The urgent need for bold climate action continues to grow, and and with it the opportunity to step up to the plate by building clean-energy industries with good, union jobs. Climate Jobs New York (CJNY) and the unions in our coalition continue to fight for a new green economy that works for all New Yorkers, and in 2019 we reached important milestones, demonstrating the power of labor leading on climate.

We continued our push for a robust offshore wind industry in New York. Back in 2017, we announced the Clean Climate Careers initiative in partnership with Governor Cuomo and the Worker Institute at Cornell’s ILR School, going on to support significant steps forward for wind in New York, from the announcement of major offshore wind projects to the creation of a first-in-the-nation offshore wind master plan. And in January 2019, Governor Cuomo announced an unprecedented goal of 9,000 megawatts from offshore wind by 2035. In July 2019, this commitment was enshrined in the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, and New York State entered into an offshore wind agreement for nearly 1,700 megawatts, the largest renewable energy procurement of any state in U.S. history, expected to create more than 1,600 jobs and $3.2 billion in economic activity.

Governor Cuomo’s 2019 clean energy and jobs agenda also doubled distributed solar deployment to 6,000 megawatts by 2025, another important CJNY priority, and established the Environmental Justice and Just Transition Working Group, along with a number of other steps to make New York a leader on climate.

In 2019 we also began the process of developing a curriculum—working with our regular and close partner, the Worker Institute at Cornell—to train union members on the science of climate change and the opportunity to build a new green economy to combat it. Going forward, this curriculum will help us engage union members across the state, creating a corps of union climate activists and empowering them to drive a climate jobs agenda.

Organizationally, CJNY and our newer sister organization, the Climate Jobs New York Education Fund, took important steps to build our capacity in 2019. With generous support from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the NorthLight Foundation, and other donors, we are building an organization that can make sure New York moves from big commitments on climate to successful implementation. I was thrilled to join late last year as executive director—I feel very lucky to be working with unions that are leading the way toward the clean energy economy of tomorrow—and we hired a great organizer to lead our efforts on Long Island, supporting offshore wind development there.