One of the California bills that made climate activists most excited last year was SB 1497 (Menjivar) Polluters Pay Climate Cost Recovery Act of 2024. The bill was one of several similar bills proposed in states across the country that would invoice the largest greenhouse gas polluters for the climate impacts caused locally by their pollution. The bills used the same “polluter pays” principle behind legal EPA superfund sites, in which responsible parties are later compelled to perform cleanups or pay to clean up the damage from their pollution.

Predictably, the idea was attacked (falsely) as a tax that would increase costs, a powerful argument in an election year with inflation top of mind. Senator Menjivar’s bill never made it out of the California Senate, but similar bills were passed in Vermont and New York. Vermont’s bill became law in May, but it was very much up in the air whether New York governor Kathy Hochul would sign it. The governor remained silent on the bill as she paused another climate-related action, New York City’s congestion fee (an ultimately temporary pause with a clearly political motive). On December 26, with the election behind us, Hochul signed the Superfund law. This is a big win for New York climate activists and makes it more likely that the idea will be brought back in California.

Bill McKibben explains that New York’s Superfund law is unlikely to lead to higher costs for consumers because fossil fuel prices are set in a global market and the fees resulting from the law will be proportionally tiny compared to that market. In California, the argument made by some more conservative Democrats who opposed SB 1497, that they didn’t want to pass something they considered akin to a tax, was particularly hypocritical as the same legislators placed a $10 billion climate bond on the ballot, a measure (Prop 4) that the state’s voters approved with nearly 60% of the vote in November.

With the election now history, inflation cooled, the economy performing well, and Californians’ desire for investment in climate resilience demonstrated by their support of Prop 4, you might expect Democrats (who continue to hold a super-majority in the state legislature) to be planning meaningful climate action such as a Polluters Pay Climate Superfund bill. Instead, the watchword is “affordability.” This is the lesson Democratic politicians seemingly learned from Trump’s narrow victory in November.

Of course affordability is important, but in his December 24 Boiling Point column, Sammy Roth hits on a very important point: there are costs involved in the clean energy transition, but there are higher costs to inaction.

“That kind of [affordability] rhetoric is unfortunate because it hides the costs of oil and gas that we tend to ignore, or to accept as inevitable: higher rates of asthma, heart attacks, cancer and deaths; infrastructure damage from heat waves; more dangerous storms and sea level rise driven by climate change; and exposure to global oil and gas markets that can be manipulated or thrown into chaos by political adversaries such as Russia.”

Here’s an interesting stat to consider in light of all the talk about California’s “skyrocketing utility bills.” California ranks 41st in terms of average monthly household energy cost. Yes, we have electricity rates that are second only to Hawaii, but we use significantly less electricity (and energy generally) than Americans in other states, thanks in large part to California’s leadership in building energy efficiency standards. In other words, the myopic focus on rates misses the more important stat of overall costs. Similarly, a focus on the costs of addressing climate pollution leave out the costs of the status quo.

And these are not just abstract future societal costs, but real household costs related to health care, missed days at work or school, home insurance, and rebuilding after disasters. Just as California invested in rules that made our buildings more efficient, we must invest in our transition to a green economy. This investment will pay for itself many times over.

In 2025, it is time to flip the affordability question on its head. If affordability is king, can we afford not to act on climate? Or in the case of the climate superfund bill, can we afford to let polluters off the hook?