States continue with bold efforts to force companies to clean up their mess: 'Not paying their fair share for the ... crisis that they've caused'
Nearly a dozen states have drafted legislation to hold dirty energy companies fiscally responsible for environmental harms and the impact of rising temperatures they've caused.
In 2024, lawmakers in Vermont advanced legislation "modeled after the EPA's Superfund program." A year prior, residents experienced unprecedented, catastrophic flooding, a form of extreme weather the state later warned would likely become more common, including because of a warming climate.
Vermont's first-of-its-kind legislation was passed in June 2024. At the time, Elena Mihaly of the Conservation Law Foundation said the bill was not about "punishing" oil companies. "If you contributed to a mess, you should play a role in cleaning it up," Mihaly told the Guardian.
According to Grist, Vermont's novel Superfund bill "requires major oil and gas companies to pay for climate-related disaster and adaptation costs, based on their share of global greenhouse gas emissions over the past few decades."
The state encountered predictable pushback from dirty fuel corporations and lobbyists, but that hasn't stopped other states from adopting the same approach. Lawmakers in New York passed similar legislation in June 2024, ultimately seeking $75 billion from oil companies.
Efforts to make "polluters pay" were already underway in California when swaths of the broader Los Angeles area were devastated by another form of extreme weather — devastating wildfires that engulfed homes, caused chaotic evacuations, and killed 30 people.
By March, costs associated with the January 2025 wildfires were estimated at between "$76 billion and $131 billion, with insured losses estimated [at] up to $45 billion."
California's efforts to make polluters pay hit a roadblock in the form of a successful, $80 million lobbying effort to spike the bill — but as extreme weather becomes a "new norm" and disaster costs stack up, lawmakers persist in their attempts to hold oil companies accountable.
"We realized that these big fossil fuel companies were, frankly, not paying their fair share for the climate crisis that they've caused," said Adrian Boafo, a Maryland state delegate and co-sponsor of a similar superfund bill.
Big Oil's big pockets are infamous, and efforts to sabotage state-level Superfund bills are not unexpected. Nevertheless, the costs of a warming globe aren't going anywhere, and neither are the state lawmakers faced with ever-increasing cleanup costs.
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Columbia University climate law fellow Martin Lockman, who said advancing science has made it much easier to attribute emissions to specific companies, told Grist that state-level politicians can't ignore the issue at a budgetary level, due to "really serious questions about how our society is going to allocate the harms of climate change."
"I suspect that the lawmakers who are advocating for these bills are in it for the long haul," Lockman observed.
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