Activists: Big Oil should pay for climate change damage
ALBANY - A coalition of climate activists and local elected officials gathered at the state Capitol Thursday to once again call for passage of a Climate Change Superfund.
The state Superfund would be funded by industries responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, with the biggest companies paying the most.
Total cost of the Superfund is estimated at $3 billion annually for 25 years. The measure, proposed by two New York City Democrats, Sen. Liz Krueger and Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz, has passed in the Senate but been rejected in the Assembly.
It’s unclear how the legislation will do during upcoming session.
The rationale, supporters said, was similar to the federal Superfund, a program dating to the 1980s in which companies that polluted now-toxic sites or waterways are required to fund a good deal of the cleanup.
The state Climate fund would have the private sector fund the multi-billion cost of damage caused by climate change, including flooding, and violent storms.
According to the speakers, much of that burden would fall on the world’s major oil companies, on the logic that fossil fuel consumption has led to climate change.
“They are the ones who knew about this problem 40 years ago and decided to bamboozle the public,” said Blair Horner, executive director at NYPIRG NY.
Several of the speakers from the Hudson Valley and across upstate alluded to flood and storm damage along riverfront communities they said has been sparked by climate change.
“It’s the front-line communities that have to bear the cost of pollution,” said Claire Cousin, a member of the Columbia County Board of Supervisors who represents the riverfront community of Hudson.
“We need Big Oil to pay,” said Dominic Frongillo, a former town council member in the Tompkins County community of Caroline, which has suffered from several bad floods.
Others mentioned that their communities have seen several so-called “100-year floods” over the past several years. A 100year flood is statistically supposed to happen just once in a century.
“Normally this would be a snow day,” added Albany County Legislator Merton Simpson, referring to Thursday’s balmy, wet weather, despite it being the end of
December.
A spokesman from the American Petroleum Institute said the measure would amount to a tax on the energy industry. “This proposal is nothing more than a punitive new tax on American energy that would only stall the innovative progress underway to accelerate low-carbon solutions while delivering the energy communities need,” said the spokesperson.
The institute, in a previous memo against the bill, said that such a tax would probably violate the Constitution on a number of levels. And they questioned how the state would accurately measure or assess the costs of climate change to a particular industry.
“Liability should not attach simply because a company extracted or refined fossil fuels that were placed into commerce and combusted by a third party,” reads the memo.