Video, Audio, Photos & Rush Transcript: Governor Hochul Delivers Welcome Remarks at Ceres Climate Week

Governor Hochul today addressed business, finance and policy leaders at the Ceres Climate Week Event in New York City, touting New York's record of ambition and execution, including her nation-leading efforts on offshore wind, solar energy, her plans for expanded nuclear energy, and her signature AI moratorium. The Governor outlined what New York has been doing to overcome federal headwinds due to reckless Republican policies that New York and other states face in their efforts to address climate change while trying to keep the lights on and costs down. She also urged investors to "step up" in New York's efforts to increase clean energy supply.

VIDEO: The event is available to stream on YouTube here and TV quality video is available here (h.264, mp4).

AUDIO: The Governor's remarks are available in audio form here.

PHOTOS: The Governor's Flickr page will post photos of the event here.

A rush transcript of the Governor's remarks is available below:

I never felt so tall in front of a podium, holy smokes. Thank you, Mindy. Mindy Lubber has been an extraordinary global leader in this space, to talk about the intersection of investment, but also achieving ambitious goals, and I love that we have people who understand that dynamic and who talk about it and bring people together to find not just the ambition, but also the execution, which is what we're all about here in New York. I want to thank her. Also, Doreen Harris, who's representing me at probably 4,000 events this week. She is a national leader. If you want to know what's going to be happening in this country, because New York always leads, you talk to Doreen Harris. She will tell you where we're headed. She's the head of NYSERDA and has done an extraordinary job, and I thank her for everything she's done for our administration. Also we're joined by our Comptroller Mark Levine, who's been a longtime climate activist as well. Proud to have our association as well.

So here we are. Welcome to New York. Anybody complain about the traffic? I want to tell you this, if we didn't enact the first ever in America congestion pricing, it'd be a lot worse, okay? Just want to put that out there. I'm a New Yorker, I have to brag. Knicks in five, everything. We've had a great year. But I'm really proud to host you and those who are joining us online.

As I mentioned, ambition matters, but execution is everything. And I literally had a conversation - I was out on Long Island late last night - and someone says, "What keeps you up at night? What are your fears?" And I had to say, which is what keeps me up at night, is solving our energy crisis, right now. I have to figure out how to power this state that has come perilously close to having brownouts and blackouts as we've been battered with really unpredictable, unprecedented winter storms. We lost 17 people in those storms just a few months ago, last winter here in New York City. I'm from Buffalo, we had our worst blizzards - we had seven feet of snow recently. As someone who grew up with blizzards, this is next level blizzards.

And as a governor who's been in office just since 2021 - a little bit unexpectedly, there's a history there - but my first week on the job, we had two hurricanes. We had more hurricanes in New York than we had in Florida that year. Of course, I'm brand new Governor, like, "Am I supposed to declare an emergency? What do I do with this?" It was an unprecedented time and also a challenge for my new administration to figure this out, but now, it's becoming the norm. I mean, they're predicting we might have a pretty bad storm this weekend.

And so execution is everything. So I believe that it's not an either/or proposition - that we're going to fight for climate change or protect us from climate change and to have smart strategies, but we're also going to power our states. They have to help each other. They have to coexist, and I think for a long time it was an one or the other, and in New York, we're smarter than that. We know how to do both. We can walk and chew gum at the same time in New York. We do it all the time. So I'm proud to be able to be in a position - I'm going to be named one of the co-chairs of the US Climate Alliance next spring. I've held that role earlier. Looking forward to charting a path forward for the nation as well. And I get a chance to work with brilliant governors - I was just with many of them yesterday, and what a dream team we have of US governors who are really working with us to confront the two crises at the same time.

And demand is rising for energy as well. [At] the same time we're trying to deal with what is happening with Mother Nature and decades of assault on Mother Nature - I say mankind's assault on Mother Nature, it wasn't womankind, it was mankind's assault. It was the men who were building the factories up where I grew up in Buffalo, on the shores of Lake Erie, where I grew up. And I thought the skies were supposed to be orange, because that's what I saw billowing out of the steel plant where my dad worked, my uncles worked. It was the bread and butter. It was our economy. Nobody questioned the fact that this huge factory, every night, would dump tons of this orange molten lava into one of the greatest freshwater lakes on the planet. And then we swam in it. So when I talk about environmental activism, it's in my DNA, so I know how bad it can be.

And we've had policies for many years, starting with 1972 and the creation of the EPA, and believe it or not, it was Richard Nixon who brought us to a better place, so we're more thoughtful about our overt contamination of our resources. That's good. But how we also talk about what has been happening with greenhouse emissions globally, what effect that has had on our weather changes, and I don't - we have climate deniers, we have AI impact deniers, we have crazy people speaking [before] the UN yesterday, but I won't diverge too much. So that's what we're up against.

We know what we have to do. In this room, we know what we have to do. But let me tell you some of the challenges, and I'm trying to create a clean energy future here in the State of New York and powers - I like offshore wind. We're proud of what we have. Doreen, aren't we the largest - what is it? Largest commercial grade scale - we got all these metrics - okay, we're the best in America, just take it from me. But we want to do more, and now this administration in Washington has shut down any more lease opportunities, projects that literally take 10 years to come to fruition.

One: Empire Wind. Ten-year plan, $5 billion investment, foreign investment, local investment, thousands of good-paying jobs for our union workers. It's our dream. This is a really great project, and I'm so excited to go to all sorts of milestone announcements, we're getting it done. And all of a sudden, Donald Trump gets in office and decides, "I don't like offshore wind." And he shuts it down. I have to get on the phone. I have to go visit in Washington. It's like:

"What's the problem with offshore wind, Mr. President?"

"It kills the birds."

"Didn't know you were so concerned about the birds."

He killed it. Shut it down. We lost all this money, and literally the project was going to disappear, and we had to beg the company not to close up shop. They're losing $50 million a week, and we got them to hang on, and that's to power 500,000 homes in Brooklyn. That's what we're trying to do. Look at the headwinds we have. So we get stymied there.

Onshore wind, solar. Now I'm going to tell you, because you can look up how old I am, I'm really old, and I was a young staffer working on Capitol Hill back in the '80s when President Reagan came in and wiped out all the energy initiatives that Jimmy Carter had started during the oil embargo and the energy crisis, when I still walk out of every room and turn off the lights because Jimmy Carter told us to, okay? And keep the temperature down and wear a sweater in the house. That is still in my head. We had solar tax credits, we had wind tax credit, we had all kinds of innovative strategies, electric vehicles, all sorts of incentives at a time for these new industries to really take off, and they were going to be incredible. And the Republicans take office in the White House, and Ronald Reagan shuts it all down. And I just knew at that moment as a young staffer that this could be decades in the making of trying to bring it all back.

And so we've overcome those challenges as well. I'm still fighting back against Washington, but it's been harder to meet the goals that we set forth because of these unforced errors and unprecedented assault on our ambition. So we're committed to carrying on despite this, I believe in elections, every couple years have a chance to reset, okay? Break the fever, get back to normal. It'll get there. But these new investments are real exciting for us. And so I just want to encourage all of you. We're doing 95 large-scale solar, wind, hydro and offshore wind projects right now, delivering 10.5 gigawatts of clean power, more than 4.6 million homes. I want clean, affordable power for families, but I'm not going to have an economy that's stuck in the past.

When I was Lieutenant Governor, I knew about this project, and nothing was happening for years - we could bring clean hydroelectric power from Quebec down to power New York City. It could've been done five years earlier. It was brought to the previous administration. During Climate Week, my first year in office, 2021, I announced, "I'm going to get that done," and I went up to Quebec, met with the premier, met with everybody and said, "I want this done." What a great concept of private sector investment, public sector investment, two countries involved and thousands of good-paying jobs. Proud to say: launched it, powered up. Starting in June, I think we had the ribbon cutting.

And so that's what you do when you don't let anything get in your way. All the obstacles that were not overcome before, you just power through it. And that's the ambition that I have with the people in this room who have the ability to make investments. And it'll be smart money to invest, for sure, in a place like New York, because I'll break down any barrier that stands in our way of doing what I need to do to support my economy, to keep the lights on, to drive down costs for consumers and create thousands of good-paying clean energy jobs. So we're ambitious. We're going to keep doing this.

I've got all kinds of stuff here I could tell you, but I need you. We need the investors for the capital. Let's just be real candid here. A lot of money in this room. I can smell it. This is New York. I need your help. I need you to step up. I need you to be engaged with our administration. We'll tell you what our ambitions are, we'll tell you where we're heading, and we're heading where few are willing to go. We're going all the way. And I'm even going so far that I'm going to build more nuclear in the State of New York than the entire country has in 30 years. That's ambition, but it'll be executed upon.

And in fact, I'm waiting for approvals from the Trump administration now to move ahead with the next step. My first conversation with the President, right after he got elected, said, "Let's do two things together. Penn Station looks like hell, scares everybody, let's make it nice." We're working on that. And I said, "I want to build nuclear." And he was a little surprised to hear that because Democrats don't usually talk about nuclear, because everybody still thinks it's Three Mile Island and China Syndrome and all these other scary specters. I saw the same movies. It was scary for a little while, except the technology has evolved dramatically, gotten smarter, more manageable and technologically safe. So I want to build up my grid because I've also got a lot of other challenges.

We're going to move ahead with that, and I've got data centers that are coming. Now, I have proposals for even in one county, St. Lawrence County up on the St. Lawrence River, beautiful area, five data centers want to go there. We estimated that if all five of those data centers were approved, that would consume all the power that I would generate with one of my brand-new nuclear reactors. So there's no real economic benefit to the larger economy or to my local ratepayers or the other businesses like Micron, which is bringing 50,000 jobs to Upstate New York and even more we're announcing. So I will use energy to power smart economic projects, but data centers, we have a moratorium in place for one year, and after that year, we're going to have the smartest policy in the country. We're already starting to unveil it now.

Because if you come - and it's up to local governments, it's up to them - but I'm going to help them negotiate. Because they go to a small town, and sometimes they got a part-time mayor and a part-time economic developer. They're supposed to negotiate a deal for their residents against these gigantic conglomerates? It doesn't work. So I'm saying, "No more tax breaks because I know you don't need them. You're going to bring your own power, or you're going to pay a significant amount into our overall grid to build resiliency in our transmission lines, help even subsidize the community and their ratepayers and their utility bills. You're going to have community benefits that you're going to give a million dollars per megawatt of power you're using - a lot of them over a hundred megawatts - hundred million dollars going to one of my local communities, upstate New York." I'm not saying whether they should do it or not. It's a local decision. But I'm going to make sure that it's done in a smart way, uses less energy.

And lastly, I'll close with this. I have sat with the leaders of these giant companies, almost every one of them. And I have challenged them. And I have said this: "You've created a technology that is capable of changing civilization as we know it. It's happening before our eyes: how we live, how we work, how we communicate. Ask AI how AI can be powered in a smarter way." Okay? Think about it. Does it have to be taking up seven miles of space, which is a proposal out in, I think, Arizona or Texas? Do you have to consume that much space? Do you need to use any water at all? Use the closed-loop systems, I know that's already in place. Do you have to make so much noise? Can you go vertical? Can you do something from satellites? Can you do it underwater? Just do something brilliant.

I understand the need to power AI. I get it. But when you're looking to come and consume massive amounts of land and energy, the communities have to come out ahead of that. And you show me how. Show me how. My family - I have seven family members who live in Loudoun County, Virginia. You may have heard of it because it was the fastest-growing county because they're building houses on farmland, and they all moved there when they couldn't get jobs in Buffalo. Now they have gigantic data centers in their backyards. So I've seen this. This is not something that is hypothetical. It is real. So that's why I, as the Governor of the State of New York, know that there's smart ways to do things, and there are ways that let people go unregulated, do what they want, and they'll always find the cheapest way to get around with it. I get it. But you're not going to do something like this and not have my taxpayers and my residents come out ahead. So thank you, Mindy, for the opportunity just to talk about our ambition here in New York. Appreciate you very much.