New York Mayoral Candidates All Strut Their Green Credentials

Five of the Democratic candidates in New York City’s mayoral race committed at a forum Thursday night to shut down a controversial gas power plant in Brooklyn, fund composting programs and further divest the city’s pension funds from money managers with investments in fossil fuels. 

The candidates included current New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, former comptroller Scott Stringer, New York state Sens.  Zellnor Myrie and Jessica Ramos and New York State Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani. 

New York Communities for Change organized the event, along with 30 other environmental organizations and local groups. The event did not include the current frontrunners in the race, Mayor Eric Adams and former Governor Andrew Cuomo, who is currently ahead in the polls despite still not making his official entry into the race. 

After loud chants of “climate, jobs, justice, now” from the audience, the candidates sat down to answer questions about their positions on city issues and found little to disagree on. The conversation was moderated by Helen Mancini, a high school student and policy co-lead at the youth climate organization Fridays for Future, as well as Santosh Nandabalan, senior climate campaigner for New York Communities for Change.

All candidates pledged to get rid of “loopholes” in Local Law 97, the city law mandating emissions reductions in city buildings. 

Over a third of the city’s emissions come from buildings, much of that from the heating systems in residential multi-family housing. The law, passed in 2019, places slowly decreasing carbon caps on large buildings’ emissions, slowly moving them towards net-zero by 2050. 

Though considered a big win among environmental groups, real estate developers sued, saying it was unconstitutional. In 2024, an update to the law introduced a “good faith” effort provision, which can help property owners avoid fines if they show they are working to reduce emissions. Additionally, if a building is over the cap they can, in some cases, buy Renewable Energy Credits. 

“I have had asthma since I was very young […] due to the poor air quality,” said Myrie, who is a Brooklyn native, and has run on a platform of increasing affordable housing. “Renewable Energy Credits are great, but we need to reduce emissions now, and anyone that is going to lead this city needs to be doing that with a sense of urgency.”

All of the candidates also promised to allocate money to help affordable housing co-ops and the city’s Housing Authority buildings transition away from fossil fuels. 

As comptroller, Lander has published a report advocating for a green affordable housing fund, and for Renewable Energy Credits to account for a maximum of 30 percent of a building’s emissions above the cap. 

Environmental groups are also concerned about the potential for more greenhouse gas emissions from the Iroquois pipeline, which delivers fracked gas to New York City and Long Island. A proposed enhancement of that pipeline would increase both the capacity at two polluting compressor stations in the state, and the amount of fracked gas arriving in the city. 

Mamdani, who was a key figure in stopping the construction of a fracked gas plant by the energy company NRG in Astoria in 2022, said he opposes the pipeline. He was also the prime sponsor of a bill called the Clean Futures Act, which would have imposed a ban on all new fracked gas power plants across the state.

“I will urge Governor Hochul to also oppose it, and I do so knowing that getting the [Department of Environmental Conservation] to make the right decisions is only possible when we build the right kind of power,” said Mamdani. “When we stopped NRG’s fracked gas power plant in Astoria, it was because we sent thousands of postcards to constituents, because we called tens of thousands of Astorians.”

All candidates asserted that they would oppose the pipeline enhancement, though ultimately the decision is up to the governor. (On Friday, the environmental organization Food & Water Watch reported that Governor Kathy Hochul approved the enhancement.)

In November 2023, Adams cut funding to composting programs across the city through his program to “Eliminate the Gap.” The City Council reinstated the funding in July. Previous reporting by Inside Climate News found that the city’s own curbside composting program often turned food waste into polluting natural gas that can be used to heat New Yorkers’ homes. 

With local composting programs, residents’ waste is, instead, turned into soil-enriching fertilizer. At the forum, environmental advocates and residents made it clear that they wanted candidates to promise the continued allocation of funds to these programs—which they did. 

The New York City bus system is among the slowest in the country, according to a February report by the New York City Independent Budget Office. The congestion associated with the many cars and trucks that come in and out of the city each day has led to higher rates of asthma near congested highways. 

All of the candidates support fixing the bus system, though Mamdani has been distinguishing himself as a particularly staunch supporter through his advocacy for a fare-free bus pilot in which the MTA offered free service on five bus lines across New York City, one in each borough. The pilot ended last year, and a report by the MTA found that it increased ridership by 30 percent on weekdays, and 38 percent on weekends. 

“I will expand the results of that pilot to every single bus route across New York City,” said Mamdani. “So that we can finally understand that public transit is one of the greatest gifts we have to take on the climate crisis.”

The divestment of New York City’s pension funds is also a hot button issue for environmentalists in the city, particularly with the current and former comptrollers, custodians of these funds,  campaigning. Stringer, along with former Mayor Bill De Blasio, led the effort to divest the city’s pension funds of almost $3 billion from fossil fuel companies, as well as securities related to them. 

“When we all got together and said, ‘Let’s divest,’ everybody said it couldn’t be done—everybody except the people in this room,” said Stringer, who also ran for mayor after his final term as comptroller in 2021. His campaign was essentially ended by sexual misconduct allegations from a woman who worked on his 2001 campaign for New York City public advocate. “We have to go back to having a zero tolerance policy for dirty polluters,” he said. “It’s a $300 billion fund—it’s a fund that we can leverage.”

In January, Blackrock, the world’s largest asset manager, quit the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative, amid backlash from red states who are suing the company for allegedly conspiring to artificially constrict the coal market. As of February 2024, the city’s employees’ retirement system had invested approximately $43 million in BlackRock, and BlackRock manages approximately $19 billion on behalf of the pension fund—investments made prior to Lander taking office in January 2022. 

In 2022, Lander said he was reassessing business relationships with Blackrock, due to their move away from their climate commitments. He has since ramped up the city’s divestment from fossil fuels by stopping new investments into private equity funds that invest in oil and gas. In 2022, he said he was reassessing business relationships with Blackrock, due to their move away from their climate commitments. 

At the forum, he pledged that he would move the city’s pension funds to different money managers, but refused to promise to make a targeted shift away from BlackRock, worrying that it would put the city on shaky legal ground. His office was sued in 2023 by former and current city employees, accusing Lander of putting an environmental agenda above retirement security. The case was ultimately dismissed for lack of standing. 

“You can’t single out an asset manager amongst the 300 that manage for us by name, even if they’re the biggest,” said Lander. “You’ve got to do it with standards across the board, and that’s why we’re setting the strongest standards for asset managers of any U.S. public pension fund.”

The nonprofit Sane Energy Project, which co-sponsored the event, has been advocating for the decommissioning of National Grid’s Greenpoint Energy Center, a liquefied natural gas facility that is the state’s biggest fossil fuel installation. Kim Fraczek, the group’s director, said in a call before the event that her organization has obtained records that show that the facility is rarely used. 

“We just filed a discovery question asking them how much they have used it during this current cold snap, and we found out that they have used it zero times,” said Fraczek. “So the fact that they’re saying that they need this as backup for when we have very cold weather, is just a misnomer on their part.”

Candidates pledged to close the power plant down. 

All candidates also pledged to make efforts to close the prison on Rikers Island by 2027, though they acknowledged that the delays in building another prison in Brooklyn may change that timeline. Many environmental advocates want to turn the prison into a hub for green infrastructure, with new wastewater treatment plants, solar panels and battery storage facilities in a plan called Renewable Rikers. 

They also agreed that 1 percent of the city budget should be allocated to the Parks Department—a pledge Mayor Eric Adams made during his campaign and subsequently broke. 

“We really want more [parks] in the council district where I reside, because Jackson Heights is actually the place with the least amount of park space per capita in New York City,” said Sen. Ramos, who referred to herself as a “public school mom” and made affordability the center of her campaign. “So getting that 1 percent for Parks is life changing for constituents,” she said.

Council Member Sandy Nurse recently introduced a resolution that would force the New York Power Authority to build 15 gigawatts of renewable electricity by 2030, which the state needs to meet its climate goals. It also stipulates that 5 gigawatts of that electricity would be produced downstate, because the power authority’s current draft plans included very few renewable energy projects in the city, as Inside Climate News reported.

When asked about whether they would support this effort, all candidates responded that they would, with Lander emphasizing his 2022 Public Solar NYC plan, which would have achieved 600 megawatts of new rooftop solar over eight years, using public financing to increase investments. 

Though the frontrunners, Adams and Cuomo, were not in attendance, the forum offered a look at the issues environmentally conscious city residents are thinking about this year. Many of the groups in attendance have won political fights in the past, from stopping fracked gas power plants, to instituting congestion pricing, to divesting from fossil fuels. 

“We need these elected officials and state agencies to know that if they don’t do their job, don’t follow our law that we fought so hard for,” said Fraczek. “Their jobs will be on the line.”