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

By Ella Ryan, Climate Families NYC

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? 

Read the full op-ed here.