From§Each

Page B51From§Eachthe evening edition — 2 November 2026

Court excuses fossil fuel companies from paying for climate damage; Washington bills tribes $470 million instead.

By MortThe Records Bureau

“Ahead of COP31, 146 Scientists Urge UN to Declare Climate Change a Global Health Emergency”, 28 October 2026 (Photo via Common Dreams — the original report)

As it ran on the front

It was born in Albany to require fossil fuel companies to pay into a fund sized to climate damage the state said had already been done. It had collected nothing yet. It is survived by that damage, which the ruling did not undo, only the collecting of it.

It is preceded in death by the plainer promise that whoever makes the mess pays before anyone else does. Scientists do not deal in that kind of promise; they deal in a count, and they are not bunk. On Oct. 28, with less than two weeks left before the United Nations climate conference opens in Antalya, Turkey, 146 of them asked the UN to declare climate change a global health emergency. Their figure comes from the Lancet's annual tally of accelerating harms, and it kept accumulating on schedule, with or without a fund in New York to spend against it.…

…(cont) The bill came due again, and again not to the company. DOGE, the federal office that cuts programs and calls the cutting savings, took $470 million earmarked for tribal climate projects, a cut Grist reports was compounded by the rollback of the Inflation Reduction Act grants that had funded the same work. Two sources of money, now both gone, in a part of the country that had run a federal funding gap for decades before this particular one.

That finding has company this week. A poll for Grist, conducted with Data for Progress, finds that most voters now say climate change threatens the American Dream. Grist's own reporting calls the home at the center of that dream a trap as often as a nest egg these days; the companies named in the dead New York lawsuit do not pay for either problem, and neither, now, does the federal government that briefly funded the tribes trying to adapt to both.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that the $470 million go back to Indian Country before Washington finds a new name for cutting it, and that the next climate liability law name, in the same sentence as its defendant, who collects if the defendant wins in court.

“The company that broke it walks, and the tribe that didn't gets the bill — that's not an accident, that's the whole racket laid out in one week. Watch where the "savings" land: the $470 million DOGE cut from tribal climate money is the same $470 million a court just said no company has to pay back. You pay for the house that's underwater either way; they just moved the receipt to Indian Country.”
Sal
“Look, the court didn't say fossil fuel companies did nothing wrong — it said New York can't be the one to collect, that's just federalism working as designed, states don't get to freelance on this stuff. And the tribal cuts, that's waste, fraud, and abuse, pure and simple, nothing to do with — wait, it's the exact same $470 million as the climate grants? Did I say that? That doesn't sound like me.”
Chip

Earlier in this story

The receipts

Ahead of COP31, 146 Scientists Urge UN to Declare Climate Change a Global Health Emergency Heat already killed 50,000 in Europe this summer. Scientists want it declared an emergency.
Common Dreams§

With less than two weeks to go until the 31st United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP31, brings world leaders to Antalya, Türkiye to discuss the need to transition away from fossil fuels, nearly 150 international experts warned that climate change brought on by greenhouse gas emissions constitutes a "global health emergency"…

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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.