New York Becomes Second State To Pass Superfund Pollution Law

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On December 26, 2024,New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed landmark Superfund legislation that bolsters the state’s efforts to guard and restore the setting. The brand new legislation requires giant fossil gas corporations to pay for crucial initiatives that defend the residents of New York by making a Local weather Superfund that can pay for initiatives that enhance the state’s resiliency to local weather impacts corresponding to flooding and excessive warmth.

“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,” Hochul mentioned. “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.”

What The Superfund Legislation Does

The Local weather Superfund legislation shifts the price of local weather adaptation from the residents of New York to the fossil gas corporations who’re most answerable for the air pollution. By making a Local weather Change Adaptation Price Restoration Program, the legislation ensures that these corporations contribute to the funding of crucial infrastructure investments corresponding to coastal safety and flood mitigation methods to reinforce the local weather resilience of communities throughout the state.

New York State Division of Environmental Conservation Interim Commissioner Sean Mahar mentioned, “Holding polluters accountable for the damages they cause is essential to New York’s environmental protection efforts, and I commend Governor Hochul for signing this historic climate legislation into law. By ensuring those responsible for historic climate-altering emissions bear the costs of the significant health, environmental, and economic impacts already being passed on to New Yorkers, this law will complement the State’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, help communities adapt to the climate-driven impacts experienced today, and leverage the significant investments the Governor is making in climate resilience.”

State Senator Liz Krueger, one of many main sponsors for the brand new legislation, mentioned, “The Local weather Change Superfund Act is now legislation and New York has fired a shot that shall be heard around the world. The businesses most answerable for the local weather disaster shall be held accountable. Too usually during the last decade, courts have dismissed lawsuits in opposition to the oil and fuel trade by saying that the difficulty of local weather culpability ought to be determined by legislatures. Effectively, the Legislature of the State of New York — the tenth largest financial system on this planet — has accepted the invitation, and I hope we’ve 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. There’s no question that those consequences are here and they are serious. Repairing from and preparing for extreme weather caused by climate change will cost more than half a trillion dollars statewide by 2050. That’s 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. The Climate Change Superfund Act is a critical piece of affordability legislation that will deliver billions of dollars every year to ease the burden on regular New Yorkers.”

$75 Billion Over 25 Years

Bloomberg says the brand new legislation would require the state’s high polluters to pay an estimated $75 billion over 25 years to assist New York’s infrastructure higher face up to flooding and different climate-related occasions. Invoice sponsors say that quantity is a small fraction of the a whole bunch of billions the state will want for local weather remediation by way of 2050. New York has now joined Vermont in enacting local weather Superfund laws.

The American Petroleum Institute, which represents about 600 members of the trade, condemned the legislation. “This type of legislation represents nothing more than a punitive new fee on American energy, and we are evaluating our options moving forward,” an API spokesperson mentioned in an e mail to Bloomberg.

Fossil gas corporations discovered to be answerable for greater than 1 billion tons of greenhouse fuel emissions from 2000 to 2018 are on the hook, in accordance with the legislation. Funds shall be managed by a state fund and dispersed equitably. State regulators should decide over the subsequent yr easy methods to establish accountable events and their share of bills, register these events underneath this system, and problem price restoration calls for.

“Big Oil is making a killing off climate disaster—but now, in New York they’ll be on the hook for their damages,” Eric Weltman, Meals & Water Watch’s New York senior strategist, mentioned in an announcement. “New York State is on the leading edge of polluter pays legislation, redirecting corporate profits into public coffers, and investing in the climate resiliency efforts we need to survive worsening climate chaos.” Maryland, Massachusetts, and California are additionally contemplating local weather Superfund legal guidelines to handle mounting infrastructure prices.

Let The Authorized Wrangling Start

These payments are modeled after the federal Complete Environmental Response, Compensation, and Legal responsibility Act (CERCLA), referred to as the Superfund legislation, and can nearly actually end in lawsuits filed by the fossil gas trade. These authorized challenges will declare that federal legislation preempts state motion pursuant to the Supremacy Clause of the Structure. CleanTechnica readers will discover instantly that proper wing extremists all the time say issues ought to be left to the states to resolve when it’s handy for them — schooling, abortion, and border safety are widespread examples to get the “states rights” therapy. However when it’s not so handy — like California setting its personal emissions guidelines or states making an attempt to guard their youngsters from being murdered by lunatics with assault rifles — then they sing out of the opposite aspect of their mouths and declare the states are powerless to enact laws that conflicts with federal legislation.

The Supreme Court docket will inevitably be drawn into the fray however the fossil gas corporations might not get the outcomes from the court docket they’re hoping for. The Supreme Court docket has dominated constantly that fits filed by states and cities in state courts ought to be heard in state courts, which is one small motive to hope that state Superfund legal guidelines will survive any authorized challenges, however courts have a means of delaying issues longer than most individuals would imagine. If nothing else, the trade will attempt to drag the court docket continuing out so long as attainable whereas they proceed raking of their obscene earnings.

A Phrase From Joseph Stiglitz

Bill McKibben wrote after the New York Superfund invoice was signed that the oil corporations try to say it’ll increase fuel costs for New Yorkers, however that’s not how the price of oil works. As Joseph Stiglitz, who has a Nobel Prize in economics, pointed out recently,

The precise attributes of the worldwide oil market preclude value will increase ensuing from the Local weather Change Superfund assessments. The value of crude oil is about by the worldwide market, based mostly on the worldwide stability of provide and demand. Particular person corporations can not immediately increase the value of crude even when it could be of their curiosity to take action. The value of gasoline on the pump, derived from crude oil, is about by a mix of worldwide crude costs, refining prices, distribution and advertising prices, and native taxes and charges. The Superfund evaluation doesn’t impression any of these components, as it’s assessed too far upstream to impression native prices, and is much too small and impacts too restricted a universe of corporations to impression international costs.

Some would possibly argue that the New York Superfund legislation is just not probably the most elegant resolution to the issue. Senator Liz Krueger, the legislator who actually pushed the measure ahead within the New York legislature, agrees. She advised the Wall Road Journal final summer time, “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.”

Conservative are all the time screaming that the states ought to be free to set their very own insurance policies — a notion that goes all the best way again in US historical past to post-colonial days when southern states needed the correct to maintain slavery authorized in the event that they determined to affix the proposed new union. Now some states are doing exactly that and those self same conservative voices are filled with reproach and indignation. Politics means by no means having to apologize for egregious hypocrisy, apparently.