(DCNF)—New York is poised to fine energy companies billions of dollars in the name of fighting climate change under a new law that will likely make life more costly for ordinary consumers.
Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed Senate Bill S2129B on Thursday, enacting a law that will require energy companies to cough up $75 billion to the state over 25 years to atone for their supposed roles in causing climate change. Aside from standing on questionable legal footing, the new law essentially amounts to a state revenue grab that will ultimately increase costs for consumers if fully implemented, according to energy and legal experts.
“When you dig beneath the headlines, the story here is very simple: New York State is choosing to punish industries that it doesn’t like, which power everyday activities, and use the money it’s confiscating to fund pet projects and various progressive lifestyle choices that couldn’t get funded by Bernie Sanders and Democrats in Congress,” O.H. Skinner, executive director of the Alliance for Consumers, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “While China and other adversaries continue to pump carbon into the atmosphere, New York liberals are using the guise of ‘fixing climate change’ to try and bankrupt companies they don’t like and unlock money for their liberal wishlist. This shakedown is horrible for everyday people.”
New York On Track To Miss Deadlines On Majority Of Its Lofty Climate Goalshttps://t.co/vKEHsxkaDC
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) July 20, 2024
Hochul’s office says that New York will take the funds it rakes in under the superfund law to pay for projects that will enhance the state’s “resiliency to dangerous climate impacts.” Examples of the projects funded by the law would include upgrades to drainage systems, “preventive health care programs,” retrofitting buildings to be more green and developing “green spaces” in urban environments among others, according to the law’s text.
State officials will determine how much each affected company must contribute to the superfund based on how much carbon dioxide they emitted between 2000 and 2018.
Upon signing the bill, Hochul’s office proclaimed that the new superfund law will “[shift] the cost of climate adaptation from everyday New Yorkers to the fossil fuel companies most responsible for the pollution.”
However, Ken Girardin, director of research for a New York-focused think tank known as the Empire Center, said that the new statute will hit consumers the hardest as the affected corporations seek to recover costs by passing the expense along to their customers.
“I don’t think that this law will ultimately be implemented, as New York is trying to thread multiple legal needles at once,” Girardin told the DCNF. “That aside, if these costs were to be levied, it would be entirely within the companies’ rights to recover those costs, basically in New York exclusively. They could levy a geographically-focused surcharge … If a company gets targeted by this program, it stands to reason that they would recover their costs by raising prices in New York specifically.”
Even without the new superfund bill in effect, New York has some of the highest average gas prices of any state in the U.S., trailing only eight other states, according to AAA gas price data. Moreover, the cost of electricity for commercial, residential and industrial customers in New York is higher than the national average cost for each type of customer, in some cases by as much as 50% as of October, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Scott Segal, a partner at Bracewell LLP who advises energy companies on the implications of climate legislation, said that the new law will likely only intensify existing concerns about New York’s hostile business environment.
“While we all share the goal of addressing climate change, imposing retroactive liability on companies for legally-conducted business activities sets a troubling precedent that could significantly impact New York’s business environment and economic competitiveness,” said Segal. “Unlike its namesake federal statute that dealt with waste activities, the use of fossil fuels is and was an essential component of maintaining quality of life in New York and elsewhere.”
“There’s a real risk that these costs will ultimately be passed on to New York consumers through higher energy prices,” Segal added. “At a time when many families are already struggling with high costs of living, we need to carefully consider the downstream economic impacts of this policy.”
Vermont enacted a similar piece of legislation in June, and other blue states including Massachusetts and Maryland are also reportedly considering rolling out their own comparable versions of a superfund bill, according to Insurance Journal. Moreover, New York state and city — as well as numerous other Democrat-controlled jurisdictions across the country — have sued energy companies in pursuit of billions of dollars of damages with “climate nuisance” litigation, though none of those cases have so far led to a major verdict or settlement with the plaintiffs.
Hochul’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact [email protected].
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
