New Yorkers, beware the law of unintended consequences.

From an item at the New York Post comes the news that Kathy Hochul has just signed a new bill, “modeled after a federal law that holds polluters responsible for abandoned toxic-waste sites,” which establishes the New York Climate Superfund. This endowment will be funded by energy companies that deal in gas, oil, and coal, and the money will finance “resiliency projects,” like initiatives to shore up the coast and mitigate flooding—because obviously as every progressive and mainstream media consumer “knows,” energy that comes from “fossil fuels” cause “climate change.”

As of now, a number of companies operating in New York have been hit with $75 billion in fines, which are to be paid into the fund over the span of a decade. Per the NY Post:

The oil giant Saudi Aramco of Saudi Arabia could be slapped with the largest annual assessment of any company — $640 million a year — for emitting 31,269 million tons of greenhouse gases from 2000 to 2020.

Aramco — formally known as the Saudi Arabian Oil Co. — is owned by the Saudi Royal family.

The state-owned Mexican oil firm Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, emitted 9,512 tons of CO2 and could face an $193 million assessment for generating 9,512 million tons of greenhouse gases.

Russia’s Lukoil could be assessed with a $100 million yearly fee for spewing 4,912 millions of CO2.

The 38 companies identified as carbon polluters include American petro giants such as Exxon and Chevron as well as Shell and BP in the UK, Total Energies IES in France, Petrobras in Brazil, BHP in Australia, Glencore in Switzerland, Equinor in Norway and ENI in Italy.

Another greedy, communistic money grab. What the left doesn’t get as they cheer on the theft is that once it’s normalized for the “ultra rich” it’s then normalized for the “rich”... and then it’s normalized for the upper middle class… then the lower middle class, and so on—it’s a war on wealth, using Saul Alinsky’s infamous line about “rub[bing] raw the sores of discontent” as a vehicle.

Did you know that when the federal income tax started it only applied to less than 1% of Americans? Now look where we are.

The way I see it, there are two possible outcomes—first, these companies could stop doing business in New York altogether. If that were to happen, the gas stations would run out of fuel (like every other socialist government that obliterates the economy), people would be unable to heat their homes (even in a New York winter), and cooking over a fire pit replaces the electric or gas oven (if food even continues to be trucked in to the state).

But secondly, and this is obviously what we all expect, the cost of the fines will just be passed on to the consumer, energy prices will skyrocket, and the cost of everything will surge.

Obviously, neither of these outcomes is a good deal for a single New Yorker.

And there can only be one of two reasons to explain Hochul’s decision to sign this bill into law—either she’s a special kind of stupid and all the evidence of attacking energy directly causing increased costs somehow didn’t sink in to her thick skull, or it’s intentional to impoverish the people she’s supposed to serve. Maybe, it’s a lot of both.

Image: Metropolitan Transportation Authority of the State of New York (Marc A. Hermann / MTA), CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, unaltered.