Climate Activists’ Protest Demands NY Gov. Hochul Sign ‘Make Polluters Pay’ Bill Before Year Ends

Interview with Michael Richardson, an activist with Third Act Upstate New York, conducted by Melinda Tuhus

From Dec. 10-12, dozens of elder and youth activists gathered for a protest in the War Room outside New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office at the state Capitol in Albany, to pressure her to sign the Climate Change Superfund Act, known widely as the “make polluters pay” bill. Nineteen climate activists were arrested for engaging in non-violent civil disobedience during the protest action.

The legislation would require the largest fossil fuel companies to pay $3 billion a year for 25 years in compensation for the pollution they’ve emitted over the previous two decades. The money would help pay to repair damage from past climate-fueled storms and harden the state’s infrastructure to prepare for future storm destruction. If signed into law, the bill would also provide funding to address public health issues, such as asthma, which is exacerbated by fossil fuel’s toxic emissions.

The mid-December protest at the Capitol included a sit-in, teach-in, sing-in, and die-in, as well as a rousing rally where participants chanted “Make polluters pay!” Michael Richardson, with the elder-focused group Third Act, initiated the action with his friend Sheldon Pollock and the youth climate group, Fridays for Future NYC. Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus, a participant in the action, spoke with Richardson who explains what the bill would do and why he believes this protest action was necessary.

MICHAEL RICHARDSON: The past few years, a coalition has been writing a very long sentence of why this needs to be done and what Sheldon and I saw is that we really needed something at the end that was more than another phone relay or another one-hour rally on the million-dollar staircase that we really needed to have an exclamation point on the back of that long sentence.

And we thought that we mobilized interfaith intergenerational intercultural sit-in, teach-in, sing-in, borrowing on strategies to go way back to the Vietnam sit-ins of the 1970s, 1960s that really started the University of Michigan. And as you can see from today, we had roughly 200 people—intergenerational intercultural interfaith show up. And well, we’ve been here since 10 o’clock this morning. Most of us are gonna stay until the building closes this evening, at which time we think that we’ll be asked to leave and some of us won’t.

So two-and-a-half day sit-in, teach-in, sing-in, who knows. Civil disobedience. But one thing I want to be clear about here, the Climate Change Super Fund does not do anything about greenhouse gases. This is going to the oil companies saying, you guys caused all this pollution that caused the storms that’s causing us to have all this damage and poor health, and we, the taxpayers, are being stuck with it. This is about playing fair.

We could really call this the Municipal Taxpayer Relief Act. We do have other legislation and this is why this is so important because this other legislation—cap, trade and invest and other bills that are coming forward bills to regulate these peaker plants that fire up every time, dirty oil, dirty gas—those are things where we’re going after the greenhouse gases today and tomorrow, and that’s where it affects our neighboring states. But even the Superfund Act, which is about past emissions, paying for the damage those past emissions caused, has a nationwide impact because Vermont has passed the bill, right? New York is next. This bill is on the desk in Massachusetts, in Maryland and California. So it is essential that New York do this to show the other states that it can be done.

MELINDA TUHUS: So I understand that there was a scientific reckoning of which companies owed which amounts. Is that right?

MICHAEL RICHARDSON: Yes. There’s a formula that has been largely agreed to where we know how much oil they produced in barrels and we know how much gas they put through their pipeline in cubic feet. And we also know how many tons of coal that they produce. So, records are there. And so you use a formula that if you burn those materials at a certain efficiency, you create certain amount of carbon dioxide and methane and the like. So the metrics are there. But of course the larger producers, Saudi Aramco, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Total, BP, those are going to be paying more than some other companies that will be paying less. So, there’s roughly 30 companies that are in the mix. The math works out that Saudi Aramco is such a heavy, heavy producer that they end up paying the bulk of the largest amount. And number two, number three, number four are right up there. So if you add their percentages, it gets to be about 60 percent of the fund will be coming from those four or five top companies.

MELINDA TUHUS: From your perspective, how has it been organizing mostly elders, like mostly through Third Act and, you know, organizing with the teenagers?

MICHAEL RICHARDSON: I get the sense from Summer of Heat when an intergenerational, intercultural group together came together for holding CitiGroup accountable for their financing of fossil fuel projects, that there is a strong desire for us to come together in unity on these campaigns to get out of our silos and out of our unique groups and lead out. Third Act, of course, has this foundation that this is to be youth-led and us as seniors—where we vote at a higher level and we have a lot of assets that are invested in the markets—that we should be backing the youth up. And so our real mission is not to lead the youth, but to back up the youth. So, this is an example of that coming together. But I tell you what’s important here is not just the bill, that’s our focus. It’s the movement. We have a long slog ahead of us. This is only the beginning.

For more information, visit Third Act – New York at thirdact.org/upstate-ny 
and Fridays for Future NYC at fridays4futurenyc.com.

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