“If Gov. Kathy Hochul’s extremist climate agenda marches ahead as planned, New Yorkers are set to see massive price hikes in their energy bills,” notes Real Clear Energy.
In December, Hochul signed the $75 billion dollar Climate Change Superfund Act into law, which will require oil companies to funnel $3 billion a year for 25 years into a government slush fund for public projects mitigating the alleged effects of climate change. Essentially, they want to raise funds without raising taxes and virtue signal to the climate zealots and uninformed.
Anticipating the increased costs of providing energy under the governor’s oppressive climate initiatives, companies like NYC’s main provider Consolidated Edison have proposed shocking rate hikes of 11.4% for electric services and 13.3% for gas – this would increase the average New Yorker’s energy bills by about $154 per month than what they paid in 2020.
Regardless of how its advocates try to sugar coat it, this new $3 billion per year tax will be paid by the people of New York. Oil companies will add this tax to the cost of the oil they sell, creating a toxic cycle of passing costs down to consumers through the burdensome demands of woke corporate capitalism and politicians’ moralistic agendas.
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New York has also banned natural gas hookups in new buildings, making it harder to access inexpensive energy and perhaps reducing precision and control in commercial cooking. This may eventually face legal challenges: In April 2023, a federal appeals court struck down a similar gas ban in the city of Berkeley, California, which was the first city in the nation to introduce such a ban.
New York is already a very high-tax, high-cost place to live, especially New York City. As former New York Lieutenant Governor Betsy McCaughey noted in 2023, “New Yorkers pay the highest combined state and local tax burden in the nation. Businesses here are also getting taxed to death. A whopping 158 Wall Street firms have moved their headquarters since the end of 2019, fed up with crime and high taxes. Hotels here are losing business because a 5.875% occupancy tax and stiff property taxes make rooms here more expensive than in other cities. New York can’t tax its way out of decline. It must cut taxes to rebound.”
