When State Assemblyman Jeffery Dinowitz and Senator Liz Krueger introduced New York’s Climate Change Super Fund bill last spring, they had a clear message: it’s time to put a price tag on the fossil fuel industry’s contribution to climate change.
The bill, which supporters are pushing to see included in the state budget that's due April 1, would require the most prolific oil and gas producers to pay $3 billion dollars a year for the next 25 years for their share of total greenhouse gas emissions.
The money, $75 billion in total, would be poured into infrastructure adaptation projects to protect the state from the effects of global warming. Dinowitz calls the bill a “game changer”—the first in the country to make the fossil fuel industry contribute financially to climate change adaptation and mitigation efforts, a cost that usually falls on taxpayers.
“You do the damage, you gotta fix it,” Dinowitz told City Limits.
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