Climate lawfare could raise household energy costs by nearly $1,500 per year as lawsuits, climate superfund laws and legislation target energy companies.
Page F3From§Eachthe sunrise edition — 7 October 2026
New York Post prices transit tax at $17 billion, then $1 billion, then $17 billion, same day
As it ran on the front
The story does not pin the number to one lawsuit, one statute, or one state; it is a total built from several pending threats, and the word doing the work is "nearly." The source hedges its own number.
One of the lawsuits that total depends on has a documented history in print, nine days earlier, in the New York Post. On September 28, the Post ran three versions of the same story about a five-county Bay Area sales tax built to fund transit. The third put the number back at $17 billion. Two figures, seventeen-fold apart, appear three times, in one day, about one tax.…
…(cont) It does not show a correction filed against any of them — no editor's note, no clarification, no explanation of which number was wrong, or whether both were. The correction count for a $16 billion swing, run twice in a single news day, stands at zero.
That is the gap sitting underneath the $1,500. Fox wants a reader angry at an exact-sounding, hedged number tied to lawsuits it does not name individually. The same week, a tax figure central to one of those underlying fights moved by sixteen billion dollars, in both directions, inside twenty-four hours, and the correction count on that move held at zero. The $1,500 is precise in its phrasing and loose in its sourcing. The $17 billion — then $1 billion, then $17 billion again — is stated with full confidence three times and reconciled zero times.
Hon, when a number can swing seventeen-fold in a single day and the correction count stays at zero, the number was not load-bearing. It was decoration on a direction the story had already picked: climate costs money, so be angry. Whether the arithmetic holds up is, on this record, a question the correction desk has filed zero queries about.
“Fox wants you scared that climate lawsuits could cost you fifteen hundred bucks a year, fine, write it down. Same week, the New York Post can't settle on whether a transit tax costs one billion or seventeen, and runs both as fact, twice, in a single day. The number was never the story, the panic was the product, and the correction count on that swing sits at zero.”
“Look, a headline getting a number re-estimated is not a scandal, that's called journalism — did I say re-estimated? I mean revised, numbers get revised, that's normal, that happens, that's — okay, three headlines in one day flipping between one billion and seventeen is a lot of revising, but the fifteen-hundred-dollar figure, that one's solid, that one Fox checked, probably.”
The receipts
· This $17B tax grab would fund bureaucrats who want you to stop driving from the morgue, 28 Sep 2026
· The $1B tax grab that would fund bureaucrats who want you to stop driving from the morgue, 28 Sep 2026
· The $17B tax grab that would fund bureaucrats who want you to stop driving from the morgue, 28 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.