Last week, Inside Climate News reported, “The Vermont Legislature Considers ‘Superfund’ Legislation to Compensate for Climate Change.” The article begins by noting the weather disaster that hit most of Vermont last summer.“Vermont had just been hit by historic, catastrophic rain storms that left the state swimming in flood damage, with water rising over 20 feet in some areas. In Jones’ part of Burlington, a fertile 100-year floodplain perfect for farming, up to 6 feet of water covered the fields.”
Given the reality that we cannot stop all the impacts of climate change we already see, some climate action advocates believe we must immediately extract a “pound of flesh” from the fossil fuel industry to help clean up the mess it has created.
What a Climate Superfund Can Accomplish
“The bill calls for the fund to go toward ‘adaptive infrastructure.’ That could include things like updating roads and bridges to withstand more intense, frequent floods. It could fund planting flood-resilient, absorbent riverbeds and floodplains,” the report explains. It could also mean compensation to individuals whose land, property, or health was damaged by a weather disaster due to greenhouse gas-related climate change.
The New York Times, in How to make polluters pay, said there is new scientific method and research that can be used to attribute damages. “If the climate superfund bill becomes law in Vermont, the state plans to work with scientists to figure out just how much of the damage was caused by climate change. Then, they will calculate what each oil and gas company contributed to it.”
Other States Seeking Climate Superfunds
Vermont is not the only state to see this type of legislation moving through their legislature. Inside Climate News reports, “As the first of its kind to gain such traction inany state legislature, the Climate Superfund offers an innovative pathway to do that and hold fossil fuel companies accountable…New York, Massachusetts and Maryland have all introduced superfund bills that have since stalled or died.”
A Superfund bill was introduced into the California legislature last week. This opinion piece, Chevron’s oil spills are profitable. We need to hold corporate polluters accountable | Opinion published in the Sacramento Bee, makes the case for this strategy,
In March, Columbia University Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law offers an overview of these legislative initiatives in State “Climate Superfund” Bills: What You Need to Know.
How Fossil Fuel Industries Battle the Public Interest
Not surprisingly, the fossil fuel industry is opposed to all of these legislative initiatives and it is sending hordes of lobbyists and offering significant donations to political campaigns to influence the outcome. In These Fossil Fuel Industry Tactics Are Fueling Democratic Backsliding American Progress sets out the tactics that are being used by the oil, gas, and coal industries to fight public policies of many types.
“First, by propagating deception and misinformation, the industry has polluted the information ecosystems essential for democracies to function, pushing open societies closer to the “post-truth” politics that allow authoritarianism to thrive. Second, enabled in part by its misinformation campaigns, the industry has used its considerable financial and lobbying influence to bend policy to serve its own narrow interests instead of the public good. Finally, the fossil fuel industry has directly undermined core democratic rights by filing unfounded lawsuits to silence critics, promoting draconian anti-protest laws, and supporting voter suppression efforts.”
This article looks at these numbers available as of December 2023:
FOSSIL FUEL INDUSTRY LOBBYING: BY THE NUMBERS
$125M – Amount spent by industry on lobbying in 2022
$93M – Amount spent by industry on lobbying so far in 2023
27x – Greater amount spent on lobbying by fossil fuel industry vs. climate advocacy groups from 2008–2018
In the coming months, we will see whether public support for compensation by the fossil fuel companies for climate change damages will overcome the power of the fossil fuel purse. Climate action advocates and American citizens must keep elected officials and voters from bending to the will of corporate actors who care little or nothing for the public interest and whose primary – perhaps only – objective is profit.
