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The Comptroller’s Office is tasked with financial accountability, which means taking the long-term view on the climate risks: Ensuring that City services, infrastructure, and resources are managed effectively—not only to confront challenges now, but for generations of New Yorkers to come.
That’s why I’ve made confronting the climate crisis a top priority of our office. We’re working hard to stand up Public Solar NYC to dramatically scale up solar adoption and make the most of the clean energy funds coming from the Inflation Reduction Act.
We’ve highlighted the urgency of building resilient infrastructure a decade after Hurricane Sandy devastated our communities. We developed an innovative, and feasible, proposal to make basement apartments safer. And we launched a Climate Dashboard that enables the public to track our progress and hold the City accountable to our climate goals.
But the climate crisis cannot be confronted one city at a time. We need concerted action at the scale of the global economy to transition to decarbonize. That’s why, on behalf of three NYC pension funds, we brought shareholder resolutions this spring at four of the big U.S. and Canadian banks calling on them to set and disclose real goals for reducing emissions.
Many European banks have recognized that confronting climate risk is aligned with their bottom line. But Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Royal Bank of Canada have so far refused to stop financing new fossil fuel infrastructure or set additional targets to reduce emissions. Even after making commitments to abide by the Paris Accords, these banks collectively lent over $1 trillion to new fossil fuel extraction projects.
As you can see, finance plays a huge role in climate change whether we like it or not. That’s why I want to highlight our most consequential action to address the climate crisis yet: Three of the NYC pension funds’ plan to reach net zero emissions in their investment portfolios by 2040.
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