8 Years After Sandy, New York City Lags On Climate. Will The 2021 Election Change That?
In 2007, then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed a blueprint to transform New York into “the first environmentally sustainable 21st-century city,” a lofty vision for change in an increasingly hot and urbanized world.
Five years later, Superstorm Sandy hit, killing 44 across the five boroughs, wiping out entire pockets of the city’s working-class waterfront and leaving hundreds of thousands of people without power for weeks. But that first taste of a chaotic climate future prompted the city’s leaders to retreat to a mishmash of policies to adapt to the worst effects of global warming ― rather than working to avoid them.
Now a historic election offers a chance to propel the nation’s largest and most economically influential city back to the vanguard of climate action.
While the looming presidential race has captivated attention, New York City’s most important municipal election in nearly a decade is just getting underway. Next year, voters will choose a new mayor, comptroller and a majority of the City Council, after already replacing several longtime incumbents in Congress and the state Legislature with Green New Deal backers in the last two years.
Candidates are already signaling that climate change will be a major theme, even as the city deals with an ongoing pandemic and budget shortfall. The effects could be far-reaching as other cities look to New York as a model for how municipalities with limited control of their economic destinies rebuild in the wake of the coronavirus.
Mounting climate disasters, including another record year of billion-dollar wildfires and storms, have amplified an increasingly organized movement calling for dramatic policy efforts to address climate change. Calls for a Green New Deal, a progressive framework for a green industrial plan to phase out fossil fuels and transition workers to new jobs, reshaped the Democratic presidential primary this year, and helped win more than half a dozen seats in New York’s...
