In the struggle against Donald Trump’s barbarism, how do we assess New York governor Kathy Hochul?

The governor has engaged in some acts of opposition that make many New Yorkers proud. Hochul stood up for New York City’s congestion pricing plan when Trump tried to cancel it. She signed legislation to protect abortion providers who may face prosecution in other states. The governor objected to Republicans’ xenophobic and antidemocratic threats to deport Zohran Mamdani, the socialist who won New York City’s Democratic primary in June.

And with loopy Robert F. Kennedy Jr laying waste to our nation’s infrastructure of infectious disease prevention, last Friday she issued an executive order ensuring that New York’s pharmacies can still administer the updated COVID-19 vaccine. Also on Friday, she spoke out strongly against Trump’s attempts to interfere with the New York City mayoral race, saying, “Contrary to what the president thinks, he is not a king. He is not a kingmaker. He should not be anointing the next mayor. . . . We are not fucking selling out our city.”

All good. But when it comes to climate, an issue of vital importance to the Democratic base and the future of humanity, she and Trump appear to be BFFs.

Several other blue-state governors have made headlines for high-profile Trump defiance, and while they aren’t as good on climate as they should be, they’re much better than Hochul. California governor Gavin Newsom, hardly a climate hero, has not approved any fossil fuel projects in recent years and has been trying to enact a version of cap and trade (rebranding it as “cap and invest”). Governor J. B. Pritzker of Illinois has also not approved any new fossil fuel projects recently and has worked closely with labor unions on green jobs.

Hochul, by contrast, approved an expanded compressor capacity and an increase in fracked gas transported to New York City by the Iroquois company earlier this year and seems to be kowtowing to Trump by expediting approval for the wildly unpopular Williams and Constitution pipelines. The Williams pipeline was rejected by the state’s Department of Conservation three times under Andrew Cuomo (himself no wild-eyed opponent of Trump, as we have recently seen).

It’s not the first time Hochul has flip-flopped on this issue. She has fought hard against the Build Public Renewables Act, a landmark piece of climate legislation designed to create and expand publicly owned renewable energy projects in New York. At first she tried to simply defeat it, then she tried to water it down and politically weaken it by cutting out the labor and environmental justice provisions. When none of that worked, she appointed a Republican to head the relevant agency, Justin Driscoll, who has testified that the public ownership requirement should be stripped — from the Build Public Renewables Act.

She tried to water down, delay, and weaken the enactment of a new building code — which eventually did go into effect in July — requiring most new buildings to be all-electric. She’s also been trying to undo the state’s groundbreaking climate goals for years, even, stunningly, trying to ease limits on methane, one of the deadliest and most climate-toxic gases. And a few months before she became the great defender of congestion pricing against big bad Trump, she herself temporarily canceled the policy based on bogus right-wing talking points.

While she did save one wind project from Trump’s irrational ravages, most observers believe that she did so in exchange for agreeing to build pipelines, which is right out of the Joe Biden playbook: build renewables while also building fossil fuel infrastructure at the same time, thus ensuring that we make no meaningful climate progress. Better than Trump’s atavistic death drive of an environmental policy, but that doesn’t make it any less daft.

She’s also in hock to the earth-killing tech industry, and no wonder: her megadonors include former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman. While it’s good in the long run that she seems to be bringing back nuclear power, the reason why she’s doing this isn’t: her administration has made no secret of the fact that it believes nuclear power is necessary in order to power new data centers for artificial intelligence. She has been working hard to bring more AI to New York state, an agenda that could absolutely tank the state’s climate goals.

While New Yorkers are struggling to afford necessary energy for their daily lives, and we as a polity are trying to create renewable, clean alternatives to fossil fuels, the last thing we should prioritize are these job-killing, water-wasting, and extremely energy-intensive instruments of human alienation.

Hochul’s energy policy isn’t just bad by normal climate metrics. Not only does she resist policy reforms that will lower emissions, she resists energy affordability itself. Her own agency has presided over punishing rate hikes, while refusing to be a true partner in the cause of public power, the only way to truly guarantee energy in the public interest.

She has done all this with Democratic supermajorities in a state where climate action is so popular that mainstream Democrats from Flatbush to the Hudson Valley have endured primary challenges in the state legislature on the issue, and where the largest city is poised to elect a socialist mayor.

Regardless of all of this, however, as mayor, Mamdani will have to be diplomatic on Hochul’s shortcomings, since he’s going to need her support to achieve essential goals like taxing the rich in order to fund major social-welfare programs he has campaigned on like universal childcare. He knows this and is clearly working on winning her over. Even if she doesn’t endorse him, making an enemy of her could be catastrophic: many remember how the animosity between Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo complicated the execution of the mayor’s progressive social policy vision.

Indeed, in a moment fraught with potential and peril for socialist politics, it’s not exactly clear how the Left should reckon with centrists like Hochul. Given that Mamdani’s struggles to govern the city successfully will also determine the near-term success or failure of New York City’s socialist movement, do we make it easier on him by following his lead, not antagonizing the governor too much?

Probably the biggest threat to Mamdani’s success as mayor is President Trump, who would love nothing more than to punish New York City for electing a socialist by starving it of federal funding and forcing the socialist mayor to preside over austerity, squalor, and chaos. This isn’t a threat that the Left can manage on its own; Mamdani will need the support of at least some centrist Democrats. Locally, many mainstream Democrats and organizations are already behind him; he is, after all, the party’s nominee. But national leadership has been cautious, and Mamdani will need allies. Hochul potentially has much to gain by embracing him, but let’s be honest, he may need her even more.

Or is it a mistake for socialists to abandon the oppositional stance toward centrist Democrats that has been working so well? New York is a state where Republicans, like socialists, can sometimes whip up temporary majorities if they organize effectively and take advantage of establishment Democrats’ unpopularity. Last time Hochul ran for reelection, her Republican challenger did surprisingly well. Republicans are now criticizing Hochul for the energy hikes, claiming that they’re caused by too much climate-friendly policy. The Left cedes this talking point to them at narrative and planetary peril.

She’s also facing a strong primary challenger from her left: her own lieutenant governor, Antonio Delgado, who recently marched at the front of the line in a protest urging Hochul to do better on climate. Should the Left back Delgado, whether as a pressure tactic or to get her out of office? Primary challenges have at times been effective for New York socialists in both of these ways. We haven’t yet seen a scenario in which a primary challenge truly backfired, but the stakes are higher here.

Much is riding on the question of how we handle Kathy Hochul, and anyone who thinks they know for sure isn’t reckoning with the unprecedented nature of this moment.