The great question for people who care about the climate is: what now? How do we proceed with the most important fight in the world, when the most important office in the world is about to be filled by a climate denier, and when there’s a Congress with no hope of advancing serious legislation.
One important answer is: We go state by state, and city by city, making gains everywhere we still can. That sounds like small beer—but it’s worth remembering just how big American states are. California is the world’s fifth largest economy, and the energy transition is fully advanced there. Texas is the eighth largest economy—larger than Russia. Things are ripping along there too.
And New York is the 10th largest economy (New York City by itself would be the 12th). That’s bigger than Mexico or Australia or South Korea.
Which is why it’s very exciting news that earlier today the state’s governor, Kathy Hochul, announced that she would sign the so-called “polluter pays” climate superfund bill. Here’s the release from the governor’s office, in which she points out that
With nearly every record rainfall, heatwave, 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. Establishing the Climate Superfund is the latest example of my administration taking action to hold polluters responsible for the damage done to our environment and requiring major investments in infrastructure and other projects critical to protecting our communities and economy.
Activists have been pushing hard for the legislation. Over the last few weeks scores have occupied rooms in the capitol, and about 20 people, a great many of them elder members of Third Act, have been arrested for trespassing around the state Xmas tree—they’ve been singing carols as the cuffs go on. (Campaigners also won a big victory in Albany last week, when Hochul signed a bill that should prevent backdoor attempts at overturning the state’s fracking ban).
I’ve written about this effort before—my home state of Vermont became the first to pass it, earlier this year. But Vermont is… not one of the world’s largest economies. Its attorney general’s office is… small. Against the might of Big Oil, well…
New York’s attorney general, on the other hand, is Letitia James, who has built a reputation for taking on big players. She’s got a giant staff, and she’s not scared of Exxon. Which is important, because Exxon, and its brethren, will have no choice but to fight these laws: they cut too close to the bone. As Inside Climate News explains,
The bill borrows from the federal “polluter pays” principle, which allows the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to hold companies accountable for releasing pollution into the environment. But it strays from that slightly by applying the concept to manufacturers of fossil fuels, not all air pollution emitters.
Under the superfund act, the world’s largest fossil fuel companies would be required to pay the Empire State billions for the damages caused by their products, raising $75 billion over 25 years. Fees would be allocated according to a company’s share of emissions from 2000 to 2018. By the turn of the millennium, climate science was so well established that “no reasonable corporate actor could have failed to anticipate regulatory action to address its impacts,” lawmakers wrote in the bill.
If you think this would be a slam dunk in New York—which is, after all a blue state with essentially no fossil fuel production—think again.
Business groups have opposed it, and Hochul has been noncommittal—it passed the legislature months ago, but she sat on her hands. Which is why young people, old people, faith leaders, and the like have all descended on the state’s lovely capitol building. Their passion is largely rooted in the climate fight, but the argument is rooted in sheer populist economics. In essence, taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay to rebuild the bridges wrecked by climate change. That should be up the shareholders who have profited so handsomely. (Exxon, Chevron, and Shell had combined profits of $85 billion last year).
If you want to know the backstory, here’s a part of it, from Lee Wasserman of the Rockefeller Family Fund:
The idea for the climate superfund bill was hatched when I was at Fenway watching the Red Sox with an old friend, Rob Plattner, who had been earlier in his career deputy commissioner for policy at the NYS Tax Dept. We were chatting about the climate damages lawsuits and somewhere around the fifth inning we came to the conclusion that it would be totally appropriate for state legislatures to ask for a contribution from the fossil fuel industry to pay for the damage they caused and the adaption costs states will face for decades to come. Polluters paying for the damage they cause is, of course, a highly recognized and supported concept and it seemed particularly apt in the climate context.
We put together a bill initially for NY state when Cuomo was governor but couldn't get his attention before he retreated from the governor's mansion. By then, Biden was in office with his Build Back Better proposal, and I thought it worth a try to get it into the D.C. conversation. It found a lot support, with Van Hollen and Bernie its prime Senate sponsors, and leadership broadly supportive. The federal bill came out of nowhere and made a great deal of progress, but was resigned to a long list of items that would have become law but for Joe Manchin.
So instead they went to the state level, and put together campaigns in six states. Vermont, as I have said, was the first to sign on; with New York on board there is great hope that California, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Minnesota will come next. They’ve found outfront allies in the Public Interest Research Groups or PIRGs (Paul Burns and the Vermont chapter were crucial in the Green Mountain State). Behind the scenes, Fossil Free Media and Jamie Henn have been providing crucial comms work. And I’m very proud of all the Third Actors that stood up, often hand in hand with young activists. (A particular shout out to Michael Richardson and the TA upstate New York chapter; you can read today’s edition of their newsletter here.) In the end it was enough, even to get past Hochul who earned the ire of environmentalists earlier in the year when she (temporarily, as it turns out) nixed congestion pricing in Manhattan to avoid angering suburban motorists.
Hochul signed this bill in part because it doesn’t cost anyone in New York anything. The oil companies have tried to say it will raise gas prices for New Yorkers, but that’s not how the cost of oil works. As the Nobelist Joe Stiglitz pointed out
The specific attributes of the global oil market preclude price increases resulting from the Climate Change Superfund assessments. The price of crude oil is set by the global market, based on the global balance of supply and demand. Individual companies cannot directly raise the price of crude even if it would be in their interest to do so. The price of gasoline at the pump, derived from crude oil, is set by a combination of global crude prices, refining costs, distribution and marketing costs, and local taxes and fees. The Superfund assessment does not impact any of those factors, as it is assessed too far upstream to impact local costs, and is far too small and affects too limited a universe of companies to impact global prices.
You could argue that it’s not the most elegant solution to the problem. But as Liz Krueger, the legislator who really pushed the measure, told The Wall Street Journal over the summer
Look, would I prefer this all be done at the federal level? Yes. But the states have learned over the last few years, we can’t count on the federal government to do these things for us.
It’s possible that Exxon et al will try to get Congress to immunize them from such measures; they’ll certainly be in court arguing that it’s all unfair. But at least initially those will be state courts, under state statutes. (It was Letitia James, remember, who used these tactics to convict President-elect Donald Trump on fraud charges last year).
And now those other states may join in too. The billions begin to add up. This is, more or less, how the states slowly and then quite rapidly took down the tobacco industry. So—many many thanks to the people who but their bodies on the line these past days, and those who have worked so hard for years to get us here. This may be what progress looks like in the Trump years.
