NY Gov To Big Oil: You Assh*les Broke It, You Assh*les Bought It!

It's a tort ... it's a claim ... it's a state Climate Superfund!

Damage to homes on Long Beach, New York, following Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Photo: Andrea Booher, FEMA. Public domain.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul this week signed a law that will make big oil and gas companies pay into a state Climate Superfund that will be used to help pay for damage done by climate change-driven extreme weather.

The Climate Change Superfund Act will require companies responsible for greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels to pay a total of around $3 billion a year for the next 25 years. The fund will help offset the costs of infrastructure repairs and adaptive upgrades for infrastructure like roads, public transportation, buildings, water and sewer systems, and other stuff that will be slammed by rising seas, wildfires, and more frequent storms. It will also help health programs that treat illnesses and injuries related to climate disasters, like lung problems from wildfire smoke.

Like the federal and state Superfund models, the new law works on the general principle of “you assholes broke it, you assholes bought it,” plus an extra dirty look at polluters for the “you assholes covered up the science and paid to spread disinformation about it” part.

Hochul said when signing the bill,

“With nearly every record rainfall, heat wave, and coastal storm, New Yorkers are increasingly burdened with billions of dollars in health, safety, and environmental consequences due to polluters that have historically harmed our environment.”

In a statement, state Sen. Liz Krueger (D), one of the bill’s sponsors, noted that all too often, court cases seeking to hold the oil and gas industry responsible for climate damage have said plaintiffs lacked standing, and that state legislatures would need to decide questions of culpability for climate change.

Well, the Legislature of the State of New York — the 10th largest economy in the world — has accepted the invitation, and I hope we have made ourselves very clear: The planet’s largest climate polluters bear a unique responsibility for creating the climate crisis, and they must pay their fair share to help regular New Yorkers deal with the consequences.

Krueger cited estimates that by 2050, damage caused by extreme weather in New York will cost more than $500 billion, which works out to “over $65,000 per household, and that’s on top of the disruption, injury, and death that the climate crisis is causing in every corner of our state.” Letting big climate polluters off for just $75 billion over 25 years seems only right, although the bill doesn’t preclude lawsuits against particular bad actors.

The New York Times notes (gift link) that Big Fossil is very very unhappy about being singled out for its responsibility for greenhouse emissions, because haven’t fossil fuels made us all so happy and prosperous? Ken Pokalsky, vice president of the “Business Council,” a CEO club for corporate dickheads, whined,

“The narrative that this presents is the cause of climate change is solely the fuel industry and major businesses. […] We have all benefited from the use of fossil fuels over the time period covered by this law when there were really no other broadly available alternatives.”

Also, please overlook the billions spent over the decades on lobbying to prevent regulations on fossil fuels and to quash widespread adoption of cleaner energy options. You People went and believed us, and you have only yourselves to blame.

New York is now the second state to create a Climate Superfund, following Vermont, which passed a similar law this summer. Both states have dealt with climate disasters ranging from choking wildfire smoke to flooding and heavy snows caused by the planet’s increasingly unstable weather.

Next, it’ll be time for the lawsuits aimed at keeping every dime possible for the companies that made fortunes from climate pollution, says Columbia environmental law prof Michael Gerrard.

One premise for those legal challenges will likely focus on “whether this law by an individual state, in effect, sets national climate policy in a lawful way,” Mr. Gerrard said. In other words, corporations will argue that it should be up to Congress, not to individual states, whether they must pay for climate change damages.

And if some future Congress were to pass any such legislation, obviously the argument would be that it’s a state responsibility, duh. The Times notes that business interests are already preparing to sue the New York statute into fine, smoky dust before the state can start billing polluters in 2028.

But for now, other states are also looking at passing their own Climate Superfund laws, including New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, and California. And as we recently noted in Tabs, lawsuits over climate damage continue working their way through the courts, too, leading Big Oil to worry that one of these days it will have to face a reckoning like Big Tobacco did back in 1998.

For a hoax, climate change sure is costing us a hell of a lot.

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[NYT (gift link) / New York Senate / Reuters]

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