Anne Marie Garti, (718) 601-9618

CT, ME, MA, NH, NJ, NY, PA, RI, VT — Over 200 organizations, citizens groups, farms, and businesses wrote to nine Northeastern governors today, urging them to stand firm and united against the Trump administration’s goal of reviving gas pipelines that were proposed in the region years ago and then abandoned by the project proponents.

The letter thanks the governors for their role in moving the region “towards a cleaner energy system that is protective of our environment, and of our rights to self-determination as states, communities, and landowners.”

The organizations that drafted the letter are Stop the Pipeline (STP), which spearheaded the legal and political grassroots effort in New York that defeated the Constitution Pipeline, and the Pipe Line Awareness Network for the Northeast (PLAN), which coordinated legal, regulatory, and grassroots pushback against Kinder Morgan’s Northeast Energy Direct project in multiple states (chiefly Massachusetts and New Hampshire).

Trump declared a “national energy emergency” on Inauguration Day, and followed up with another executive order on Valentine’s Day establishing a “national energy dominance council.” He has subsequently pressured NY Governor Hochul to allow the Constitution Pipeline to be built. This strong-arming is reverberating throughout the region as proponents of gas pipelines put pressure on other governors, such as Massachusetts’ Governor Healey, who has been a strong opponent of expensive and destructive pipeline proposals in her state.

“These pipelines did not move forward when they were proposed because they were being funded by gas drillers and pipeline companies who had no respect for state laws that guarantee protections of our natural resources, particularly our pristine and irreplaceable water quality,” said Anne Marie Garti, a founder of STP and co-counsel of the group (with the Pace Environmental Litigation Clinic).

After years of resisting these energy conglomerates, people of the region are familiar with their playbook. As the letter states, “Today, more people than ever are awake, engaged, and resolved to stand up against the tyranny of greed. We have real solutions, and we are implementing them.”

Kathryn Eiseman, PLAN’s president, explains: “Over-reliance on natural gas makes consumers captive to the fluctuations of commodities markets. Diversifying our energy resources – particularly by expanding non-commodity based resources such as wind, solar, energy efficiency and other demand-side solutions – is what ultimately can free us from price spikes.”

The letter’s core message to the governors: “The 233 undersigned organizations ask you, as the leaders of our States, to stand united with each other and with us, to protect our hard-fought victories against the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure and to focus on fulfilling our climate goals. … Our stance against the buildout of gas infrastructure, after all we have achieved, is non-negotiable.”

Like a mob boss, the government threatens to cut off two of the university’s fingers: academic freedom and faculty governance
Wed 19 Mar 2025 05.00 EDT

On 15 March, Columbia University received what can only be described as the most dangerous letter in the history of higher education in America. The sender was the United States government. Like a ransom note, the government letter insists that Columbia comply with a list of Trump administration demands in order to even have a chance at recovering the $400m in federal funding for scientific research that the government canceled on 7 March.

Oddly, one of the specific targets identified in the letter was Columbia’s department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies (Mesaas), a small humanities department devoted to studying the languages, cultures and history of those regions. The government demanded the Mesaas department be put into “receivership” – basically, be taken over by the university – as a precondition to further negotiations.
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The battle against the authoritarianism taking hold in Washington now appears to turn in part on the fate of Mesaas.

Why Mesaas?

The Trump campaign to destroy the independence of American higher education began when an obscure federal agency, the General Services Administration (GSA), in collaboration with the Departments of Health and Human Services and Education, coordinated the extraordinary move to rescind $400m in federal funding for scientific research at Columbia, since Columbia “has fundamentally failed to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment”.

After threatening some 60 other universities with the same fate, on 13 March the government sent their ransom note to Columbia alone. Their conditions were to be met within seven days, and not in return for the release of the funds, but merely as “preconditions”. Further demands would then be presented for “formal negotiation” – which would not be an actual negotiation, because the GSA would continue to hold back the university’s money, like a mobster.

The preconditions concern mainly the policing of student protest on campus. Their imposition likely violates both federal law and the US constitution, as Columbia law faculty have made clear. But in a startling and equally unlawful move the government took another hostage in its letter: Mesaas. For a period of five years, Columbia must place the department in academic receivership. The university was given the same seven-day ultimatum by which to specify “a full plan, with date-certain deliverables” for enforcing the receivership.

This is an unparalleled attempt to seize control over people and ideas in a US university. Universities do find it necessary sometimes to place an academic department in receivership, typically when the department’s self-governance breaks down. Normally the administration will appoint as chair a member of another department, for one academic year. Mesaas’s current self-governance is outstanding, and there have been no problems in all the years that that I chaired the department.

For the United States government itself to intervene directly in faculty governance – specifying the extraordinary five-year period, and with “deliverables” on whose performance the future funding of the entire university might depend – is without precedent in the history of US higher education.

Why has the government chosen to single out this department?

The answer is clear: because its faculty have not voiced steadfast support for the state of Israel in their scholarship. The US government stands almost alone in the world in its unwavering ideological and financial support for the violence of the state of Israel against the people of Palestine. Most recently it has provided the consent, the justification and the arms for Israel’s destruction of Gaza. (Just this week, the destruction was relaunched, to condemnation from around the world but not from Washington, which alone gave its support.)

In contrast, academic research by prominent scholars in the field of Middle Eastern studies, including those in Mesaas, has reflected deeply on the complexity of the situation and has long since questioned the versions of history and racial ideas fueling Israel’s actions. Mesaas professors ask hard but entirely legitimate questions about Israel – and our government wants to ban that.

The Mesaas department played no role in organizing student protests for Gaza. But Washington has decided that in addition to dictating how a university should govern political protest, it should control how the university governs academic research –intensifying a broad attack on research on the Middle East across US universities.

With its demands to essentially seize control of Mesaas, the federal government is undermining two fundamental principles of the American university: the right of academic departments to self-government and the freedom of members of the faculty to express their views, without fear, both as authorities in their fields of inquiry and as private individuals.
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Columbia is required to decide by Thursday 20 March how to respond to this ransom note, with the government threatening to cut off two of the university’s fingers: academic freedom and faculty governance. If the Columbia administration capitulates, it will mark the beginning of its own destruction and that of the American university as such – precisely what the American Enterprise Institute, which supplied the template for the note, has called for.

The courts have so far paused more than 40 of the administration’s initiatives, though it remains unclear if the mob boss will obey. So long as we do have a functional judicial system, however, Columbia’s answer to Trump can only be: see you in court.

Sheldon Pollock FBA is the Arvind Raghunathan professor emeritus of South Asian studies at Columbia University and former chair of the Mesaas department. He currently has no role in department or university administration and writes only in a personal capacity.

The Los Angeles mega-fires demonstrate that climate change threatens not only people’s lives but also their access to affordable insurance. Uninsurable property is all but impossible to sell. Absent fundamental reforms, homeowners as well as renters stand to suffer. More broadly — experts say this is a global problem — the result could be crumbling housing markets, which could trigger a collapse of the larger financial system as occurred in 2007.

In this press briefing, leading insurance experts and journalists who’ve covered this subject offered substantive insights and practical suggestions for how you and your news outlet can tackle what promises to be a central, and contentious, part of the climate story going forward.

Panelists
Anita Chabria, California Columnist, Los Angeles Times
Christopher Flavelle, Climate Adaptation Reporter, The New York Times
Dave Jones, Insurance Commissioner, Emeritus; Director, Climate Risk Initiative
Leslie Kaufman, Climate and Environment Reporter, Bloomberg
Mark Hertsgaard, CCNow executive director and co-founder, moderated.

In the News:
Climate Change Superfund
Sit-in, Teach-in, Sing-in
Climate activists arrested at NY State Capitol during three-day sit-in over climate legislation

Twelve elders were arrested on misdemeanor charges for “criminal trespassing” on the evening of December 10 and seven more elders on the evening of December 11 while sitting around the Christmas tree outside the Governor’s office singing carols with lyrics adapted to bring attention to the urgent need for signing the Climate Change Superfund Act.

Newscasts – watch/listen

Democracy Now with Amy Goodman (12.11.24) – clip of rally and sit-in arrests: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdvVha14gyw

Spectrum News (12.10.24): https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/politics/2024/12/11/advocates-push-climate-change-superfund-
New York Public News Network – Rochester/Binghamton/Adirondacks (12.13.24): https://www.wxxinews.org/2024-12-13/environmental-activists-arrested-at-ny-state-capitol-during-protests-over-climate-legislation

https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/story/50940/20241213/activists-arrested-at-nys-capitol-during-protests-over-climate-legislation

News Articles – read all about it

Inside Climate News (12.11.24): https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11122024/new-york-climate-activists-urge-gov-hochul-to-sign-superfund-bill/

Nexstar Media (12.13.24) Three-day Capitol climate sit-in ends with HEAT Act push – good photos: https://www.wwlp.com/news/three-day-capitol-climate-sit-in-ends-with-heat-act-push/

Hudson Valley Post (12.11.24): https://hudsonvalleypost.com/new-york-capitol-sit-in/

One Earth Now – Substack (12.11.24): https://oneearthnow.substack.com/p/new-york-is-on-the-verge-of-passing?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email#media-4022ade4-5e16-484a-826d-1441afc42ded
Radio Interviews – listen

Green Radio Hour (12.9.24) – Jon Bowermaster interviews Michael Richardson, Third Act Upstate New York: (go to 33:43): https://radiokingston.org/en/broadcast/green-radio-hour-w-jon-bowermaster/episodes/paul-watson-from-prison-third-act-pushes-hochul

The Brian Lehrer Show (12.13.23) – Climate Change Superfund at 8:55 to 12:02: https://www.wnyc.org/story/the-bills-awaiting-kathy-hochuls-signature

ALBANY, N.Y.—Climate activists were in the holiday spirit Tuesday as they occupied a festive, mural-clad reception room near Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office. To cheers of “climate change is coming to town,” protestors urged Hochul to close the year by signing what could be the nation’s second climate adaptation bill.

The Climate Change Superfund Act, New York’s answer to the skyrocketing costs of dealing with damages from climate change, was the focus of about 200 climate change organizers, who pressed Hochul to sign the bill as quickly as possible—and with no major changes. The group, which was sponsored by 43 environmental organizations, was prepared to continue sitting in until Thursday.

Twelve organizers were arrested Tuesday for conducting the demonstration past 7 p.m., according to New York State Police. They were charged with criminal trespass and issued tickets to appear at Albany City Court on Jan. 7.

Lawmakers say that the superfund would give New York a badly needed new source of revenue to help it adapt to statewide, irreversible environmental damage. The bill borrows from the federal “polluter pays” principle, which allows the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to hold companies accountable for releasing pollution into the environment. But it strays from that slightly by applying the concept to manufacturers of fossil fuels, not all air pollution emitters.

Under the superfund act, the world’s largest fossil fuel companies would be required to pay the Empire State billions for the damages caused by their products, raising $75 billion over 25 years. Fees would be allocated according to a company’s share of emissions from 2000 to 2018. By the turn of the millennium, climate science was so well established that “no reasonable corporate actor could have failed to anticipate regulatory action to address its impacts,” lawmakers wrote in the bill.

At least 40 percent of the money contributed, $26.25 billion, would go toward climate adaptation projects in disadvantaged communities. The law will not target future fossil fuel production and therefore will not directly affect future emissions.

Business groups in New York have urged Hochul not to sign the bill, calling it an unfair approach to addressing problems that affect everybody and arguing that it will raise prices for consumers.

Economists have pushed back on the latter argument, saying that because the law covers past sales, fossil fuel companies cannot pass along the costs to consumers at the pump.

The superfund would shift some of the burden of climate adaptation away from taxpayers, who the state projects will be on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars to address climate damages in the coming decades, and onto the ledgers of fossil fuel companies, whose products have contributed excess greenhouse gases to the atmosphere while raking in immense profits for their shareholders.

Last year, three of the world’s largest oil and gas companies—Exxon, Chevron and Shell—reported combined profits of over $85.6 billion. It is unlikely that yearly payouts for any of those companies would eclipse 5 percent of their 2023 earnings.

Earlier this month, Politico reported that Hochul sent Democratic lawmakers suggested changes to the superfund act, indicating that she may be leaning toward signing it. Her proposals included extending the covered period to 2024 and giving the executive branch more control over when funds are spent, among several others.

Many of the activists in Albany said the bill’s basic premises—$75 billion over 25 years in even increments, with at least 35 percent of that money going toward disadvantaged communities—must remain untouched in negotiations.

“We’re really confident with the legislation as it has been written,” said Keanu Arpels-Josiah, an organizer with Fridays For Future NYC, a regional branch of the international, student-driven climate activist organization.

“We’re really concerned hearing about these kinds of negotiations going on” if they could lead to a weakened bill, he added. “We’re hopeful that the legislation will be signed, but we’re only celebrating that if it is the strong legislation that is written.”

Arpels-Josiah, a first-year student at Swarthmore College, wore a surgical mask, blue pants and grey fleece to give him some warmth on the dreary, wet day. In New York City, where Arpels-Josiah is from, “I feel like every time it rains now there’s flooding,” he said. Stormwater and sewage infrastructure upgrades are vital for the city’s future, and cooling centers in the city—spaces in air-conditioned buildings open to the public during the summer—could also use funding from this bill, he said.

At a press conference in the Capitol on an opulent set of stone stairs known as the “million-dollar staircase,” spokespersons from seven organizations said that Hochul’s political legacy, and the health of future generations of New Yorkers, were both reasons she should sign the bill as quickly as possible.

“The environment I grew up in is not the environment children today grow up in,” said Blair Horner, executive director of the New York Public Interest Group, a nonpartisan research and education nonprofit. “Fossil fuel companies are making our lives worse and making our taxes go up. Governor Hochul can do something about both with the stroke of a pen.”

“You will be judged by decisions you make in the next couple days, none more so than whether or not you sign this bill,” said Fred Kowal, president of the United University Professions, a labor union. “We will vote in 2026 based on how Kathy Hochul behaves.”

Other speakers offered a more somber message. “We are all unavoidably involved in a fossil fuel economy,” said the Rev. John Paarlberg, a member of the social justice commission of the New York State Council of Churches. “But some are much more responsible and culpable than others.”

Oil companies, he said, have known about the effects of their product on the Earth’s atmosphere for decades and have relentlessly tried to suppress that knowledge.

“Major oil companies have reaped enormous profits from selling fossil fuels,” he said. “Jesus said to whom much has been given, much will be required. It is fair and just that those who have reaped such enormous profits from selling products that they knew were harming the environment should shoulder the responsibility and the costs of repairing the damage and helping us become more resilient.”

Justin Flagg, director of communications and environmental policy for state Sen. Liz Krueger, a Manhattan Democrat and the bill’s sponsor, said Krueger remains optimistic as Hochul and lawmakers engage in negotiations over amendments.

Business groups opposed to the bill do not see any merit in the amendment process. “The bill should be vetoed,” said Ken Pokalsky, vice president of the Business Council of New York State, in an email. “We are not pushing for any amendments because we believe this is fundamentally flawed policy, legally suspect, with major implementation issues.”

In May, Vermont became the first state to pass climate superfund legislation. California, Maryland, Massachustts and New Jersey are all developing similar bills.

Hochul has until the end of the year to sign or veto the bill. “Today was a real show of power,” Arpels-Josiah said on a bus back to New York City from Albany. “This legislation could mean a world of difference for many, many lives throughout the state.”

BY MARIE J. FRENCH – December 5, 2024 3:53 pm

ALBANY, New York — Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed tweaks to lawmakers’ most recent signature climate bill earlier this week, opening the door to negotiations.

The bill’s sponsors told POLITICO on Thursday that those tweaks came in the form of chapter amendments circulated by Hochul’s office. It’s a significant step that indicates the governor is considering signing off on the Climate Superfund bill — and it jumpstarts discussions before the end of the year, the deadline for the governor to act on bills passed this session.

“It’s a good sign that the governor’s office is proposing changes as opposed to vetoing the bill,” said Assemblymember Jeff Dinowitz, a Democrat from the Bronx and the bill’s sponsor. “We have a few weeks to figure this out.”

Why it matters: The Climate Superfund measure seeks to raise $75 billion over 25 years from oil giants to fund investments in response to the impacts of climate change. Vermont’s governor signed a similar bill earlier this year.

Because the charges would be based on past sales, proponents of the idea say companies won’t be able to pass costs directly on to consumers. Business groups, including the fossil fuel industry, have urged Hochul to veto the bill and have raised affordability concerns.

Over the past month, bill supporters have revved up their push for Hochul to sign the bill, pointing to the risks President-elect Donald Trump and the incoming Republican Congress pose to environmental action on the national level.

“We know it’s not going to be good when it comes to the environment and climate change,” said Sen. Liz Krueger, a Democrat from Manhattan and sponsor of the bill. “We in New York State have to move forward with dealing with the mitigation of the damage.”

Details: A spokesperson for Hochul declined to comment on the bill negotiations.

Dinowitz said he was still parsing the proposed changes, but generally said they would give the executive branch more authority.

“I do want very much for this to become law, but I don’t want to see the bill eviscerated — I’m not saying that’s what the changes do,” Dinowitz said. “Their proposals are so numerous, like for example they want to spend the money… whenever they decide to spend it. That’s something that gives me concern.”

Both Krueger and Dinowitz said the amendments would extend the covered period of fossil fuel sales for which companies would be charged on a proportional basis. The measure lawmakers passed looked at the 2000 through 2018 time period to allocate costs, while Hochul is proposing 2000 to 2024, Dinowitz said.

The changes also involve giving more time for the Department of Environmental Conservation to implement the program, the lawmakers said. Given the expected litigation, that doesn’t appear to be a dealbreaker.

“That I don’t think upsets me that much,” Krueger said.

What’s next: Democratic lawmakers and the governor have until the end of the year to negotiate changes to the bill, which would be passed during session next year if Hochul signs on.