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A New York law signed by Gov. Kathy Hochul that would impose as much as $75 billion in liabilities on major fossil fuel companies by forcing them to pay into a state “climate super-fund” depending on their emissions would hurt way more than the firms themselves, West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey warned Friday.
“It would be catastrophic, not just for the economies of West Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania, but the economies of every state,” McCuskey said, as those states are likely to see the most negative effects due to their role in powering New York’s grid.
“If we don’t have access to reliable, inexpensive electricity, and the only way to make that right now is with fossil fuels, every American’s energy bills are going to skyrocket.”
McCuskey warned that it is those same energy companies that provide livable conditions and conveniences for the same New York City dwellers who boosted the policy.
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The skyscrapers dotting the city relied on Pennsylvania steel and West Virginia power to be built in the first place. McCuskey said it was “ironic” to see “people in Manhattan looking down on them – it’s that very coal power that they’re claiming now destroyed their city.”
McCuskey, leading about a score of other states in trying to halt New York’s law, said costs will rise across the board, including for commodities, transportation and other concerns not immediately thought of as being directly linked to fossil fuels or physical infrastructure.
Hochul has rebutted such opposition, claiming increasingly strong meteorological patterns are increasingly burdening New Yorkers with billions of dollars in health and environmental “consequences — due to polluters that have historically harmed our environment.”
“Establishing the Climate Superfund is the latest example of my administration taking action to hold polluters responsible for the damage done to our environment and requiring major investments in infrastructure and other projects critical to protecting our communities and economy,” Hochul said in a statement.
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McCuskey added that a second suit is confronting Vermont’s similar 2024 law as well – though he warned the Green Mountain State’s version does not have a $75 billion cap like the neighboring Empire State.
Vermont Republican Gov. Phil Scott declined to veto or sign that law, rendering it enacted.
State Rep. Martin LaLonde, D-South Burlington, predicted that “Big Oil will fight this in the courts,” but said in a statement at the time that the “stakes are too high and costs too steep for Vermonters to release corporations that caused this mess from their obligation to help clean it up.”
Hearings in the New York suit are expected to begin in July, McCuskey said, and he expected that no matter what happens in Albany’s judiciary, the Supreme Court will likely have to have the final word.
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About a dozen other states, including Illinois, Massachusetts and California, are pursuing similar legislation, McCuskey said, so litigators may soon have their hands full.
“The New York case is so incredibly important, $75 billion is outrageous. But if it were to be $75 billion times X number of states, it becomes the kind of lawfare that bankrupts energy companies,” he said.
A suit in Louisiana brought by coastal Plaquemines Parish recently cost Chevron billions for pollution plaintiffs claimed had been caused by its subsidiary Texaco – albeit decades ago, before the two companies were linked.
McCuskey said energy development and the coal and gas industries are so inextricably tied to West Virginia that a loss would be just as catastrophic for Mountaineers.
In the state, primed to celebrate its 162nd birthday on Friday, concerns over the undermining of the energy industry have been a rare point of bipartisanship on any state or federal issue.
Then-Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., so enraged actress Bette Midler for opposing provisions of then-President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan that she categorized West Virginians as poor and “strung-out” and wrongly wielding political power for having only the population the “size of Brooklyn.”
Manchin and now-Sen. Jim Justice II – then the state’s governor – didn’t take kindly to that characterization, with Justice taking to the House floor in Charleston and holding up his bulldog, Babydog — declaring that Midler could “kiss her heiney.”
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