than to do it otherwise. So they invented these, but then the big oil companies came in and convinced everybody that that was so, so ridiculous to go electric vehicles, let's do oil.
So imagine the world we would have had if people listened to the folks in Buffalo. I digress. We are now on par with California with respect to our zero emission vehicles. And when you take the power of New York and the power of California that's over 58 million people will now be leading the way toward more electric vehicles on our roads by 2035.
We also will be accelerating the zero emission truck sales on our streets. We also invest in, I mentioned this a little bit earlier, we've invested money. I don't just say we're going to hire more people from underserved communities. We invested $6 million to launch the Climate Justice Fellowship, which supports fellowships to get people in disadvantaged communities to support clean energy efforts and get people jobs.
We also partnered with New York City on a $24 million program to fund electrification in New York City's affordable housing. This is transformative. We need to do much more of this in the housing stock that needs a lot of work, but let's make sure that we are electrifying it in a clean way.
We also committed $107 million to start construction on Staten Island's, Living Breakwaters, coastal resiliency project. Because the next storm, they will not be able to survive if we do not make these investments now, we're going to do that.
Let's get excited about solar goals. That's all my first month, but right now I say, wait, what are we doing today folks? We've got another day, time's slipping fast.
You know, we have to save the planet, save the planet now. I'm launching two major steps to accelerate the transition into a cleaner, greener future. And I told you, we're kind of ambitious here. We're not content to be nation leading anymore, we want to be global leading. And that means setting even more ambitious goals.
We're going all in on solar, all in on solar and our landmark 2019 climate leadership. If you want to clap, go ahead.
Now, where I live, I don't see a lot of sun, but that's okay. You know, I think it's going to work. I think it's going to work. The Climate Leadership and Community protection act set an aggressive goal of producing six gigawatts of electricity from solar by 2025. But the good news is we're almost there already, 2025, we're going to beat that by years.
So I said, okay, that's not good enough. So today I'm announcing, we're going to double down and expand that goal to build out at least 10 gigawatts of solar by 2030. No one said we're going to do that before. I'm saying it right here, right now. And we're going to get it done
I've directed NYSERDA to develop a solar roadmap, to find our way there and focus on disadvantaged and low-income communities. And what excites me the most, we're going to have over 20,000 brand new jobs in the solar industry alone. This will result in powering over 1.7 million homes and save our customers $880 million along with $9 billion in private investment. And I want to thank the team from the State of New York, Doreen Harris, and New York Sun for all the work they've done, let's give them a round of applause.
These are the visionaries who are part of your state workforce, who get things done. And I'm so proud to be associated with all of them, but here's another announcement for you.
Transmission award, everybody's been wanting [to know] what we're going to do about this. We need to build new sources of renewable energy and how do we bring all that clean energy, renewable energy, which is largely an upstage geographic. It's mostly upstate, but the population is right here. How do we get it down to New York City where the needs are the greatest? And right now, because of that disconnect, New York City has had to rely so heavily on fossil fuels because it's not hooked up to renewable sources upstate. Many of those fossil fuels polluting, those plants are in black and brown and low income communities all around the city.
They're everywhere. And we're going to fix that. We're going to fix that. Let's turn the page on the city's long-standing reliance on fossil fuels and bring new jobs instead to those communities.
So right now we are reviewing various contracts that were out there. We went and did a bid for proposals to bring a plentiful supply of clean, renewable power into the city. Got down to the final two. People were traditionally going to pick one or the other. Right? And I asked simple questions. Why not both? Why not do both? I mean, why would we do one now? See how it works and then do the other one, maybe in a decade or so? I say, if we're really serious about getting the job done and relying less on fossil, never on fossils and more on renewables, let's do both together.
So today I'm announcing we're awarding not one but two contracts that'll absolutely accomplish these goals. First, a new 174-mile new transmission project that'll go from Delaware County to the Rainey Substation in Queens, and secondly, a 339-mile new transmission project that'll extend from Quebec in Canada all the way to the Astoria substation in Queens.
These historic projects will pair wind, solar and hydropower, will be brought from upstate and Canada to bring nearly 18 million mega hours of renewable energy to New York City annually, enough to power two and a half million homes a year. Think of these as two extension cords. I know that you need a simple image, so we're bringing extension cords down the state and plug them into New York. Okay? This is exciting to power homes and businesses all over.
And you know my favorite topic, creating more jobs - over 10,000 good paying jobs, attracting billions of dollars in private investment.
And finally, this will play a major role in allowing New York City to retire its reliance on fossil fuel plants that have been polluting too many parts of our city. We're going to get that done. We're going to get it done as soon as
We'll be shutting down unhealthy facilities like the Astoria facility which is in the part of the city known as asthma alley. We're also beginning the process to transition from dirty power plants like the Big Allis. If you live in New York City you know what I'm talking about.
These will be sent to the Public Service Commission and we're going to make sure that we do this in a smart way, sensitive to the environmental habitats along the way, and make sure we're investing more clean money here.
It's impossible to overstate how important that is for New York City. As we left reliance on Indian Point nuclear power and we are transitioning to wind, solar and hydropower, this is a major, major initiative to deliver clean, healthier air and more electricity to New York City.
I think that's all I have for announcements. Just to wrap up, my friends, I will continue to be as bold as I possibly can. You bring before me the ideas that come out of a conference like this and say, this is how we can lead our way into the energy future, create jobs, and make up for all the past destruction of beautiful neighborhoods where children are still growing up with environmental crises like I did as a child. I want to fix that.
I'm impatient. That's one thing you'll know about me. I'm very impatient. So I hope that you'll see that New York State is not just talking the talk but we're going to walk the walk and we're going to make sure we get this done.
And someday, my father is 85 years old and I would say, dad, I know we had that conversation a long time ago, how people were able to live like.
I am not a grandma yet. Hope to be soon. But I want my grandchildren never have that question asked of me - how did you let that happen when you were in charge of things? How did you let that happen to our environment, grandma? I'm not going to have to answer that question because we're going to get it right this time and we're going to make up for a lot of harm that was done in the past.
But I'm excited. I'm fired up to help lead the energy revolution, the green revolution, because it's long overdue my friends and you are part of the solution. Thank you very much.