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President Donald Trump has made it quite clear how he feels about state laws that aim to make fossil fuel companies pay for damages caused by climate change. An executive order issued in April compared these efforts — known as climate superfund laws — to extortion. The administration has since sued New York and Vermont, the two states with these measures on the books.
This hostility, however, has not stopped a growing number of state legislatures from taking up their own climate superfund proposals. Last month, legislative committees in Maine and New Jersey advanced bills. Lawmakers in Illinois, Oregon, and Rhode Island are also considering such legislation. Connecticut lawmakers plan to add their state to the list.
Why do the proposals continue to multiply despite steadfast federal opposition? Because the law and the science are both on their side, proponents say. And because it’s just fair.
“Climate superfund laws are based on the principle that if you make a mess, you clean it up,” said Jamie Flynn, a visiting fellow at the Conservation Law Foundation. “It’s kindergarten-level ethics.”
States, municipalities, and tribal governments have tried a variety of strategies for holding oil and gas companies responsible for the problems created by their products. Some have sued, accusing fossil fuel interests of deceiving the public or investors by concealing the hazards of burning hydrocarbons. Others have filed antitrust cases, accusing major companies of colluding to dominate the market, leaving customers locked into climate-damaging products.
Climate superfund laws take a different, arguably more practical approach, by pointing to very visible storm and flooding impacts, and demanding compensation. While the details vary from state to state, climate superfund bills all have a similar framework. They call for the state to tally up expenses incurred by climate change — which could include both recovery costs and protective measures — and then to divide the total among major fossil fuel suppliers and start collecting the money.
The money collected would alleviate the burden on taxpayers by repaying states for past recovery efforts — the cleanup Vermont had to undergo after catastrophic flooding in 2023, for example — and by covering future resilience projects, like wetlands restoration.
“Taxpayers right now are footing the bill for all of it,” said Rhode Island state Rep. Jennifer Boylan, a Democrat, one of the sponsors of the state’s bill. “The folks that are responsible are not contributing, and it’s just not fair.”
Opponents — which include fossil fuel companies, attorneys general from oil-producing states, and, of course, the Trump administration — have deployed several arguments against these laws.
The broadest is that these measures interfere with the federal government’s attempts to unleash American energy dominance by penalizing fossil fuel companies. Others claim that consumers would see prices go up as a result of the added costs. They also argue that the laws constitute an attempt to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, which has historically been under federal authority.
It’s also worth noting that superfund laws make sense only if you accept the overwhelming scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet and thus leading to more destructive weather. The Trump administration rejects this premise. Last Thursday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency repealed the scientific finding that greenhouse gases are a harm to public health and welfare, which has underpinned the federal government’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases for the last 16 years.
Still, lawmakers and advocates behind these bills believe that the law backs them up.
Climate superfund laws are modeled on the federal Superfund program, which was established in 1980 to hold corporations financially accountable for cleaning up soil contamination they had caused. The program was challenged repeatedly, but courts upheld the law time and again — a precedent that is encouraging to proponents of climate superfund legislation.
“You can see why this law was attractive when thinking about greenhouse gas emissions and climate,” said Kirt Mayland, a visiting professor at Vermont Law and Graduate School. “The hope is that courts will provide the same protection as they did for the conventional Superfund.”
The strength of this approach, he said, is that the laws and bills do not target federally regulated emissions, despite opponents’ claims. Climate superfund bills focus not on what’s happening in the atmosphere but rather on what’s happening on the ground: observably flooded towns and storm-damaged businesses.
Opponents have played up concerns that it would be difficult to accurately quantify the contributions greenhouse gases make to climate change and then properly allocate responsibility among multiple parties. Supporters, however, say there are ways to do just that.
The Carbon Majors Database is a collection of data about the historic emissions of 178 of the world’s largest oil, gas, coal, and cement producers, including private and public companies as well as entire countries. Using this information, the growing field of attribution science can connect emissions to climate impacts and even, in some cases, to specific storms, heat waves, or other extreme weather events, said Carly Phillips, a research scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“The science is really robust around the magnitude and scope of emissions that can be traced,” she said. “It really provides a template to answer those kinds of questions.”
Phillips said that she would welcome engagement and dialogue around the science, but that she is not hearing any good-faith skepticism from opponents. Instead, she sees only a wholesale rejection of attribution science, aimed, she believes, at delaying climate action as long as possible.
The lawsuits targeting New York and Vermont will take some time to resolve, and are likely to end up in the U.S. Supreme Court, Mayland said. In the meantime, neither state has yet assessed any charges under the laws. Still, continuing to push these new bills, even in the face of federal and industry hostility, could increase their eventual chances of success, proponents say.
In Rhode Island, where climate superfund legislation has been introduced for a second year in a row, lawmakers are learning more about how the proposal works, and the idea is gaining support, Boylan said. Ongoing conversations about the idea will help pave the way for adoption when some of the legal questions are resolved, said Connecticut state Rep. Steve Winter, a Democrat who plans to support his state’s climate superfund bill.
“There’s no doubt that legal challenges to Vermont and New York’s legislation create a cloud of uncertainty, but I don’t think that should stop us from advancing the public conversation,” he said. “It’s that important.”
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