There is no avoiding the cascading bad climate news: New records in temperature, catastrophic flooding, and ongoing wildfires, all put the world’s rapidly worsening environment in the “Code Red” danger zone. The flooding in the Northeast was the result of record-breaking rainfall. If the climate was a person it would be in the ICU.
Weeks of a punishing heat dome have left one third of the nation suffering from incredible heat. Wildfire smoke from Canada obscured the Chicago skyline, just weeks after triggering a spike in asthma hospital admissions in New York and Washington, D.C. Last Sunday, eight inches of rain fell in a few hours near West Point, N.Y. – causing significant damage to the area, including at the U.S. military academy – even as another storm buried the Oklahoma City area in floodwaters, too. Last week, ocean temperatures off the Florida coast passed the 90-degree mark.
All in all, the planet experienced its hottest seven-day stretch in recorded history.
The toll is increasingly obvious. A new report found that in Europe last summer more than 61,000 people died because of record-breaking heat. The summer of 2022 was the hottest period ever recorded on the continent – a record that may well be broken this year.
The economic hit from these storms will be staggering and added to the tens of trillions of dollars worldwide that are expected by the middle of this century. And those costs will be borne by taxpayers and consumers as well.
The evidence is piling up and the catastrophes are increasing, yet the oil industry is escalating its drilling efforts in order to drive up its already massive profits. BP scaled back an earlier goal of lowering its emissions by 35% by 2030, saying it will aim for a 20 to 30% cut instead. ExxonMobil cut its fundingfor a heavily self-promoted effort to use algae to create low-carbon fuel. Shell announced that it would freeze its investments in renewable energy this year, despite its previous promises to reduce its carbon emissions.
While Shell argues that it remains committed to fighting climate change, its new CEO told the BBC that cutting fossil-fuel production would actually be “dangerous and irresponsible,” because doing so could cause the “cost of living” to start to “shoot up.” Closer to home his talking points are parroted by the oil industry’s allies as New York tries to take steps to shift from an economy based on fossil fuels to one based on alternative power sources.
As Governor Hochul crisscrossed the state moving from one climate catastrophe to another, she described the situation as the “new normal.” But increasingly intense storms, rising sea levels, and a hotter planet are anything but normal: They are the direct consequences of the burning of oil, gas, and coal, which has triggered a climate catastrophe.
The science is undeniable and the costs are real. According to an estimate by the think tank Rebuild By Design, the climate costs to New York could be $55 billion by the end of this decade. Furthermore, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineersestimated that it would cost $52 billion to protect NY Harbor. It was recently estimated that Long Island faces $75-$100 billion in climate costs. And while storms get worse, sea levels are rising and groundwater poses a higher risk of flooding –and we don’t even know how much that will cost yet. The storms from last week alone are estimated to cost New York $50 million. Clearly, New York is facing staggering – and growing – climate costs.
The question facing the Governor and the Legislature is: Who should pay? It will undoubtedly be the case that the ongoing devastation from the worsening climate crisis will cost New York tens of billions of dollars over the coming decades. As it stands, under the direction of the Governor those costs are being borne - and will continue to be borne - by taxpayers.
Big Oil should pay. They chose profit over the planet. Their fossil fuel pollution caused the climate crisis. They are raking in record profits. After all, they knew decades ago that the burning of fossil fuels would rapidly heat the planet and with incredible precision predicted exactly the situation we’re in today. Instead of alerting the world, they undermined science, bamboozled the public, and – to this day – fought tooth and nail to block environmental protections.
This summer it has become clearer that there are dire environmental and public health implications of relying on fossil fuels to power our economy. Every year will be worse. Unless the state, the nation, and the world, acts, the situation will move from bad to worse. And the costs and challenges will only multiply unless the world aggressively reduces the burning of fossil fuels.
The costs of dealing with this unfolding catastrophe will be enormous. It’s time to make the oil companies pay and to do it in a way that they cannot pass on those payments to the public. In passing the Climate Change Superfund Act the New York’s state Senate has shown how it can be done. Governor Hochul should embrace that plan. There is no time to waste.
Blair Horner is executive director of the New York Public Interest Research Group.
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