New York Green Advocates Reckon With Climate Loss to Hochul

New York climate advocates closed out a bruising legislative session this month in which they say Gov. Kathy Hochul weakened the state’s landmark climate law and claim to climate policy leadership.

Hochul and lawmakers changed the state’s 2019 climate law during the last few weeks of the 2026 legislative session, including how the state accounts for its greenhouse gas emissions, while scaling back climate targets. Hochul’s administration was slow to implement key provisions of the law—like a cap-and-invest program—before moving to amend it over energy affordability concerns.

The blue state has long been a front-runner on climate policy and in 2019 adopted the landmark Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, which set renewable electricity and emissions targets up to 2050. But climate advocates contend the Hochul administration’s changes water down the state’s status among climate policy leaders, and should trigger a reckoning for their movement.

“There are 10 states in the US that have had binding climate targets on the books, and this moves New York to the back,” said Vanessa Fajans-Turner, executive director of Environmental Advocates NY.

With the second Trump administration dismantling federal climate policies and programs, states are seen as the next best leaders on this issue, making Hochul’s retreat more striking. Following the 2024 elections, other Democratic governors have moved to curb support for climate policies, like around energy efficiency, as they also try to zero in on energy affordability.

“They got their shirts handed to them in 2024 and I think took basically the exact wrong lessons from that, at least on climate change,” said Alex Beauchamp, northern region director of Food & Water Watch.

While Beauchamp acknowledged other governors have backtracked on climate policy support, he said Hochul went further. Given New York is one of the largest blue states in the country, Hochul “should have the least pressure to do this kind of stuff,” he said.

Ken Lovett, Hochul’s senior communications adviser on energy and environment, said the governor’s “top priority is keeping the lights on and costs down for all New Yorkers” and “reckless policies coming out of Washington D.C. continue to bring unprecedented challenges.”

“The commonsense reforms Governor Hochul fought for in this year’s budget protect New York’s status as a climate leader, while prioritizing affordability for New Yorkers,” Lovett said in an email, adding that the governor “remains committed to building on the state’s robust record of climate and clean energy successes.”

The Hochul administration framed the climate law as conflicting with affordability, but that’s uncertain given unanswered questions around how New York would’ve used proceeds from the potential cap-and-invest program, said Shelley Welton, a law and energy policy professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Carey Law School.

“The question really is what was that rollout going to look like and was it going to cause bills to soar like Hochul claimed,” she said. “In some ways, that’s kind of an unknowable answer before figuring out how the rollout’s going to go.”

An Environmental Hail Mary

Many Democrats in the legislature supported the budget bill that included rollbacks to the climate law, even as some expressed concern over those provisions. Some climate hawks argued they closed session with a climate win: a one-year moratorium on new data centers. But Hochul could still tinker with it or veto it.

That measure, passed as in a larger legislative package, softens the blow of the climate law rollbacks given the demand data centers put on the grid, said Assemblymember Anna Kelles (D), who voted against the budget bill with the rollbacks and sponsored an initial standalone bill calling for a three-year data center moratorium. She said the pause could “ameliorate some of the harm until we come back” and “until we can fully assess the impact of these rollbacks.”

Should the moratorium become law, New York would be the first state to enact such a policy. A spokesperson for Hochul said she is reviewing the bill. The governor typically has until the end of the year to act on legislation.

“The fight that still exists this year is getting her to sign the data center moratorium without significant erosion,” outgoing Assemblymember Deborah Glick (D) said. The governor is “all about affordability” and data centers are the main source of grid stress and utility rate increases, she said.

Another blow to the environmental movement’s priorities this year was defeat of a bill sponsored by Glick that would require larger plastics producers to curb single-use packaging over 12 years by 30%. Glick said she expects 2027 “will be a better year in terms of not fighting with the governor over things that she puts in her budget that are objectionable, unless she’s looking to roll back fracking, which I think would then be war.”

Climate Advocates’ Reckoning

Environmental Advocates NY’s Fajans-Turner said this session has been one of the hardest for environmental organizations in “recent memory” and that a Democrat-led state government is buying “into a narrative that pits climate action in particular against affordability.”

“That is where the losses are most concerning and where I think the reckoning really has to happen,” she said.

The path ahead will require environmental groups to pivot with lawmakers’ political priorities. They need to work with social justice and public interest movements to coalesce around affordability challenges, Fajans-Turner said.

Her organization and the New York League of Conservation Voters this year reconvened a group that was dormant for the last decade called the Green Council, a coalition of environmental justice and conservation groups, that collectively endorses what they call “super bills,” she said, or legislation they all support.

Food & Water Watch’s Beauchamp also said New York environmental groups need to galvanize the public to in turn pressure lawmakers to vote their way.

“The electoral part of the environmental movement is a little anemic in New York, and that’s the reason that a lot of these legislators aren’t afraid of us enough,” he said.