Transcript: Mayor de Blasio Delivers Remarks at C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group Conference

September 18, 2017

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Thank you so much.

[Applause]

Thank you. Thank you so much, Mark. I want to thank you for your great leadership. You know, C40 works because it is visionary and it’s bold and it keeps pushing us to go farther. Let’s thank Mark for his great leadership.

[Applause]

Now, this is for me a challenging moment because I am a little humbled right now. And you know humility is not a characteristic we associate with New York City. Fair statement, New Yorkers are bold and brass. But, I am in the presence of people from all over this world doing such good work and specifically in the presence of some of my colleague mayors. And as a New Yorker I think our city is the most creative, most culturally advanced, most hip, most interesting in the world but it’s a little hard to say that when you’re sitting next to the mayor of Paris. So, Anne – Anne can always give me a run for the money there, and in the American context my brother Steve Adler from Austin, Texas – Austin, Texas, south by south west. All these things give us New Yorkers a little inferiority complex.

So I hope you enjoy this moment of seeing a humbled New Yorker before your very eyes. I want to thank all of you for gathering in common cause. And this is what’s so powerful about C40 is that it is common cause. It’s not an organization for people to just talk. It is an organization filled with solidarity for action. And each of us spurring each other on to do more. One thing I have found in my relationship with my fellow mayors. Is there’s a good healthy kind of competition to do more, to learn great ideas from each other. I always say, I think the notion of stealing someone else’s idea is too strong a word. We borrow other people’s ideas; I think that’s much more genteel. But we constantly are energized by each other. And for mayors on the front line of this work every day, I find anytime we’re in each other’s presence. It is energizing and inspiring and it helps us to think where we can go farther.  So, for all of you who work in mayor’s offices and for all of you who support this local work I hope you know how much each step you take whatever it is, no matter how big how small is energizing the world of someone else, somewhere else. And that’s why this organization really creates that continuity, that energy for constant progress. I want to thank a couple of my colleagues for the City of New York who do so much to move us forward, our Chief Resiliency Officer Dan Zarrilli and our Director for the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability Mark Chambers. Please give them a round of applause for the great work they’re doing here in New York.

[Applause] 

Look, we feel urgency here, and depending on where you come from I’m sure everyone’s experience is a little bit different. But our urgency is earned and it stems particularly from the experience we had with superstorm Sandy and what we saw happen in our city. You know, New Yorkers are also very self-assured. And we’ve been used to living in one of the great coastal environments on the earth. And not really feeling too much negative consequence from that setting until Sandy hit about five years ago and forced everyone, literally the entire New York City community to think again about our place in the world, our place in the context of nature. And to understand the vulnerabilities that we face, but to also understand what caused it. And you know, I am a big believer that the people are often way ahead of their political leadership. I think we see this over, and over again. Certainly in the context of the United States, but I think we it in other countries as well. The conventional wisdom about people’s values and their level of perception is often disconnected from what’s happening on the ground. What I have found in this city is there is not a big debate over the existence of global warming. It’s an article of faith and that’s true of people of all different backgrounds and pretty afar across the ideological spectrum because we lived it. And I wish that realized, that understanding didn’t sometimes have to come out of tragedy. But let’s face it, there’s a lot people now in Florida, there is a lot of people now in Texas who unfortunately have come to understand global warming is not a fiction, and that it is real, it is persistent, it is manmade, and it must be reversed. They have come to that realization through the kind of personal experience that we went through five years ago. We lost dozens of people, thousands and thousands of families displaced. And it makes the situation pertinent and it makes it tangible and it then creates urgency.

So I have had the blessing of working with a community that’s already convinced and understands we have to move evermore quickly. And again I wish for the places that haven’t gone through these tragedies I hope that the realization grows without them. But what I can say is once that realization occurs the urgency never ends. And I’ve told people this, people have asked me what we have to do to fight global warming, what we have to do to be resilient in the face of global warming. And one thing I try and get across which I think is probably an article of faith for a lot people here is that this, this is an effort that never ends. It’s not like there is going to be a day, if we all do everything we’re capable of, there is going to be a day when we say, we’re done here we’re perfectly resilient, global warming has ended. Maybe, maybe some place in a distant future that moment will exist. But for all intents and purposes in our lifetimes this is a fight that we will continue to wage and we shouldn’t be afraid of that. I know I am probably preaching the converted. But I want to make the point we should not be afraid of something we will spend our whole lives trying to perfect. Because if we do that, we actually will be able to pass the baton to the next generation and the one after that and they will still have a chance of saving this earth. Our urgency literally opens the door to a solution.

And here in this city, we understood the challenge like so many of you committed to the 80 x 50 goal several years ago. We’ve been working in every way we could to achieve that goal and I think we had a clear sense that there was a path forward. We were doing the specific intangible things; there was support for the goals. It was going to cost a lot of money. There would be challenges along the way. It was the right thing to do and we were moving forward and then just a few months ago a series of things happened that jolted us.

First of all, I don’t know if any of you read about this, there was an election here in the United States on November 8th and I think the election – the good news for all of us, who run for office, is that election is going to once and for all tell us to never listen to pollsters again. So we’ve made our lives a little easier that way. But you know what happened in that election obviously changed the trajectory for this country profoundly and therefore for all of our cities. And there was a period at doubt of what it would mean until a day about three months ago when President Trump made the faithful decision to begin the process of removing the United States from the Paris Agreement. I think that if all the things we’ve seen in these last months. This was one of the most shocking. And that’s saying a lot, we’ve seen a lot of shocking things. But this was one of the most shocking because Paris was such a hard won victory. And thank you for hosting that extraordinary moment in global history Anne. And so many people worked so hard to get there and I think there had been some sense that maybe this was one thing that was untouchable in global life.

But when we saw our nation to start move away, cities and states as well had that obvious choice make. We had to determine our willingness to go at it alone and to rethink our role in our national context. And look, again, I am sure a lot of you have had this experience already of recognizing what your national governments will and won’t do for you. And coming to the realization that we have to be self-reliant in so many ways, there is a wonderful American phrase. A very simple one that says “God bless the child that’s got his own” or her own. And the notion of us taking matters into our own hands, had occurred to us on many fronts previously in terms of security against terrorism, in terms of creating a more just and inclusive economy, in terms of building better relationships, between different faiths and communities. But now we the President’s action we had to think about something that on its face might not have made sense.
Fighting global warming without the backing of your own national government, it was a jolt.

But the pathway was immediately and intensely clear because after we got done with that initial response and that initial shock, our responsibilities became even clearer. And it was no longer from New York City’s point of view to simply reach the 80 x 50 goal, or to go along with a fantastic goal of keeping warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius. We recognized if the government of the United States was backing away, the rest of us had to step forward and go even farther. And I have to tell you, amidst the pain that frustration I felt with the President’s announcement, I was so moved that in such quick, rapid order the cities of the United States of America came forward and affirmed the Paris agreement and affirmed the 80 x 50 goal. 375 American cities at this count have subscribed to the goals of Paris and are recognizing and adopting the actions they need to take to get there – 375 cities encompassing a huge percentage of the American population. And by the way – to give you another ray of hope – not just cities run by one political party. Cities represented by leaders from both parties and independents. So the grassroots in this country are not only speaking, they’re acting.

And we recognize that as the largest city in this county, and one that has particular resources and strength, we had to now reset the equation as best we could in hopes of encouraging others to do the same. The two degree goal – powerful and necessary – but given the absence of U.S. leadership, this city is now moving toward the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees. We want to go to a higher standard. We want to find every tool we have proportionate to our share of the global context to go farther, to go deeper, to go faster because we have to – all of us have to – find what we thought was a stretch goal before, we have to find the new stretch goal. And in this city, we looked at our situation and we said ‘the problem itself is evident.’ If we’re willing to take risks, if we’re willing to create some opposition along the way – and by the way I think everyone in this room understands that profound change always engenders opposition. The status quo is typically comfortable on a number of fronts – environmental, economic, social – and when you jolt it, when you say that we’re going to go in a different direction there will be opposition. Once you account for that opposition, you can move forward.

So we recognized that we needed to hit that higher goal, and I’ll tell you what we announced just in the last few days – the single biggest action we can take here in this city – 8.5 million people, the center of a metropolitan region of well over 20 million people, 4.4 million jobs in this city, the center of so much of American life in terms of finance and communications, media, fashion, design, art. You can think of so many areas where this is a center point. We recognized that we had to do something very different with the physical reality of this city.

Now, I want some audience participation here. So I think you can see on either side a little bit of our skyline, and when you see – here’s the question for everyone in the audience – when you see a picture of the New York City skyline do you immediately recognize it as New York? Raise your hand, when you see a picture is it unmistakably New York. Excellent, everyone gets an A or 100 or whatever grading scale you use in your country.

[Laughter]

We look at the skyline – we’ve always been taught to look at the skyline – and to love it and feel pride in it and feel like it epitomizes our energy and our progress and our entrepreneurship, and our creativity, but what we didn’t realize until relatively recently was that skyline includes a lot of building that are actually our chief problem here in this city when it comes to emissions. I think most people – not unfairly – think the emissions problem is first and foremost related to the automobile, but here in this city first and foremost it’s our buildings, and so we recognized the need to move forward in addressing this problem.

The majority of our carbon emissions now come from our buildings in this city, and in too many cases buildings that have not been brought up to modern standards. And if we don’t intervene that doesn’t change fast enough. We’ve got approximately one million buildings in this city, but the ones that are older and outdated do a really a profound disservice to the rest of us and to the Earth because they produce a huge amount of those emissions. In fact it’s under 15,000 buildings that create a quarter of the emissions in this city. The oldest – the big, old antiquated buildings – that need intervention quickly.

We looked at the rules. We looked at the way things were managed. We looked at the approach that the City has taken to regulating these buildings, and we realized the old rules didn’t work anymore. The rules had to change if we were going to fix this problem. So we announced a mandate – and I will say it up front, we spent several years talking to our colleagues in the business community, in the private sector, looking for voluntary measures that would work, looking for enough progress to not necessitate a mandate, but we did not see it. And meanwhile the Earth was waiting, and meanwhile our national government was going in the wrong direction. So we announced a mandate this last week, and it will dramatically cut greenhouse gas emissions from our buildings. It is the most powerful mandate that any American city is undertaking in terms of buildings. We believe it will make a big difference and a big difference fast. We hope it is a helpful tool for many other places, and as we prove the efficacy that others will adopt the same approach.

Large buildings will be required to upgrade their boilers, their water heaters, their roofs, their windows. They will have to meet strict fossil fuel use targets by 2030, and a lot of that will happen sooner because a lot of buildings are constantly upgrading. They are now being told very clearly here are the standards that will become necessary just a few years up ahead. You should get to them now because you don’t want to be on the wrong side of those standards later when real consequences will come to bear. We understand that some of these buildings are owned by smaller property owners that don’t have a lot of resources. We’re going to provide low interest loans on more favorable terms than are available from private lenders to encourage quick action in upgrading these buildings. We’ll provide the resources up front to make it easier on these building owners. Everyone knows the beauty of retrofits is you make the money back ultimately. So we can offer an equation that’s financially viable and shows that we’re trying to help those who really need it. But we also know – and there’s plenty of big famous names attached to these buildings, there’s plenty of real estate companies and real estate families that have ample resources. There’s plenty of landlords that don’t need any public help. We know they can make these upgrades on their own, and we expect them to.

And for those who think they can hesitate or evade these requirements, we’ve created a set of consequences that are very, very meaningful. An example – a one million sq ft building that fails to meet these goals in a substantial way would pay a fine of $2 million for every year of non-compliance. That is a dollar figure that will get the attention even of some of the strongest companies and the wealthiest companies in this town.

The power of this mandate is the sheer impact it can have. The single action we take with a building mandate related to emissions – once it’s achieved it will be the equivalent of taking 900,000 cars off the roads of New York City in a single year. Think about that for a moment – 900,000 cars equivalent. If you could imagine, look at our crowded streets and highways imagine those 900,000 cars disappearing over the course of a year. That’s how much we can do to help the Earth and change the trajectory.

So as I mentioned before, of course there will be opposition, there will be push back, there will be people and companies that are uncomfortable, but we know this is how we move things forward. We know it’s for everyone’s good. We know it’s for everyone’s child and grandchildren. I’ll tell you when I talk to my children – and I bet everyone has this experience in your own lives, in your own families – I have a 20-year-old and a 22-year-old. I need to be responsible enough to give them answers. They’re looking at all of us to be stewards. I need to show them that we actually do want to pass the baton to them in a way that will allow them and their generation to go farther. This is the kind of urgent action that allows us to do that.

And I’ll conclude with this point. The particular irony here – and it’s a painful one – I’m not going to get into a partisan diatribe about the President of the United States. I will only note a fact – he comes from this very city. He should inherently understand the threat we face because he’s seen it, too. It’s a little more shocking still that he’s taken an action so discordant with the needs of the people in the very place he comes from, but even if our president turns a blind eye, we will act. We feel fully empowered, and I know my colleagues around the country feel the same and so many around the world. We will act. At a certain point if we all act, our national governments need to come along. At a certain point if we all act, we create a new reality regardless of any vote taken in a congress or a parliament. We have more tools sometimes than we even recognize, and if anyone anywhere says it can’t be done, please tell them to come to New York City and see it happening right now.

Thank you, good luck to all.