Hochul's Planned Heist of Oil and Gas Revenues Will Only Raise Energy Costs for New Yorkers and Send Them Elsewhere

Doug Sheridan has several takes on Kathy Hochul’s climate lawfare initiative. They’re quite good, but I have a few more.

New York sinks into a green energy swamp of lawfare, spending, and higher energy prices for its residents that sends them looking for new homes

Here are Sheridan’s observations:

The WSJ Editorial Board writes, businesses and people are already leaving New York due to its tax-and-spending ratchet. Now its politicians are spreading the high costs of their progressive gov't to other states under the guise of climate remediation.

Gov. Kathy Hochul recently signed legislation requiring fossil-fuel producers to pay $75B to supposedly help the state adapt to climate change. “This landmark legislation shifts the cost of climate adaptation from everyday New Yorkers to the fossil fuel companies most responsible for the pollution," Hochul's office declared.

Under the program, bureaucrats will apportion responsibility for climate change among some three dozen companies that have sold fossil fuels in the state based on their global CO2 emissions from 2000 to 2018. Of course, most fossil-fuel emissions stem from their combustion—a necessity of modern life—rather than production.

The state plans to dun fossil-fuel producers a combined $3B annually over the next 25 years for their to-be-determined climate contribution. The law says this money could pay for “upgrades to roads, bridges, subways and transit systems," “preventive health care programs," “upgrading parts of the electrical grid" and “weatherization and energy efficiency upgrades" in buildings. Upgrading NYC's sewer system to "deal with regularly-occurring large rain events is estimated to cost around $100 billion," the law notes. Project contractors will have to pay inflated union prevailing wages.

Climate change is merely an excuse to get others to pay for upgrading infrastructure that NY politicians have failed to maintain because they divert so much money to welfare payments and fat public-worker pay and benefits. Now Hochul is grasping for revenue because GOP control of DC will likely mean less federal dollars for states. Since New Yorkers are taxed out, she's looking elsewhere for money.

Our Take 1: The massive spending on the energy transition that zealot politicians have engineered is failing. So their Plan B is to bleed dry the companies that produce—rather than the companies and persons that combust—fossil fuels.

Our Take 2: Extorting reparations from—followed by ruination of—the industry is the goal. So oil and gas companies need to take special care of what they admit to. These politicians aren't good-faith actors that will reward their go-alongism. Quite the opposite. In fact, we wonder if the inclination of some oil and gas execs to "go along" with policies that assign outsized responsibility for climate change to the industry—in hopes it might represent some kind of parapet against actions like this—could backfire if these cases make it to court.

Our Take 3: If oil and gas companies must be punished for legally selling their products, how can it be that do-gooder politicians in NY have allowed the sale and consumption of these same products—and will continue to do so?

Here are my additional takes:

Tom’s Take 1: This is all about virtue signaling at the front end and a blame game at the back end. It’s unlikely Hochul expects to collect anything at all. Indeed, I suspect she knows her green energy plan is failing and will cost New Yorkers big-time, so she wants to be able to say “we were going to cover the costs by going after those evil fossil fuel companies” but the courts shot us down.”

Tom’s Take 2: There is plenty of blame attributable to oil and gas companies here. They did nothing whatsoever when Governor Cuorruptocrat banned facking a decade ago. Instead, they simply wrote off New York and moved on to supposedly greener pastures, thereby emboldening New York to take several more steps to halt pipelines, gas connections, gas appliances, and the like. Worse, when they got a Supreme Court decision that would have allowed the Constitution Pipeline through New York to proceed, land having already been acquired and pipe positioned for construction, they said “never mind.” What should have happened in 2014 was an immediate ‘ton of bricks’ Federal lawsuit challenging that fracking ban, which subsequently metastasized to other states (e.g., Maryland) because nothing was done.

Tom’s Take 3: The oil and gas industry doesn’t grasp how to fight in states such as New York. Raised from birth in states such as Texas, Louisiana and Pennsylvania, it operates on the faulty assumption that nice guy, waiting bureaucrats out, strategies of simple persistence will win the day. It never does in a place such as New York where that only means you’re a patsy. The one and only thing New York State politicians respect is a punch in the face. That means not only lawsuits but also wading into enemy territory and taking prisoners. One cannot win by playing ‘me too’ green energy games that only give the game away, which is precisely what far too many pro-energy organizations do. What’s required, instead, is advocacy on behalf of consumers who see how they are being cheated by policies Hochul is enacting and that the $75 billion would only come out of their pockets if it became reality.

The good news here is that Kathy Hochul is creating the circumstances that will allow a complete reversal of everything green she’s doing, and when it gets bad enough, she will flip as they all do. That’s because there are no principles involved, only political calculations. Indeed, she’ll lead the effort to re-energize New York when it becomes convenient to do so and she’ll blame the past on all of us, of course.

#Hochul #Cuomo #Electricity #NaturalGas #ElectricGrid #Oil #Gas #$75billion #Lawsuits #DougSheridan