Climate superfund bills have failed to pass in Democratic strongholds like California, Illinois, Oregon, and New Jersey over economic concerns
Janeese Lewis George, an avowed socialist who is heavily favored to become the next mayor of Washington, D.C., made energy affordability a central pillar of her campaign, stating that “all Washingtonians should be able to afford everyday needs like electricity.” But as a member of the D.C. city council, she authored legislation that would open the door to forcing oil and gas companies to pool billions of dollars into a climate fund, something experts say would make energy even more expensive in the city.
The legislation, known by supporters as the “make polluters pay” bill, would require the city government to fund a $200,000 “study” assessing the impact greenhouse gas emissions supposedly have on extreme weather events. According to advocates, the bill is the first step toward establishing a billion-dollar superfund that the largest producers of emissions, oil and gas companies, would somehow be forced to fund to support a wide variety of D.C. “climate adaptation” projects. It’s the first step because the city would use the study’s results to justify charging companies stiff fees under a superfund bill.
George formally unveiled her bill in January during a press conference where she led a “make polluters pay” chant and said her bill would ultimately “safeguard the future” of D.C. residents. “Climate change is not a distant threat, it is something the district is living with every single day,” she remarked. Area climate groups that have advocated for superfund legislation and other far-left climate policies—the CCAN Action Fund, which is the lobbying arm of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, and Sunrise D.C.—hosted the press conference.
George’s effort to fight climate change, however, contradicts the energy affordability message she has emphasized during her campaign for D.C. mayor. George, who won the Democratic primary in June with the backing of the Democratic Socialists of America, lists making energy bills more affordable as one of her top priorities, promising to lower utility bills and “put money back in our pockets.”
Tom Pyle, the president of the Institute for Energy Research, said the fees forced upon oil and gas companies under George’s “make polluters pay” plan would amount to a stealth tax on gasoline, heating, and utility bills, and choke off energy investment.
“D.C. residents are already paying some of the highest energy bills in the nation. This proposal would make them even higher and line the pockets of environmental lawyers at the same time,” Pyle told the Washington Free Beacon.
The economic ramifications of superfund laws are why similar bills have stalled in even the most Democratic states like California, Illinois, Oregon, and New Jersey. A study from the California Center for Jobs and the Economy concluded that a proposed superfund law would cause the state’s natural gas rates to rise 117 percent, gasoline prices to rise 43 percent, and electric rates to rise more than 8 percent, while costing billions in lost GDP and tax revenue.
D.C. wouldn’t be immune to such impacts—even as the city has pushed green energy and electric car mandates in recent years, the city is still heavily dependent on fossil fuels. The vast majority of the city’s electricity is imported from power plants in surrounding states where natural gas is the largest source of power. And about 95 percent of all cars registered in D.C. are gas-powered while the market share of electric cars has declined nearly 15 percent year-over-year, according to industry data.
“If companies are being charged extra, they’re going to find the money from somewhere,” said Jeffrey Kupfer, a former senior Department of Energy official during the George W. Bush administration who is now the president of the right-leaning environmental group ConservAmerica. “That’ll be an issue or they will just raise the prices that they charge for providing energy to make up for what they’re being forced to pay through these laws. It’s not as simple as the proponents make it seem to be, which is, ‘hey, let’s just go after some deep pockets, they’ll pay and the proceeds will benefit everybody.’ That is not empirically what would happen.”
Kupfer, whose organization advocates for market-based environmental policies, added that superfund laws are “fundamentally a bad policy concept.”
George, meanwhile, said when she announced her legislation that she modeled her bill after recent Maryland legislation, which allocates $470,000 for a study calculating the past and future costs associated with climate change.
As with George’s bill, the Free Beacon previously reported that the Chesapeake Climate Action Network was involved in getting the Maryland bill over the finish line. The state’s study will also be partially funded by a grant from the Rockefeller Family Fund, a left-wing environmental charity that advocates for superfund legislation nationwide, says oil companies “advance a business model that accelerates the climate crisis,” and has given $640,000 to the Chesapeake Climate Action Network since 2017, according to tax records.
There is, of course, the overriding issue of whether the local D.C. government would ever be able to compel big energy companies to write them checks. If George continues to prioritize superfund legislation after she enters office next year, it could threaten D.C.’s already shaky hold on “Home Rule” by drawing the ire of President Donald Trump. He has sharply criticized George as a “communist” and has threatened a federal takeover of D.C. if she wins. “We won’t put up with it. We’re not going to lose our businesses,” he said of George in June.
Nationally, the Department of Justice has filed lawsuits challenging climate superfund bills passed in Vermont and New York. The New York law stipulates that oil companies must pay the state $75 billion over the next 25 years, a bill the oil companies are unlikely to pay. The DOJ has argued that the laws are unconstitutional since they interfere with the federal government’s exclusive right to set certain policies. It has also argued that the laws “will raise energy costs for consumers nationwide and disrupt the uniform regulation of fossil fuel production.” A federal judge appeared to sympathize with the DOJ in a hearing late last month, E&E News reported.
The Institute for Energy Research’s Pyle agreed that the laws are unconstitutional, arguing they “slap retroactive liability on decades of perfectly legal, government-approved energy production.”
George’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
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