Make Polluters Pay

Make Polluters Pay

Polluters - not taxpayers - should pay to ready our cities for the floods, drought, and heat of climate change -and to clean up after storms like Sandy and Ida.

Belleville and Nutley should join 40 other NJ cities - plus Essex County - in passing resolutions to support that Act. It would collect $ billions for NJ from the biggest fossil fuel polluters. Those funds would go to NJ cities for climate infrastructure & cleanup. The first 33 cities who passed this resolution are listed here: https://tinyurl.com/338tw9ex

City support is important because, although the bill passed both environmental committees in the legislature, it needs to be brought to a full vote of the legislature to pass.

Polluters should pay - and our electeds should make them

Companies like Saudi Aramco, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Total Energies, Shell, and BP - all of which have emitted over a billion metric tons in carbon pollution - have invested vast sums for decades in successfully blocking solutions that would have saved tens of thousands of lives and billions of dollars in damage - devastation caused by the product they sell.

They've known for decades that their products disrupt the climate. But they've actively covered up this truth – and prevented corrective action.

The current, nearly unsustainable costs of increasingly severe weather events will only get worse. Experts estimate that the world will bear an estimated $38 trillion per year in damages every year within the next 25 years. (Kotz, M., Levermann, A. & Wenz, L. The economic commitment of climate change. Nature 628, 551–557 (2024) )

With their vast profits - made on the basis of lies - they can afford to pay to help communities get through the coming storms. Oil and gas companies have been making $2.7 billion dollars per day every day since 1970. (The geopolitics of trillion US$ oil & gas rents, Aviel Verbruggen, (11/22) International Journal of Sustainable Energy Planning and Management)

New York and Vermont have passed similar laws and will raise billions. NJ should not have to go without the critically important infrastructure improvements that this law would enable.

6/21 Note: This post was edited after learning that Belleville's Council, expected to consider voting on a resolution supporting this law at its June meeting, would not be doing so. Stay tuned – or message me on Facebook to learn more.