By Patti Wood

If you make a mess, it’s your responsibility to clean it up. It is a basic lesson taught in kindergarten, along with sharing and getting along with others.

But that lesson is apparently lost on the executives of the oil and gas industries that are largely responsible for the creation of our global climate crisis and who have spent untold millions of dollars over decades to obfuscate their role. Still today, oil and gas companies fight the regulations needed to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change, while they strenuously lobby to keep their lucrative government subsidies that add hundreds of millions to their bottom line.

Meanwhile, the cost of dealing with the destruction caused by climate change and building climate resilience, including desperately needed upgrades to infrastructure, is falling on American taxpayers. And that cost is growing exponentially, while oil and gas companies continue to post record profits.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the total cost of climate and weather-related disasters in the United States in 2022 was more than $165 billion. That’s about $500 for each man, woman and child in the country, and that’s just last year’s bill. And it doesn’t include the immense health costs associated with climate change.

Rates of asthma and other respiratory diseases from air pollution, caused not only by the burning of fossil fuels but from the wildfires which are directly related to climate change, are increasing. Between 1999 and 2018, asthma rates in the United States increased by more than 43%.

Mosquito-borne illnesses, on the rise as temperatures increase and historic weather patterns are re-drawn, included cases of malaria in Florida and Texas for the first time in 20 years. And the Northeast has seen an increase in more serious mosquito and tick- borne illnesses due to the increase in the duration of disease transmission seasons as well as flooding, which increases the breeding potential for many vectors.

Extreme heat in Arizona became so dangerous last summer that people who accidentally fell on asphalt were taken to the hospital with serious, sometimes life-threatening burns. Exposure to extreme heat can also cause heatstroke and exacerbate pre-existing cardiovascular and respiratory conditions.

Cities and towns are now routinely opening cooling centers for local residents without access to air conditioning during heat emergencies, but many elderly and disabled people need transportation to those centers. Who pays for that?

In a salt-in-the-wound scenario, it will be our children and grandchildren who will pay the highest price for climate change, not only with their pocketbooks and wallets, but with their health. Ninety percent of the diseases resulting from the climate crisis are likely to affect children under the age of 5.

New York’s legislators, well informed about all of the above, have addressed this imbalance in responsibility for the costs of climate change. The “Climate Change Superfund Act,” is first-in-the-nation legislation that would shift at least a portion of the financial costs for dealing with climate-related expenses from local governments to the oil and gas companies which have so far escaped responsibility for cleaning up their mess.

In brief, the bill reads, “Climate change, resulting primarily from the combustion of fossil fuels, is an immediate grave threat to the state’s communities, environment and economy. The state must take action to adapt to certain consequences of climate change that are irreversible, including rising sea levels, increasing temperatures, extreme weather events, flooding, heat waves, and other climate-change-driven threats. Maintaining New York’s quality of life into the future, particularly for young people, who will experience greater impacts from climate change over their lifetimes, will be one of the state’s greatest challenges over the next three decades.

“Based on decades of research it is now possible to determine with great accuracy the share of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere by specific fossil fuel companies, making it possible to assign liability to and require compensation from companies commensurate with their emissions during a given time period. The Legislature recognizes that the actions of many of the biggest fossil fuel companies have been unconscionable, closely reflecting the strategy of denial, deflection and delay used by the tobacco industry. In spite of the information provided by their own scientists that the continued burning of fossil fuels would have catastrophic results, these companies hid the truth from the public and actively spread false information that the science of climate change was uncertain when in fact it was beyond controversy.”

According to some experts, climate change will cost New York state taxpayers $55 billion by the end of the decade and $150 billion by 2050 and that doesn’t include the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ $52 billion proposal to protect New York Harbor from sea level rise and storms. The legislation would require oil and gas producers to chip in $3 billion a year for the next 25 years—a tiny fraction of the estimated costs and a tiny fraction of their profits.

Payments into the climate change adaptation cost recovery program would be used for new and improved infrastructure, including coastal wetlands restoration, storm water drainage systems, energy-efficient cooling systems in public and private buildings, including schools and public housing, and climate-driven public health challenges.

But not surprisingly, the oil and gas lobby has pushed back vigorously against the bill, which would follow the basic “let the polluter pay” principle which has been the basis for most superfund legislation since the 1980s. The American Petroleum Institute, the powerful trade group for the oil and natural gas industry, has sent a statement to New York State legislators saying its members “strongly oppose this bill.”

Supporters are hoping that Gov. Kathy Hochul will include the bill in the state’s budget this year, setting an example for the rest of the country and teaching the oil and gas company executives the lesson they apparently didn’t learn in kindergarten: If you make a mess, it’s your responsibility to clean it up.