As climate change exacts a mounting toll on California, who should pay for the damage from rising sea levels and increasingly ferocious wildfires, floods and heat waves?
Fossil fuel companies would like taxpayers to keep footing the bill while they reap the profits from the burning of coal, oil and methane gas. That’s not right. Companies whose products are responsible for the vast majority of the greenhouse gas emissions should be held liable for the costs.
That’s the concept behind the Polluters Pay Climate Cost Recovery Act, a bill in the California Legislature that would create a Superfund-style program to collect money from major fossil fuel companies such as Chevron and ExxonMobil to help the state pay for the environmental damage caused by their products.
Other states, including New York, Massachusetts and Maryland, are considering similar “Climate Superfund” bills. They’re modeled on the 1980 federal Superfund law that established an industry-funded trust fund to pay for cleaning abandoned hazardous waste sites and holds current and past operators and other responsible parties liable for the costs. California would not be the first to act; Vermont lawmakers earlier this month sent a Climate Superfund bill to their governor’s desk.
Senate Bill 1497, by Sen. Caroline Menjivar (D-Panorama City), rightly focuses on the world’s largest fossil fuel companies on the grounds that they are responsible for much of the climate impacts California is experiencing and paying for today.
The fund would come from the estimated 41 fossil fuel extraction and refining companies that meet the bill’s threshold of being responsible for more than 1 billion metric tons of emissions from 2000 to 2020. Each would pay a share of the climate costs to the state based on a study to be conducted by the California Environmental Protection Agency. The total cost recovery could amount to tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars, according to legislative analysts, and could be paid in installments over 20 years.
It may sound like a lot, but even that would not fully offset the costs climate-related damages California is expected to suffer for years to come from just those two decades of pollution. Wildfires alone have caused tens of billions in destruction of property, health costs and other losses in California in just the past few years.
For example, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, below.
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if hundreds of fossil fuel lobbyists cried out in terror…and attacked the California legislature.