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YOU FLOOD IT, YOU PAY FOR IT.  
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Bill McKibben
March 15, 2024
The Crucial Years
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_ States are considering 'climate superfund' laws to hold Big Oil
accountable _

Vermont’s capitol city, underwater in epic July flooding that
wrecked most of Montpelier’s retail district,

 

One prong of the climate fight involves installing so much renewable
energy that fossil fuel use actually declines dramatically—a few
places are finally showing that’s possible, like sunny Germany
which last week said
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in 2023 dropped more than ten percent.

But if that’s going to happen everywhere, and fast enough, it’s
going to require the other prong: HOLDING BACK THE FOSSIL FUEL
INDUSTRY. The problem is that the politics of oil-producing countries
don’t allow it—that’s why the Inflation Reduction Act was all
carrots/no sticks. And it’s not just DC—in Lula’s progressive
Brazil the national oil company, already Exxon-sized, said last week
it plans
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outproducing all its peers except Saudi Arabia and Iran by 2035.

So you need a mechanism for places where there is no oil in the ground
to inflict some hurt on Big Oil—and get some justice at the same
time. Like, Vermont. And New York, and Maryland, and Massachusetts.

In a just world, Big Oil would be criminally prosecuted, since
investigative reporting has made it abundantly clear that it knew what
it was doing (Aaron Regunberg and David Arkush last week laid out
an excellent argument 
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to why these companies could be charged with homicide). In civil
court, jurisdictions can simply sue the fossil fuel industry, and
that’s actually been happening more and more often (on Wednesday a
Belgian farmer sued
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energy giant Total for making his life harder). Suits like that—many
premised on the fact that Big Oil clearly knew about the dangers they
were causing—are wending their way through the American courts, but
our justice system is a) slow and b) bent in the direction of the
powerful.

So legislators are opening up another front—”climate superfund”
laws that treat disasters like Vermont’s summer flooding as if they
were a toxic dump whose cleanup can be charged to the corporation that
caused them. That would have been hard even a few years ago, but
“climate attribution” science is now robust: it’s increasingly
easy to prove that absent global warming we wouldn’t have the
endless downpours/droughts/fires. If a chemical company pollutes a
site, the superfund law has been a way to make it pay for the
remediation—so if Vermont’s flooding cost its taxpayers $2.5
billion to repair, why should they be on the hook?

I’m talking about Vermont because it might be the first state to
adopt such a law, as it was the first to abolish slavery or allow
civil unions—the legislature and the governor will decide in the
next few weeks. And I’m talking about it because I live here, in a
town that is struggling to pay for the repairs to its roads after last
summer’s record flooding. We heard the sobering litany at town
meeting earlier this month; every culvert makes it that much harder to
keep our school open. New York is also close to passing such a law,
and perhaps Maryland and Massachusetts, as Katie Meyers pointed out
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Grist recently—all of them states without significant hydrocarbon
production, and all of them states with a lot of climate damage.

Campaigners led by the Vermont Public Research Interest Group launched
the campaign last summer, accompanied by a twenty-foot-long inflatable
pig. VPIRG’s executive director Paul Burns, and Lauren Hierl, a
member of the selectboard in flood-devastated Montpelier, explained
the logic in an oped:

The biggest oil companies in the world made more than $200 billion in
profits last year, while Vermonters were forced to pay record prices
at the pump — and got stuck with the costs of climate change cleanup
in our communities. That shouldn’t be the case. Big Oil knowingly
made a mess of the climate. They should help pay to clean it up.

It’s a lesson we all learned in kindergarten: If you make a mess,
you clean it up.

The argument has obviously appealed to legislators. Here’s the
state’s news website, VTDigger, describing one of the more
conservative Democrats

Sen. Dick Sears, D-Bennington, who chairs the Senate Judiciary
Committee, said he would have “absolutely opposed” such a bill 20
years ago. Chemical contamination in the Bennington area, which
has permanently altered the lives
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some of his constituents, changed his mind. 

“Who’s going to pay for the damage done?” Sears said. “Is it
going to be the taxpayer? Is it going to be the homeowner or the small
business? Or is it going to be the company that contributed to the
problem? I say it should be the company that contributed to the
problem.”

It will be fascinating to see what the state’s governor, Phil Scott,
does with the bill. He is a Republican, but a remnant one, harkening
back to the state’s Yankee past. (For a hundred years until the
1960s Vermont was the most reliably GOP state in America). He brought
the state through covid with fewer deaths per capita, and less
division, than any other; and since he’s a contractor by profession
he understands viscerally how much it costs to repair a road or
rebuild a bridge. If he signed this bill, he’d be reflecting the
clear consensus of the state’s voters. And the great marker of those
Yankee Republicans was frugality—cheapness, but the good kind.
It’s hard to imagine that he wants Vermont taxpayers on the hook
here.

The oil industry (in between insisting that all of this is a plot by
the Rockefellers
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has hinted that paying these damages could raise prices for consumers,
but that’s silly—the price of oil is set on a world market. And
they’ve of course promised to go to court if they are charged for
their damage. Vermont’s got good lawyers—it’s got one of
the best environmental law schools in the nation. 
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New York State has lawyers upon lawyers, as Donald Trump is finding
out. Massachusetts governor Maura Healy used to be AG, and she’s
taken on big oil in the past. It’s a fight, but a winnable one.

Yes, it would be best to do this at the federal level (and Vermont’s
Senators Bernie Sanders and Peter Welch have introduced legislation to
do just that). But the Senate filibuster means that oil states will
have enough clout to block those laws, at least while they could still
do some good. So for a while it’s going to be a coalition of the
oil-less (you can ask your state to get involved here
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It’s been a great blessing to Vermont that there’s nothing much of
value beneath the soil (well, granite, but a few quarries are enough
to produce an eternity of tombstones). And now that geological fact
may prove to be of great value to the planet.

_BILL MCKIBBEN'S THE CRUCIAL YEARS
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* environment
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* big oil
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* Climate Change
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* flooding
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* superfund
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