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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now our climate story of the week, which we've been doing every Tuesday on the show all this year. New York State Senator Liz Krueger is with us today. She's proposed some legislation in Albany that would hold fossil fuel companies accountable for their contributions to climate change by requiring them to pay for the damages caused by their emissions. She not only proposed it, it got passed by the legislature and everybody's waiting to see if Governor Hochul is going to sign it. She only has till the end of the year, which means the end of the month, which means two more weeks.

We'll talk about the legislation, how it would work, and whether it would have the potential to reshape how we approach climate adaptation and resilience and prevention and accountability in our state. We'll also get into some of the roadblocks that Senator Krueger has faced in advancing this bill, which is one of the hundreds of pieces on Governor Hochul's desk awaiting consideration. Signing or vetoing or just letting get into the law without saying anything before the end of the year. Senator Kruger, always good to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Liz Krueger: Thank you very much, Brian. I appreciate your having me on.

Brian Lehrer: This legislation is called the Climate Change Superfund Act, or more colloquially, polluter pays. Tell everybody who hasn't followed this this year what it is.

Liz Krueger: Basically you've described it. This bill says that we know that oil and gas companies have created massive climate damage. We're seeing it every day. Extreme weather events, dangerous, deadly things happening in our state. These activities, this damage to our climate is costing us a fortune. We have an estimate already that statewide climate adaptation costs, meaning the things we need to adjust for this crisis is already costing hundreds of billions of dollars for projects like rebuilding crumbling roads, shoring up our water friend bulkheads.

These expenses are non negotiable. Someone's going to pay for them. My bill says the polluters who cause this problem should pay a part of the cost. Otherwise we, the constituents of the state of New York, the utility bill payers of the state of New York, pay it all. This bill would say, here's an identified group of polluters about the 40 largest oil gas companies in the world. We know what percentage of the climate pollution they have caused each year for frankly over 75 years. We'd only be going back to 2000 for the data. We want them to pay their reasonable fair share as an assessment to the state of New York.

The bill would charge them $3 billion a year for 25 years. 75 billion to the state of New York to specifically help with the costs we're already paying out. Last year, Governor Hochul announced she spent $2.7 billion in one year to address climate impacts. Those costs are only growing. New York City sewer system is estimated to need 100 billion in upgrading because of the flooding crisis. A proposal to protect the city from flooding costs from between Brooklyn and Manhattan at the bottom of Manhattan is an estimated $50 billion according to the federal government.

The cost for protecting Long Island alone is estimated to cost $75 to $100 billion. We're talking hundreds of billions of dollars, Brian, you and I are going to pay it, or maybe we can get the polluters to pay some of it.

Brian Lehrer: $3 billion per year for 25 years, totaling $75 billion in revenue for the state this way over the next quarter of a century. What are the actual companies, like who do you consider the fossil fuel companies, and how would they be assessed?

Liz Krueger: A group of international economists have done an analysis of what percentage of the climate damage was caused by each of these largest companies in the world. I think their names that are familiar to people, Exxon, Chevron, BP, the list goes on and on of major companies. Interestingly, none of them are here in New York State. They can't threaten to leave. They will still sell us oil and gas for as long as we allow them to sell us oil and gas. Even though $3 billion a year sounds like a lot of money to you and me, frankly, these companies continue to make so much money that $3 billion divided among 40 companies or up to 40 companies is sort of chump change for them.

They're perfectly capable of paying it. All the economists show that they won't roll those costs over to us at the gas stations because there's many other companies who aren't as big and have been actually trying to improve their climate record who will not have to charge an increase. Nobody's going to charge an increase because it would be bad business for those large companies.

Brian Lehrer: You mean you would charge some of the biggest oil companies but not other oil companies whose product wind up at the gas pumps?

Liz Krueger: Correct. Only the 40 largest polluters. Or approximately the 40 largest polluters. Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, who has a question about the New York State Climate Change Superfund Act for State Senator Liz Krueger, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Like this idea, don't like this idea, have a question about this idea. 212-433-9692. I want to remind everybody of the context here. This law has been passed by the New York State Legislature and it's awaiting Governor Hochul's signature. She's got until the end of the year to sign the bill or not. What are you hearing from the governor's office, Senator?

Liz Krueger: Well, we're actually in three way negotiations between the governor's office, the Assembly and the Senate. While the clock ticks, I'm cautiously very optimistic we are going to get these changes made, and they will be satisfactory to the Senate and the Assembly and the Governor will sign this year.

Brian Lehrer: Ah, so the bill was passed but you're still negotiating possible changes. Can you get specific about those at all?

Liz Krueger: You know, I'm not going to just because it's usually considered work product to explain what you're negotiating, but I've worked extremely hard on this bill as has my colleague in the Assembly, Jeff Dinowitz, and there's nothing being negotiated that makes us uncomfortable about either the goals we set or the model. It's sort of more some of the technical issues of who would be responsible for what when at the state agency level, which is why I'm pretty sure we're going to get this done.

It's so important because we're facing so many growing threats, not just from the speed at which climate change is happening, but also from the new federal government coming in in January and who knows what they will propose. They can't reverse us here, but they can do a lot more damage with the environment. What does it mean to make changes after you've already passed the bill? It's a standard procedure in Albany, it's called chapter amendments. The governor signs the bill as we passed it now, but the two houses basically have a handshake deal with the governor that we will then make a chapter amendment bill probably in early January to codify the changes we're negotiating now, if that's clear.

Brian Lehrer: I think you're advancing the story here this morning. The governor has specific concerns, wants to be able to sign this bill. She's gone back to you and the leaders in the assembly and asked for some specific changes and you're negotiating them right now, and you're optimistic that you're going to come to yes.

Liz Krueger: Yes, I am saying that. You'd have to ask the governor directly whether she would make the same sentence. Obviously, we're not negotiating with her personally, we're negotiating with her legal and policy teams.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a call. Alan in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with State Senator Liz Krueger, sponsor of the New York State Climate Change Superfund Act. Hi, Alan.

Alan: Good morning. Thanks so much again for having me. In a way, this bill portrays the problem in a way that phrases with fake blame the situation we're in because even without the cost of climate, just looking at the debt we have and the fact that under the rule against perpetuities and the fastest rate of paying down the national debt in the past, we could never pay down the debt we have within a living life and being plus 21 years, which is the limitation in the rule against perpetuities on the ability to control the future by people who will have been dead for years or centuries.

We cannot impose that debt on our kids or unborn grandchildren. We don't have the right to do it individually or collectively. Even without adding the cost of climate damage, we're violating that rule already. We can't even think of cutting taxes on the rich who already owe a part of that unlawful debt that cannot be passed on to the future. We're not talking about the rule against perpetuities. One last line here. Look at a letter online, September 1789 between Madison and Jefferson talking about these very kinds of problems of intergenerational debt before they knew a thing about climate change. It's an eye opener. Very few people know about this letter. It's a very important letter. 1789 Jefferson-Madison.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Anything on that? I don't expect you to know that 1789 Madison-Jefferson letter. Maybe you do, but the idea that Alan's raising of intergenerational debt is really central here, isn't it?

Liz Krueger: I actually don't know anything about that letter, and I don't think what he's describing would apply to this law because here we're actually trying to get the companies to pay some share of the damage they did, not roll the debt over to the individual taxpayers of the state or the country. In fact, just the opposite. That's an interesting question. I think you need another guest who understands better federal debt and legal obligations or lack thereof. Sorry.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and I think maybe he was talking in legal terms, but it's kind of a moral intergenerational obligation that I think he was getting to in a bigger picture. Technically, am I correct that this legislation in effect looks backwards because what you're charging these major fossil fuel companies for is the emissions from the year 2000 to the year 2018 for climate pollution already committed?

Liz Krueger: Correct.

Brian Lehrer: Mike in Jersey City, you're on WNYC. Hi, Mike.

Mike: Yes, hi there, Brian. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good, thank you.

Mike: Yes. [unintelligible 00:12:23] speaker, Senator, the question I have to ask for you has to do with what's called joint liability. The fact of the matter is that these fossil fuel companies, we bought their stuff, okay? Everybody who bought, drove a car, purchased anything requiring petroleum is complicit in this. Yet what I hear is what's called, in legal terms, selective prosecution. You're just picking out certain actors and saying we will punish them and not punish the other people involved in this process. Frankly, I have to seriously question whether this particular piece of legislation will survive a constitutional test when the fossil fuel companies, as they inevitably will do, will challenge it in court.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting question. Mike, thank you very much.

Liz Krueger: We do expect the fossil fuel companies will challenge us in court. We're fully prepared for that. The state of Vermont already passed a very similar law, so we're in coordination with them. Other states are watching to see what happens here. Yes, we think we will be sued in court. We've been working with lawyers and law professors at some of the largest national law schools who each have environmental law specialties to build the argument of why this is constitutional. They assure us that we will win that case in court.

In fact, the federal government even explored passing this at the federal level after full vetting by Congress, and they were interested in taking a stab at it on a national level. They also thought it would withstand constitutional challenge. By the way, one of the issues is the oil companies lied to us. They've known for over 50 years the damage they were doing to the world's climate and they kept all that data and all those reports secret.

Not unlike the tobacco companies who lied to us about the damage done and the deaths caused by smoking. That is also part of the precedent of why people much smarter than me at Stanford, Yale, NYU, Columbia, University of Chicago law schools are convinced that we will withstand legal challenge by the oil companies.

Brian Lehrer: Part of the complicity-- If Mike is outlining a selective prosecution defense, part of the complicity that he suggests is with every ordinary American who drives a gas powered car or who otherwise uses energy or maybe uses more than their share of energy that are produced by the fossil fuel companies. Any thought on individual culpability?

Liz Krueger: That gets raised all the time. Again, if you're lied to about what the risks are, where is your culpability in that storyline? When those are the only options being offered to you, where is your culpability? The fact is we could have moved into green energy options far earlier, but in fact, in many cases, these same companies were buying up and then closing down anyone who seemed to have a better environmentally safer model for providing us energy, and so culpability, I guess there's some balance there.

It's way, way in the, I guess, the two columns, your personal culpability versus these giant oil, gas and coal companies also. It also includes coal, by the way, and what they did to stop alternatives to lie to us about what they were doing. I think, and again, I'm not even a lawyer, but that the courts would argue, no, we know where the vast majority of the culpability lies, and it lies with these companies.

Brian Lehrer: If you're just joining us, we're in our climate story of the week, which we've been doing on Tuesday every week all this year on this show. We're talking today about the New York State Climate Change Superfund Act with State Senator Liz Krueger of Manhattan. The Climate Change Superfund Act, kind of informally known as a polluter pays bill, which has passed the legislature. What we don't know yet is if Governor Hochul is going to sign it. She's apparently seeking some changes to the specific language in the bill. She only has until the end of the year to sign the bill.

As Senator Krueger has been explaining, it would charge the biggest fossil fuel companies $3 billion a year for the next 25 years for the damage from the pollution to the climate that has already been caused to New York State's infrastructure and other things in the state. We will see if it gets signed by the governor. We will see if it withstands challenges in court, as we were just discussing. Let's take another call. Heather in Morris county in Jersey, you're on WNYC. Hi, Heather.

Heather: Hi. I wanted to-- You spoke to it a little bit in the answer to your last question, but I wanted to ask about coordination with other states and the federal government. I'm calling, like I said, from Morris County, New Jersey. We're suffering here, too. How do you hold these companies accountable on a larger scale? I mean, if we just look at the past year and the Carolinas and California, what's happening there? How do we broaden this and hold these companies accountable across states and across the country?

Liz Krueger: As I said, other states are exploring this. I don't know whether New Jersey already has a bill that has not moved through the legislature. I would, as a New Jersey resident, I think you should reach out to your legislature and suggest they do exactly what Vermont and New York are doing.

Brian Lehrer: Heather, thank you for your call. Can you talk a little more about Vermont, the other state that has passed a bill that created a climate super fund earlier this year? They did it first.

Liz Krueger: Right. I think we're looking at what we were doing in New York and jumped to the front and got there first. We have been having discussions with the regulators in Vermont and even talked about when we all get sued, coordinating together in responding. Obviously, Vermont is a very small state, so frankly, New York City state probably has more resources. We have been coordinating with our attorney general here in New York, Tish James, who also is sure that she can successfully defend challenges to this law when and if it gets to court.

Obviously, we don't know if anybody's going to sue, but we suspect they will because that has been their historical approach to any challenges of what they're doing. I think we have to wait and see how it moves forward. Again, as you pointed out, Brian, it's very recently that Vermont passed their bill, and so I do not believe they're at the stage where they've been sending any bills out to any companies.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. It's interesting, the obvious different approach to the fossil fuel companies between you and assuming this bill does get signed by the governor of the state of New York and the federal government, with the incoming Trump administration and his promise to act as a dictator only on day one and only for a few things, and one of those things is drill, baby, drill. Further to that point, listener asks, "Why are we still paying the oil companies from the federal budget?" This listener writes, "In 2022, fossil fuel subsidies in the United States totaled $757 billion according to the International Monetary Fund."

I don't know if that number is accurate or not, but that's from a listener. It does point up kind of the structure of what we're looking at here. The state of New York, per your bill, is trying to get revenue from the fossil fuel companies for damages caused by their climate pollution. The federal government is subsidizing the oil companies to continue to do what they do. If you can confirm that subsidy.

Liz Krueger: That is so disturbing. I don't know if your number is right, Brian, but it's certainly true that this country has been more than a little schizophrenic when it comes to policy vis-a-vis oil, gas and the alternatives which is moving to a green economy, which the data all shows us will, one, address so many of these increased climate causing damages. Two, will actually be cheaper per kilowatt hour or in the case of cars and other vehicles using gas, the moving to EV vehicles where we won't have a kilowatt per hour measure.

Frankly, if the federal government, as you say, and I believe you, is giving away this much money to oil and gas companies in tax credits, incentives, grants, imagine if we just use that money instead to support the transition to the green economy. Because we know and we hear all the time that people are concerned that the upfront costs of moving to wind, offshore wind, heat pumps, thermal systems underground, there are upfront infrastructure costs but then radically reduce costs on an ongoing basis.

Imagine if we could use that federal money to move us all down the road even faster. It would be a huge victory, not just here in New York for New York ratepayers, but for everyone in the country. Yet I have my doubts that that's what we're going to see coming out of Washington in the next year or two.

Brian Lehrer: Sure enough, I just looked up, as you were giving that answer, the reference that the listener wrote, which was from the International Monetary Fund, how much the US Government is reported to be subsidizing fossil fuel companies, oil companies in particular, to the tune of listener write $757 billion. Well, sure enough, this is from the International Monetary Fund's website. From August of last year, headline Fossil fuel subsidies surged to record $7 trillion. That's just not the United States. That's the world.

The lead line here is fossil fuel subsidies surged to a record $7 trillion last year as governments supported consumers and businesses during the global spike in energy prices caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the economic recovery from the pandemic. Whatever they cite as the cause there, and however long term or short term, the frame of that particular article, that's governments around the world subsidizing fossil fuel companies to the tune of $7 trillion last year.

Liz Krueger: I'll just comment on two points in that. One, incentives provided by government through tax exemptions and payments are supposed to be incentivizing good public policy. There is no one left on this planet who thinks continuing to use oil and gas and coal is a good public policy outcome. Two, you already referenced ironically because of the Russia-Ukraine's war situation, these companies are making more than they ever have before. What the heck are we doing giving them our government money?

Brian Lehrer: Are you worried about-

Liz Krueger: It's completely unacceptable.

Brian Lehrer: -looking out of touch with the voters in New York State? Even in New York State, in the current climate, we know that Trump only lost by 11 percentage points in the state this year, whereas in 2020 he lost by 23 percentage points. There's a lot of talk about how Democrats weren't taking inflation, specifically grocery price inflation and energy price inflation, serious enough in terms of what a concern it was for the consumers around the state generally, around the country generally. Here you are getting ready-- I know you're arguing it won't push up gasoline prices at the pump, but here you are trying to push that agenda when maybe a lot of lower income New Yorkers are not so worried about this as they are about just getting those energy prices down rather than putting potential upward pressure on.

Liz Krueger: I think that this bill and other important bills that I carry do exactly what the voters do want and need, lower utility costs. It's not even a debate anymore. Shifting to environmentally sustainable, greener, less polluting choices of energy actually will save us utility costs as ratepayers over a very short period of time. I have another bill, the New York Heat Act, which would actually require lower utility costs and show how we could actually save that money and turn it into lower utility costs for New Yorkers.

I know that there are those out there who try to spin that moving forward with the things we need to do for the environment somehow are translating to increased costs, but that's simply not the case. When people look at their utility bill increases, it's because the price of oil and gas and propane are skyrocketing and they will continue to pay these costs as long as we continue to be dependent on those options, which we don't really control. They are international. They are major corporations that I said aren't even here.

We need to take control of our energy future. That absolutely and is proven to be lowering cost for everybody on their energy bills. That is certainly what we're hearing from people throughout New York State, no matter how they voted.

Brian Lehrer: Senator, before you go, I want to ask you one question on one other topic. I don't know if you heard Mayor Adams speak your name at his news conference yesterday, criticizing you for criticizing him for the way he wields power over City Council. I'll play the sound bite and then I'll invite your own take on the other side. He was talking about using the mayor's right to place ballot questions on the ballot for voters this year. He used that power to block a City Council ballot question that would have given them more power to confirm or reject his commissioner appointees. I guess you criticize the way he uses his charter revision commissions to block City Council. He said this.

Mayor Eric Adams: The charters commission's, my charter commission ability to override any City Council charter commission, that's not Eric's law. That law was in place under the previous mayors and they did it. Many of them did it, and so to all of a sudden say that Eric is misusing his power. Liz Krueger talking about misusing the power. Liz was up in Albany for God knows how long. If it was a problem under previous mayors, why didn't she change it then? Why do you wait for the Eric rule?

Brian Lehrer: Senator, what did you criticize the mayor for that brought your name to his lips in defending himself, as you see it?

Liz Krueger: Fankly, he is right that this rule has been in effect for decades and has occasionally been inappropriately used by mayors.

Brian Lehrer: The rule, I guess, is that if City Council has a charter revision proposal for the voters on a November ballot, the mayor can supersede that with one of his own. Right?

Liz Krueger: Correct. Also supersede individuals who have the right to petition to get a proposal on the ballot. My proposal, my proposed law wouldn't stop any mayor from putting his commission proposals on the ballot, but it would no longer knock off everybody else's proposals. If the City Council had proposals, they would be able to put them on. If citizens of New York City petitioned a proposal on the ballot, that could be on and the mayor's could be on. It's not taking away the mayor's ability to propose changes to the charter. What it's doing is saying you can't do these in order to just stop others, the City Council, equally elected officials of the City of New York and citizens who have a petition right to move bills to the ballot.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting.

Liz Krueger: Everybody could go on. Why now versus before? With all due respect, as he does with many other things, I do think that Eric Adams has been stretching the credibility of the decisions of the mayor's office more than most mayors during my lifetime.

Brian Lehrer: That, listeners, is our climate story of the week. Plus addendum on the back and forth between State Senator Liz Krueger, our guest, and Mayor Adams this week. Senator, we always appreciate when you come on the show. Thank you very much.

Liz Krueger: Thank you for having me, Brian. I always enjoy it. Have a good holiday season.

Brian Lehrer: You too.

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