Writer (left) with sponsors of the renewal Act. Photo by Josh Kurtaz.
By Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi
The author works at the Maryland Commission on climate change. She lives in Annapolis and is the co-founder of Mizrahi Family Charitable Fund.
A terrible new tax is killing Marylander residents across the state. If you live in St. Mary County, your local government is now spending $ 950,000 per year to upgrade the infrastructure of water to handle heavy rain storms. Annapolis? Our city is spending $ 84 million to protect the city’s dock area from the chronological high tide. Howard County? To reduce the floods, it is going into a $ 228 million tunling under Elikot City.
These tax expenses are caused by climate change, and tax-dollar expenses are increasing every day, every day-Baltimore schools sometimes for efforts to save farm fields on the eastern coast at the cost of installing new air conditioners.
Prior to the Maryland Mahasabha, a bill is now designed to protect taxpayers from these rising costs. This is called “the answer to emergency needs from the extreme weather act (renewal). The Renewal Act is remarkably simple and fair. This will assess a one-time fee paid for more than a decade on fossil fuel companies that have used climate change the most and who have openly lied to the public-like the tobacco industry in the 1990s and recently Opioid industry-his role.
MLAs in New York, Vermont, Massachusetts and Maryland have introduced bills this year to achieve the same target at the state level. Minnesota and California bills are coming soon. Chicago and other cities are also prosecuted to make large fossil fuel companies accountable.
The Maryland Bill will raise $ 9 billion in a decade from the world’s 40 largest oil companies – Exon, Chevron, BP, etc. – who sell their products in our state and who deliberately cheated the public and have done the most to damage the climate. The state proposes to gather, 1% of those companies’ annual profits are just one-fifth.
The bill is structured so that companies cannot pass the cost on customers. How? Small oil companies that are not covered with fees, if big oil companies try to ding customers, will be excluded for wholesale distribution. Instead, the shareholders of Big Oil – who have earned a profit of hundreds of billions of billions of dollars by killing people and our shared planet – will absorb cost, as they should do.
So it actually comes down to options for MPs in Annapolis. Do they want the taxpayer climate in Maryland suffering economically from the extreme, which she did not do? Do they want big oil and gas to rob us the best police officers, teachers and firefighters to recruit, train and rob our ability to resolve affordable housing? Or do they want to pass the Renewal Act that only asks pollutants to pay for the dirt made by them?
Maryland is derogatoryly unsafe for climate change and village. Wes Moore has presented a very concrete plan to cut emissions below 60% from the level of 2005 by 2031, according to a law passed by the General Assembly in 2022. Yet this scheme – without full funding behind it – Marylanders cannot be avoided already expensive and rapidly deteriorating effects. The Renewal Act supplies the decarbonization schemes by providing $ 900 million per year in appropriate and targeted adaptation expenses.
Senate Chairman Bill Ferguson and Governor Moore have said that they do not want to increase significant taxes this year – but not passing the Renewal Act will effectively increase taxes through the back door in Maryland. Hundreds of dollars worth millions of dollars of Maryland taxpayers are still going to cure damage caused by climate change, and this number will only increase over time.
Someone will pay these costs – when the record rain destroys a road, it needs to be repaired – the only question is whether it will be a Maryland taxpayer or a large oil of the bill. Every year when the Renewal Act is not passed, there is another year when MPs from Maryland have chosen taxpayers from Maryland to bear this financial burden.
Governor is ready to go to the plan to correct our climate challenges. But big oil and gas should be paid for this. We all deserve a safe, cleaner, more economical Maryland.
Re -published