NEW YORK CITY — House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was here last week celebrating new federal funding for continued recovery from Hurricane Sandy, an event he emphatically tied to the increasingly visible effects of climate change.
Jeffries’ working-class waterfront district withstood massive devastation in Sandy’s aftermath. The 2012 storm swept through this region just days before Jeffries was elected to Congress, destroying homes and displacing residents.
But back in Washington, the Brooklyn lawmaker isn’t known for speaking out about climate issues in these deeply personal and specific terms, instead making general calls for securing clean air and water. His tone, and stance, could change if he takes the speaker’s gavel after this week’s elections. And his work at home offers a glimpse into what that change might look like.
“The fact that a superstorm could strike New York City in late October with such devastating ferocity was a real-life indicator for the communities that I’m privileged to represent as to the realities of the climate crisis,” Jeffries said during an interview.
He was shielding himself from the misty rain by standing under a picnic table umbrella at Shirley Chisholm State Park, which opened a few years ago on the site of an old landfill. Jeffries was there to tout $2.8 million for restoration work on one of the marsh islands around storm-ravaged Jamaica Bay.
“There’s nothing more personal than when the realities of the climate crisis actually strike your community,” Jeffries continued, “and it increases the intensity of understanding as to why we have to decisively address this situation.”
Jeffries often talks broadly about addressing climate change with “the fierce urgency of now” — a phrase he used several times throughout the Shirley Chisholm State Park event. He has also co-sponsored a number of bills over the years in the general arena of clean energy promotion and environmental protection.
However, Jeffries has not shown yet how he’d lead in a national climate policy fight — like whether he’d risk his majority as then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did in 2009 by ramming through an aggressive emissions reduction bill known as cap and trade, or if he’d adopt the thick-skinned resolve of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to get a deal on the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022.
Jeffries has also been slower to follow members of his party to the left on climate politics. He declined as recently as last week to explain his long-standing lack of support for the Green New Deal resolution — “No,” he said with a smile, when asked if he could elaborate — and demurred on whether oil and gas companies should have to pay a “polluter’s fee” for their industry’s contributions to global warming.
Schumer, a fellow New Yorker, has of late embraced progressive rhetoric demonizing fossil fuel interests as villains of climate progress. Meanwhile, Jeffries’ more careful posture has alienated local progressive green activists, many of whom are still smarting over the lawmaker’s recent refusal to save a congestion pricing plan to cut vehicular emissions while raising more public transit revenue.
“We haven’t seen a whole lot from Hakeem Jeffries other than nodding towards the issue in a very basic, normie Democrat way, and that’s not good enough,” said Pete Sikora, the climate and inequality campaigns director with New York Communities for Change, which has chapters in Jeffries’ district.
Jeffries doesn’t get the same criticism from the heads of more mainstream environmental groups, who know many Democrats are in a tough political spot on the environment and praised him for leading his party in defending the 2022 climate law against GOP attacks.
“He’s a pragmatic person when it comes to climate,” said Julie Tighe, the president of the New York chapter of the League of Conservation Voters.
“You have got to be able to deliver. … We’re an organization that wants to see victories that result in real actions and not just victories that are ideological. So my experience is he wants to do things that are going to be deliverable.”
But the climate priorities of New York activists likely mirror those held by many members of his caucus, and it remains to be seen what sort of pressure Jeffries might be under from his own colleagues on Capitol Hill to move further left. If he becomes speaker he’ll need to do more than just defend the IRA.
“For any leader — regardless of the party, whether House or Senate, or White House — the question becomes, ‘What more needs to be done on rising energy demand and climate change?’” said Trent Bauserman, who worked in the Obama White House and as climate adviser to former House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.).
“I think it’s fair to say the American people will be looking to the leaders of the next Congress, and the next administration, for solutions to these challenges.”
‘How do we recover’
Sandy made landfall in New York City on Oct. 29, 2012. A week later, Jeffries, a five-year member of the New York General Assembly, won a race to represent one of the hardest-hit districts.
“Much of the work I spent my first several months focused on, in my first year, was responding to the devastation of Superstorm Sandy, making sure communities had what they needed. And focusing on, how do we recover and create the type of resilience necessary in the face of an era of significant climate change?” Jeffries recalled in an interview on the 12-year anniversary of that storm.
“From that point forward,” he continued, “the work both in the communities on the ground adversely impacted by Superstorm Sandy, and in the need to combat the climate crisis with the fierce urgency of now, became a priority for the people I’m privileged to represent.”
Jeffries went to Washington acutely aware of the consequences of climate change as well as the extent of the political differences surrounding climate action.
In the final days of the 112th Congress, Republicans blocked a $50 billion Sandy relief package. One of Jeffries’ first votes upon being sworn into office in January 2013 was to approve that funding.
“Even 12 years later, many … Republicans continue to bury their heads in the sand,” Jeffries said. “It is not sustainable from a climate standpoint or from an economic standpoint that we ignore the climate crisis as opposed to doing everything possible to confront it.”
Jeffries has had to confront other environmental needs in his district since that time. Tighe, for instance, mentioned the noxious emissions from bus stops and depots.
Jeffries noted he grew up in, and worked among, communities of color where “high concentrations of asthma and certain forms of cancer” were the byproducts of “environmental pollution.” And he has had to intervene twice to thwart planned pipelines through parts of his district.
Yet his work in the climate space has been largely focused on Sandy. Jeffries secured $800,000 in federal funding to design and construct a “tidal gate” in the flood-prone neighborhood of Canarsie to prevent more damage to residential and commercial properties.
“Canarsie had been left out of any kind of funding or federal grants,” said Maria Garrett, a 29-year resident who runs a civic association that has worked closely with Jeffries. “[Jeffries] organized a town hall and brought the Army Corps of Engineers, all the people who could make things happen and do the research.
“We have experienced climate change after Sandy,” she continued. “We have started seeing the flooding and people having problems with the floods. And it has gotten better because of the funds that have come into the community.”
Jeffries recently secured nearly $1 million for the Billion Oyster Project, which builds oyster reefs at sites around New York City — including Canarsie — to reduce coastal erosion, protect shorelines and improve water quality.
After he presented organizers with a check, he went on a boat ride with Executive Director Pete Malinowski and a group of students with the New York Harbor School, a public high school located on Governors Island.
“It was really amazing to spend a couple hours with Leader Jeffries,” said Malinowski. “Adults don’t often take high school students seriously, and he totally did. He treated them all like adults and experts, asking good questions. … It was such a vote of confidence for what we do in our organization to have that kind of support.”
Jeffries was also instrumental in getting language included in a water projects authorization to create the Hudson River Estuary Restoration Program.
Eight of the 20 projects from the program are in Jamaica Bay, including creation of the Duck Point Marsh Island, which was the recipient of the new funding last week and the backdrop for the recent celebration of that funding at Shirley Chisholm State Park. Jeffries said that helping to establish that park — which he called an “urban oasis” just off a major parkway — is “one of the proudest accomplishments of my tenure.”
Collin O’Mara, CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, remembered how Jeffries, in the aftermath of Sandy, worked as tirelessly to fund conservation and restoration efforts for the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge as he did to secure federal relief for his displaced constituents.
“Obviously he was concerned about neighborhoods, making sure folks could go back, rebuild smarter, but he was also prioritizing the natural resources and making sure this gem of a refuge was not forgotten because it wasn’t a housing structure or a road that was blown out,” O’Mara said.
‘My record … speaks for itself’
The pain of Sandy still resonates with many of Jeffries’ constituents, including Rachel Rivera, now an organizer in his district with New York Communities for Change.
“In the areas where I’ve spoken to people … they want the property taxes, home insurance, flood insurance to go down,” she said. “A lot of people — Hakeem’s constituents — are complaining about it and they’re waiting to see what’s going to happen.”
The night of Sandy’s arrival, Rivera rescued her young daughter from her bedroom mere moments before the roof above them collapsed.
She grew emotional remembering the year she spent at a hotel in midtown Manhattan, separated from her other children, waiting to be able to return to Brooklyn.
“I never saw him,” Rivera said. “Nobody that I spoke to ever saw him. I saw [then-New York Mayor Bill] de Blasio more than I saw him. We needed somebody.”
Jeffries was curt when asked to respond to criticism from local climate activists that he hasn’t done enough.
“I’m proud to have had a close working relationship from my days in the New York State Assembly all the way to my time in Congress with incredibly important environmental advocacy groups like the League of Conservation Voters and the Environmental Defense Fund,” Jeffries said. “My record on climate and the environment speaks for itself.”
That includes a 97 percent lifetime rating with the national chapter of LCV. The group’s senior vice president, Tiernan Sittenfeld, credited Jeffries with helping keep members together in the previous Congress, when he was House Democratic Caucus chair, as climate bill negotiations zigzagged.
O’Mara predicted Jeffries would continue to advocate for biodiversity and the national wildlife refuge system as speaker. “Having a speaker whose district literally covers one of the biggest urban refuges in the world,” O’Mara said, would be significant.
Though Jeffries promised Democrats would “build upon the progress we’ve made” on the IRA, he was more circumspect when it came to other green priorities.
Nodding to the ongoing permitting reform debate, he said Democrats would have “further discussion” about “ways to make sure we can fully stand up a clean energy economy and make a transition to a solar industry and wind industry that are more dominant in … rural and exurban America.”
Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), former chair of the now-disbanded House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, said Jeffries appointed her to another select committee, the bipartisan House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, specifically so she might “bird-dog some of the energy issues” that might arise.
Yet Jeffries has so far been noncommittal on Castor’s lobbying to bring back the climate committee if Democrats retake the majority.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Jeffries told POLITICO’s E&E News, “but we do want some climate forward focused activity in the new Congress, and what form that takes remains to be seen.”
The lists of asks will keep piling up. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who in the previous Congress led a congressional investigation into allegations that Big Oil lied for years about its climate impacts, said he was “confident” a Speaker Jeffries would be “very supportive” of resumption of that work.
Tighe, of the New York League of Conservation Voters, said advocates want Jeffries to support bipartisan legislation that would allow for revenue sharing from offshore wind development, a burgeoning industry in the state.
And if Democrats win a governing trifecta, Jeffries will be fielding all sorts of demands for what to include in an “Inflation Reduction Act 2.0” reconciliation bill.
Meanwhile, back home, progressive climate activists are pledging to continue efforts to push Jeffries to the left, with Sikora saying New York Communities for Change wants to hire more organizers in his district toward that end.
“We’re building a chapter right now in Canarsie and hope to build more of a presence in his district because it’s important that Hakeem Jeffries transforms over time into the leader that the world needs,” said Sikora.
“If — really, when — he steps into the speaker’s office, we’re going to need a champion. New York is going to need a champion and the world is going to need a champion. He’s that champion. That’s something we would like to help him become.”
Reporter Kelsey Brugger contributed.
