Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York on Thursday signed a law that requires companies that are big fossil fuel polluters to help pay to repair damage caused by extreme weather, which is becoming more common because of greenhouse gas emissions.
The legislation, called the Climate Change Superfund Act, mandates that the companies responsible for the bulk of carbon emissions buildup between 2000 and 2024 pay about $3 billion each year for 25 years.
The law was modeled on the original Superfund law, which was established in 1980 and requires companies to pay for the cleanup of toxic waste wrought by incidents like oil and chemical spills.
New York’s new law focuses on pollution produced by the combustion of fossil fuels, which results in the warming of the atmosphere, causing extreme weather, like floods and storms, to be more frequent, experts say.
The idea is to take some of the burden off taxpayers, who now are on the hook for financing much of the cleanup and mitigation efforts after weather disasters. The law takes particular aim at the oil and gas companies that produced more than one billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions globally over the last 24 years.
“Nothing could be fairer than making climate polluters pay,” said Lee Wasserman, the director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, a nonprofit that pushed for the passage of the law.
The new law, however, will unjustly focus on the energy sector and large companies, said Ken Pokalsky, vice president of the Business Council, a statewide association of employers with 3,200 members.
“The narrative that this presents is the cause of climate change is solely the fuel industry and major businesses,” Mr. Pokalsky said. “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.”
The money raised by New York State will go into a fund for restoring and protecting coastal wetlands; upgrading roads and bridges; improving storm water drainage systems; elevating and retrofitting structures; and investing in recovery efforts from natural disasters, as well as health programs that treat illnesses or injuries related to climate change.
New York is the second state to approve a version of a Superfund act, following Vermont this summer. Both states, like much of the Northeast, have experienced dangerous and expensive flooding events in recent years. In New York, within the span of a few months late this year, the state went from fighting wildfires during a severe drought to dealing with a lake-effect snowstorm that caused Ms. Hochul to declare a state of emergency.
“Repairing from and preparing for extreme weather caused by climate change will cost more than half a trillion dollars statewide by 2050,” said State Senator Liz Krueger, a Democrat who was the lead sponsor of the legislation. “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.”
Even now that the governor has signed the law, there is still much ground that will need to be covered before any penalties can be levied, experts said. Michael Gerrard, an environmental law professor at Columbia, expected legal challenges to the law.
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.
The notion of whether city or state laws can establish national climate policy, as well as other concerns questioning the constitutionality of the law, were brought up in a memo sent to the governor’s office this summer by the Business Council.
This month, the group also wrote a letter with organizations like the National Fuel Gas Company, the New York Farm Bureau and the National Mining Association asking Ms. Hochul to veto the legislation.
The state, which will now fill the regulatory details of the law, has until 2028 to bill polluting companies for the first time.
New York’s passage of the Climate Change Superfund Act could make it easier for other states, including Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and California, to pass similar legislation as soon as next year. “The more states that join in this effort, the better we’ll be,” said State Senator John F. McKeon of New Jersey, a Democrat who is sponsoring a parallel proposal in his state. He is hopeful that Gov. Philip D. Murphy will sign the bill before his term ends in 2026.
Although opponents of the law said that it will force energy companies to raise prices, some economists have noted that since fees are based on past emissions, and oil prices are set by a global market, future prices should not be affected.
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