How New York’s $75 Billion Climate Superfund Will Work

From our collaborating partner Living on Earth, public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by Aynsley O’Neill with Anne Rabe, the former environmental policy director at the New York Public Interest Research Group.

One of the most destructive consequences of a warming planet is the increased moisture a warmer atmosphere can hold, leading to extreme floods like those that hit New York in September 2024. As the climate crisis intensifies, extreme events like these are expected to become more frequent, at a huge cleanup cost to governments.

To help cover this rising bill, New York State has passed a new “Climate Change Superfund Law” that asks major fossil fuel companies to pay up, based on their historic sales of coal, gas and oil.

Anne Louise Rabe is the former environmental policy director at NY-PIRG, the New York Public Interest Research Group. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

AYNSLEY O’NEILL: What is the New York Climate Superfund law? If I have this right, it’s only really the second of its kind behind a similar law in Vermont. How do the two compare as well?

ANNE LOUISE RABE: The New York Climate Change Superfund Act is a precedent-setting law and it would create a fee on big greenhouse gas emitters, big oil and gas companies who are making tremendous profits. They would be sharing a fee that would create $3 billion a year for three projects from the climate crisis: repair, resilience and community protection programs. 

The New York law is similar to the Vermont law, which passed first, but the New York law is bigger and better, we feel. It has a specific amount, $3 billion a year, whereas the Vermont law is having a state study done to assess the amount, and it also has 35 percent of the $3 billion, or $1 billion a year for 25 years, going just to disadvantaged communities for repair, resilience and community protection programs. 

O’NEILL: This takes its cues from the federal Superfund law from 1980 which requires companies to pay for the cleanup of toxic waste brought by incidents like chemical spills. How did we get from that 1980 law to this?

RABE: Well, we are in the same situation we were back in 1980. We were finding massive hazardous waste dumps, and the industries that created them were refusing to pay for the cleanup. Congress quickly came up with a polluter pay fee, which is constitutionally supported, so that the Superfund would pay for the cleanup of toxic waste dumps where there’s companies that are refusing. Same concept here, except it’s the pollution in the air from the past. Greenhouse gas emissions that were emitted in the past have created the horrible climate crisis of today. So we’re going back in time to those polluters and saying, time to pay up. You know, if you generate over a billion tons of greenhouse gases over a 20-year period, you’ve got to pay part of that $3 billion. 

O’NEILL: What are New Yorkers seeing in terms of climate change? How is it affecting the state, both in terms of climate and environment, but also in terms of its financial or social or the psychological effects?

RABE: It’s tremendously impacting New Yorkers in many, many ways. Financially, taxpayers are having to pay over $2 billion a year for repair, resilience and protection programs. For instance, protection from flash floods in Queens, where people died in their basements from flash flooding, or the Buffalo Blizzard, where 47 people were killed two years ago. The human suffering is tragic. 

The money, over $2 billion a year, we’ve calculated, looking at the governor’s news releases, is being paid by taxpayers for resilience and repair programs when it should be paid for by polluters. 

Psychologically, people are living in fear. People in the five boroughs of New York City, every time it rains, they’re fearful that there’s going to be another flood. So it’s really a traumatic situation going on.

O’NEILL: This law has a very important environmental justice component. If I have this right, it requires 35 percent of the funds to go to disadvantaged communities. Can you walk us through some of the boroughs or municipalities across the state of New York that are going to really need this kind of support and funding?

RABE: Sure. First, I want to put it in perspective in terms of what we’re facing in New York right now. 

Our Army Corps of Engineers has told us we need $52 billion for the Lower East Side of New York City to build sea walls. On Long Island, an island in terms of the extreme weather impacts that are happening more and more every year, there’s an estimate of $100 billion needed. Over the next 25 years, the Senate Finance Committee has estimated $500 billion is needed for repair, resilience and protection programs. 

We’re talking about raising $75 billion over 25 years, and one-third of that is going to go to disadvantaged communities. For instance, Queens, the borough that is constantly dealing with flash floods, would get $130 million estimated for 25 years in a row. Erie County, where the Buffalo Blizzard shut down the water treatment facility, would receive $41 million for 25 years in a row. So that’s what the climate superfund would pay for. It also pays for health plans for people who have increased asthma because of air pollution.

O’NEILL: On top of that, there’s also going to be some impacts in terms of job creation. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

RABE: It’s a tremendous, tremendous green jobs program. For instance, we need to make our bridges, our hundreds of bridges in New York State, resilient, so that they don’t break down when there’s an extreme weather situation. That’s 65 jobs per bridge at $7 million a bridge. 

We’re talking hundreds of thousands of jobs in terms of resilience upgrades, in terms of community protection programs, cooling centers during the extreme heat. It’s a huge job creation program.

O’NEILL: With this bill requiring the fossil fuel companies to pay up, to what extent is that bill going to eventually make its way to the consumer?

RABE: It will not touch the consumer in terms of price increases. We’ve had many economists review the formula on terms of the fee structure, and again, it’s for past greenhouse gas emissions. It will not impact today’s cost of production. There should be no shifting of cost to consumers, and that also was confirmed by a Nobel Prize -winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz from Columbia University. There should be no price increases, because it’s nothing to do with future production costs. It’s for the past.

O’NEILL: If I’m living in New York and my home gets flooded out, how would I go about applying for these remediation funds?

RABE: You would contact your local assembly member, your local mayor, and let them know that this is a critical need and that you would like them to apply for a Climate Superfund grant to address flood protection or whatever the need is, if it’s climate-crisis related.

O’NEILL: What kind of response are you seeing?

RABE: There’s an overwhelming response from the environmental justice, faith, labor, local government officials, just a huge, big tent of organizations that push for this bill. We passed it only in two-and-a-half years, which is pretty big for a $75 million Climate Superfund Program. At the last minute, Governor Hochul was not sure. We were not sure. We were not sure whether she was going to sign it or not. And we had over 200 environmental leaders, including elders and youth from Fridays for the Future and the Third Act, Bill McKibben’s group, have a three day teach-in and sit-in calling on the governor to sign the bill into law. 

She did on Dec. 26 so this was a very robust and very strong campaign. The fossil fuel industry, of course, the Business Council, the American Petroleum Institute, were constantly opposing it and complaining, but you know, we all learn in kindergarten, if you make a mess, you have to clean it up. And we’re asking them to pay their fair share, not the whole bill, which is about $10 billion to $15 billion a year we need in New York.

O’NEILL: What do you see as the future of polluter pay laws like this?

RABE: This Climate Superfund Act is the second law of the land [including Vermont], but there are up to 10 other states that are introducing or have introduced climate Superfund bills, and we are looking at a state by state building block approach over the next four years under President Trump’s administration. 

The states are taking the lead, as they did with state Superfund, as they’ve done with pesticides and other environmental laws. The states are our innovators. They’re our laboratories. 

Many, many states in the future are going to see that it’s totally unfair for the taxpayers to be paying for the billions of dollars in climate damage repair, climate resilience programs and community protection programs, and local government is probably the first constituency that realizes this. They’re using up their rainy day funds. Local governments, counties and cities across the land are having to deal with tremendous repair costs after every extreme weather storm, and they then have to pass it on to the taxpayers and that’s just blatantly not fair. So climate Superfund, it’s the wave of the future. We’re going to have a federal law eventually, because we need one, and because polluters should pay their fair share.