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Vermont is on the verge of becoming the first state to try it.
Dozens of cities and states have tried to sue the oil industry for damages related to climate change over the past several years, and so far, none of these cases has been successful. In fact, not one has even made it to trial.
In the meantime, the price tag for climate-related impacts has climbed ever higher, and states are growing more desperate for help with the bill. Out of that desperation, a new legal strategy was born, one that may have a better chance of getting fossil fuel companies to pay up. And Vermonters may be the first to benefit.
It’s called a climate superfund bill, and versions of it are floating through legislative chambers in New York, Massachusetts, and Maryland, in addition to Vermont. Though each bill is slightly different, the general premise is the same: Similar to the way the federal Superfund law allows the Environmental Protection Agency to seek funds retroactively from polluters to clean up contaminated sites, states will seek to bill fossil fuel companies retroactively for the costs of addressing, avoiding, and adapting to the damages that the emissions from their products have caused.
Though New York was the first state to introduce a climate superfund bill two years ago, Vermont may be the first to get it through a legislature. On Friday, the Vermont Senate voted 21 to five to approve amendments to the bill, and will vote next week on whether to send it to the House. An equivalent bill in the House is cosponsored by nearly two-thirds of state representatives and the policy also won the support of Vermont’s Attorney General.
If it gets past the governor’s desk, the bill will kick off a multiyear process that, in the most optimistic case, could bring money into the state by 2028. The first step is for the state Treasurer to assess the cost to Vermont, specifically, of emissions from the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels from 1995 to 2024, globally. Regulators will then request compensation from responsible parties in proportion to the emissions each company contributed. The state will identify responsible parties by focusing only on the biggest emitters, companies whose products generated at least a billion tons of emissions during that time. The money will go toward implementing a state “resilience and implementation strategy” to be mapped out in the next two years.
The idea of states retroactively billing fossil fuel companies for damages outside the context of a lawsuit might sound a little far-fetched. Or, at least, I thought it was when I first heard about it. How can that be legal?
Anthony Iarrapino, the lead lobbyist supporting the bill for the Conservation Law Foundation, a New England-based environmental law nonprofit, explained it this way. There is established case law that deals with retroactive liability in the context of hazardous waste — again, the Superfund law. “Even if your activities were legal at the time you undertook them, if they result in making a mess, then you can be on the hook for cleaning that mess,” he told me. “The idea here is looking at climate disruption as a polluted site.”
How is that fair? Well, the legal precedents supporting the Superfund law and similar policies turn on a key question. Did the companies understand that their activities were potentially harmful at the time they engaged in them? “If, objectively, you knew or should have known that your conduct, whether it was legal or not, was likely to result in damages that would impose costs on society,” Iarrapino said, “then it's fair, from a lookback perspective, to hold you accountable when those damages begin to manifest in the environment or in impacts to human health.” That’s because, according to precedent, you essentially assumed the risk that at some point in the future, you might be on the hook.
By now there’s a mountain of evidence that fossil fuel companies like Exxon did, in fact, know how damaging their products would be several decades before the period covered by the Vermont bill, based on internal research not shared with the public at the time. But Ben Edgerly Walsh, an advocate at the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, told me that even absent that evidence, they should have recognized the risk based on the scientific consensus that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. To wit: Vermont chose 1995 as the start year for its bill because that’s when the first United Nations climate change conference was held.
“We shouldn't have to bear the cost of this ourselves,” said Walsh. “These oil companies that are still making hundreds of billions of dollars in profit annually should have to pay their fair share for the cost of the climate crisis they caused.”
Underpinning the bill — as well as many of the related lawsuits — is the advancement of “attribution science,” or the ability to quantify the economic losses that a region has borne due to anthropogenic climate change, as well as future losses that are already baked in, and then attribute them back to particular emitters. In testimony for the Vermont superfund bill, Justin Mankin, an associate professor at Dartmouth, stressed that these are peer reviewed, consensus, scientific methods — and that in general, they are conservative. “It is my opinion that we are systematically underestimating the economic cost of climate change to date,” he told the Vermont Judiciary Committee in February. “And that is because all of these climate damage cost assessment methods are inherently conservative, or limited by data.”
The bill’s sponsors also looked to research from Richard Heede, creator of the famous “Carbon Majors” database, which calculated the emissions of major fossil fuel companies based on the amount of oil, gas, and coal they each extracted and found that some 70% of fossil fuel emissions since 1988 can be attributed to 100 companies. In testimony to the Vermont Senate, Heede estimated that about 68 companies would be captured by the bill’s billion-ton threshold.
Of course, the fossil fuel industry patently disputes the science that Heede and Mankin expounded. The American Petroleum Institute submitted testimony warning of the “difficulties of establishing a conclusive link between anthropogenic climate change and alleged injuries to Vermont” and arguing that the emissions from individual companies over the last several decades cannot “be determined with great accuracy.” The group also called it “unfair” to charge the companies that sold oil and gas, considering they “did not combust fossil fuels but simply extracted or refined them in order to meet the needs and demands of the people.”
That might be where the biggest weak spot in the climate superfund bills — as well as the climate damages lawsuits — lies. There’s an underlying philosophical question, Martin Lockman, a climate law fellow at Columbia University, told me. Who in the supply chain is responsible for the pollution from fossil fuels?
The answer turns on a moral argument that fossil fuel companies have made enormous profits from fossil fuels for decades, all while knowing what the harms would be. “From a moral perspective, I think that these are very justified,” said Lockman, “but that will certainly get opened in litigation.”
If any of the climate superfund bills pass, they will absolutely be challenged in court. One reason they may see more success than the more direct lawsuits, however, is that they flip the burden of proof. If Vermont sued oil companies for damages, the burden would be on Vermont to prove its case, and as the defendants, the oil companies would get a “bag of tricks” to use to stall the case and make it very expensive to pursue, said Iarrapino. For example, many of these lawsuits have been delayed by years-long arguments over whether they should be tried in state or federal court, or whether the oil companies have to release certain documents.
“Even though it’s the same harms and the same contexts,” Iarrapino told me, “you’ve got a balance of power where they can win the case by losing slowly.” But if oil companies sue Vermont, for example, by calling its law unconstitutional, the burden of proof will be on them, and the state will have no incentive to delay the case.
I should note here that the federal Superfund law is not exactly the ideal model for this policy. Much of the time, the EPA can’t track down a company to ascribe blame for the contamination, and taxpayers end up footing the bill of the cleanup. Even when it does find a responsible party, said party often ends up litigating the amount owed for years. The Passaic River in New Jersey was declared a Superfund site 40 years ago, and the EPA is still fighting with Occidental over how much it should pay for the cleanup.
Iarrapino thinks there’s one key difference in the proposed climate superfund program. At contaminated sites, there can be a lot of potential polluters and so it’s difficult to assign blame. The Vermont bill attaches liability directly to the act of extracting and refining fossil fuels for combustion. “You either did that or you didn't do that,” he said. When it comes to companies like Exxon and BP, “that is their whole reason for existing.” That doesn’t mean companies won’t use all the firepower they have to dispute the amount they owe, however.
It may seem unfair for a single state, especially one as small as Vermont, to win compensation first when the damages are global and unequally distributed. But Lockman of Columbia said if these bills are successful, fossil fuel companies may stop fighting liability entirely and instead push the federal government to take action so they can be held to a more consistent standard across the country.
When I first reached Iarrapino, he told me that just downstairs from his office, someone was sawing and hammering the walls because the first floor had been entirely underwater when Montpelier flooded last summer. Three businesses that were in the building are gone. A recent estimate puts the cost of state-wide damages from the storm at $600 million.
“At this point,” he said, “what else does a state like Vermont have to lose?”
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Overturning the basis for America’s tailpipe emissions rules could actually raise prices at the pump — according to the Trump administration itself.
It hasn’t attracted much attention, but a document filed by the Trump administration last week admits to something important: The Trump administration believes that it is going to make gasoline more expensive for Americans.
That disclosure came in a technical analysis filed by the Environmental Protection Agency to support its attempt to repeal all carbon dioxide rules under the Clean Air Act. The document is meant to bolster the EPA’s case that carbon dioxide is not a dangerous air pollutant, and that the agency should therefore withdraw all tailpipe pollution limits for cars and trucks.
The document also shows that President Trump will struggle to meet his own campaign promises around energy. When he ran for president last year, Trump promised to cut energy and electricity prices by “at least half” within 12 months of taking office.
Now, the president’s policies are — by his own administration’s admission — likely to cause energy prices to rise. At least compared to the world where those policies never went into effect.
The admission comes on page 10 of the filing in a chart and associated discussion. It’s a confusing image at first glance, so take a look at it, then I’ll walk through it.
Reconsideration of 2009 Endangerment Finding and Greenhouse Gas Vehicle Standards | Draft Regulatory Impact Analysis
The rollback would affect light-duty, medium-duty, and heavy-duty vehicles — that is, everything from a small Toyota Corolla sedan to a Freightliner Cascadia semi. Because of that, the chart shows both gasoline prices (in red) and diesel prices (in black).
The solid black and red lines are what the government projected would happen to gasoline and diesel prices two years ago based on then-current policy. (They’re labeled AEO 2023 Reference because they came from the Energy Information Administration’s 2023 Annual Energy Outlook, the big yearly compendium of long-term market trends.)
The dashed black and red lines are what the government projected would happen to gasoline and diesel prices in its most recent 2025 Annual Energy Outlook. As you can see, in that report, federal analysts considerably downgraded their forecast for future gasoline and diesel prices — projecting gas prices, in particular, as much as 75 cents cheaper than in 2023. (These lines are labeled AEO 2025 Reference.)
The dotted red and black lines are what the government now thinks will happen when it rolls back the EPA’s tailpipe pollution rules. (These lines are labeled 2025 Alt Transportation, which is the name of the deregulatory scenario in the annual energy report.) As you can see, these — the Trump rollback scenario — come in far above the current 2025 forecast, particularly for gasoline. In other words, the Trump administration believes that rolling back the EPA tailpipe standards will raise gasoline prices.
The document itself acknowledges this: “For the AEO 2025 Alternative Transportation case, the difference compared to AEO 2023 is smaller, yet still lower than the prices in the AEO 2023, and the difference remains relatively stable over time.”
In other words, the document concedes that gas prices under Trump’s rollback will be more expensive — that is, much closer to the 2023 projections — than they were projected to be with the Biden-era regulations in place. The Trump document argues that’s okay: As long as gas prices are cheaper now than they were projected to be in 2023, Americans will have less to save by driving more fuel-efficient cars, so the EPA can roll back its pollution rules without worrying about the resulting increase in gas prices.
It’s an odd argument, one that relies heavily on the global decline in gasoline price forecasts from 2023 to 2025, which has little to nothing at all to do with Trump’s policymaking. As the filing says elsewhere, global gasoline markets can go up and down for many reasons, including “(1) changes in U.S. policies; (2) international incidents (e.g., wars); (3) changes in policies by international organizations (e.g., OPEC); and (4) changes in supply and demand of gasoline and diesel.” If gasoline prices go up significantly in the future, it could throw one argument for Trump’s rollback into question.
The problem for the EPA — and for the president — is that removing gas mileage rules means that American consumers will, as a whole, consume more gasoline. That might be good for the oil and gas industry, and it might slightly reduce the costs of a new car or appliance. But it will drive up energy costs as well — especially for Americans who already own a car or who are not in the market for a new appliance.
This analysis also makes Trump’s rollback oddly captive to the vagaries of Chinese policy. One reason that global gasoline price forecasts have stalled since 2023 is because Chinese gas demand has plateaued due to the explosive growth of that country’s EV industry. The Trump EPA is saying, in essence: Because China has switched en masse to EVs, it’s cheaper for Americans to keep driving gasoline cars. The follow-on innovation effects of this — the fact that American carmakers will fall behind — are not considered in the sample.
But the concession points to a deeper problem for Trump. The president campaigned on a promise to cut energy costs for Americans upon taking office. But over the past seven months, his administration has aggressively rolled back energy efficiency and fuel economy rules. It has imposed tariffs on some energy imports and moved to crack down on some zero-carbon forms of electricity production. At the same time, Trump has personally demanded that OPEC increase drilling to lower gasoline prices.
This Trump rollback — and the resulting rise in projected gasoline demand — comes as the overall energy cost environment has grown more inflationary. As I’ve previously written, electricity prices show every sign of rising in the coming years because of natural gas supply constraints, the Trump administration’s renewables policy, and equipment shortages. The president only has five months left — and a year at most — to cut energy prices in half, as he once promised during the campaign. He better get cracking.
On GM eating the tariffs, California’s utility bills, and open-sourcing climate models
Current conditions: U.S. government forecasters are projecting hurricane season to ramp up in the coming weeks, with as many as nine tropical storms forming in the Caribbean by November • Southern Arizona is facing temperatures of up to 114 degrees Fahrenheit • Northeast India is experiencing extremely heavy rainfall of more than 8 inches in 24 hours.
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said his agency is preparing to rewrite previously published National Climate Assessments, which have already been removed from government websites. In an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Wright said the analyses “weren’t fair in broad-based assessments of climate change.” He added: “We’re reviewing them, and we will come out with updated reports on those and with comments on those reports.”
The former chief executive of the fracking company Liberty Energy, Wright once eschewed the outright rejection of climate science that other Trump administration officials espouse. But as the Environmental Protection Agency works to withdraw the legal finding that gave the federal government the right to regulate planet-heating emissions under the Clean Air Act, Wright has ratcheted up his rhetoric. Earlier this week, he claimed that “ceaseless repeating from the media, politicians and activists claiming that climate change is making weather more dangerous and severe is just nonsense.” In response, my colleague Robinson Meyer noted on X: “This is a new and big turn from Secretary Wright. I’ve been pretty careful to never call him a climate change denier because while his claims about the science have been incredibly opinionated, I could see the ‘true’ thing he was trying to say. But this is just brazenly wrong.”
Days after the Department of the Interior revoked a designation opening millions of acres off the United States’ shores to offshore wind, the agency on Thursday launched “a full review of offshore wind energy regulations to ensure alignment” with “America’s energy priorities under President Donald J. Trump.” The review aims to examine “financial assurance requirements and decommissioning cost estimates for offshore wind projects, to ensure federal regulations do not provide preferential treatment to unreliable, foreign-controlled energy sources over dependable, American-made energy,” according to the press release announcing the move.
This is just the latest in a series of actions the administration has taken targeting renewables, particularly wind. For more on Trump’s all-out war against America's biggest source of non-emitting energy, here’s my colleague Jael Holzman.
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The Chevrolet Bolt.Bill Pugliano/Getty Images
General Motors is preparing to import batteries from Chinese giant CATL despite steep tariffs imposed by Trump. The automaker is buying the batteries to power the second-generation Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicle, in what The Wall Street Journal described as “a supply-chain Band-Aid for a company that touts extensive investments in U.S. battery manufacturing.”
The imports are meant to hold GM over for two years until the Detroit giant and its Korean partner LG Energy Solution can complete work on U.S. manufacturing sites to provide a domestic source of lower-cost batteries, according to Journal reporter Christopher Otts. GM’s EV sales surged in July following the introduction of the electric version of the popular Chevrolet Equinox SUV, in one of the brightest spots for the American EV market this summer.
California lawmakers are proposing a radical solution to curb rising electricity rates. Bills moving through the state’s legislature would use money raised from state bonds to help pay for the hugely expensive process of expanding the power grid and upgrading its equipment to better withstand wildfires, Canary Media’s Jeff St. John reported. The legislation would force the state’s big three utilities to accept public financing for a portion of the tens of billions of dollars they plan to spend on the power lines. The proposals come as steep rate hikes across the country become a political hot button ahead of next year’s midterm elections. As Robinson put it, “when you look across the power system, virtually every trend is setting us up for electricity price spikes.”
The sustainability data company Watershed announced a new partnership this morning with the Stanford Sustainable Solutions Lab to preserve the EPA’s model for carbon accounting. Dubbed “Cornerstone,” the project “will be a hub for open access” to software designed to assess Scope 3 emissions, the planet-heating pollution that comes from indirect downstream activities in a supply chain. “By combining the most trusted environmental data models and keeping them open to the world, we hope to help companies and organizations build and maintain momentum on sustainability,” Watershed’s co-founder Christian Anderson said in a statement. Wesley Ingwersen, the former EPA lead and architect behind the federal model, will serve as the initiative’s technical director.
The British government’s decision in May to hand back sovereignty over the Chagos Island to Mauritius more than two centuries after seizing the Indian Ocean archipelago and forcing out its residents to make way for a military base created a political uproar in the United Kingdom earlier this year. But British rule over the island chain yielded at least one major benefit beyond military defense. A new study found that the supersized Marine Protected Area the U.K. established in 2010 protected large ocean animals throughout much of their lifecycle. Scientists tracked sea turtles, manta rays and seabirds in the nearly 250,000-square-mile sanctuary. In total, 95% of tracking locations showed the area “is large enough to protect these wandering animals” which travel far to forage, breed and migrate. By contrast, the study from Exeter and Heriot-Watt universities found that seabirds in marine areas with smaller than 40,000 square miles “would be less well protected.”
Congressional Democrats will have to trust the administration to allow renewables projects through. That may be too big an ask.
How do you do a bipartisan permitting deal if the Republicans running the government don’t want to permit anything Democrats like?
The typical model for a run at permitting reform is that a handful of Republicans and Democrats come together and draw up a plan that would benefit renewable developers, transmission developers, and the fossil fuel industry by placing some kind of limit on the scope and extent of federally-mandated environmental reviews. Last year’s Energy Permitting Reform Act, for instance, co-sponsored by Republican John Barrasso and Independent Joe Manchin, included time limits on environmental reviews, mandatory oil and gas lease sales, siting authority for interstate transmission, and legal clarity for mining projects. That passed through the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee but got no further.
During a House hearing in July, California Representative Scott Peters, a Democrat, bragged that a bill he’d introduced with Republican Dusty Johnson to help digitize permitting had won support from both the Natural Resources Defense Council and the American Petroleum Institute — two advocacy groups not typically speaking in harmony. (He’s not the only one taking a crack at permitting reform, though: Another bipartisan House effort sponsored by House Natural Resources Committee chairman Bruce Westerman and moderate Maine Democrat Jared Golden would limit when National Environmental Policy Act-mandated reviews happen, install time limits for making claims, and restrict judicial oversight of the NEPA process.)
But unless Democrats trust the Trump administration to actually allow renewables projects to go forward, his proposal could be dead on arrival. Since the signing of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 4, the executive branch has been on the warpath against renewables, especially wind. With the Trump administration’s blessing, OBBBA restricted tax credits for renewable projects, both by accelerating the phaseout timeline for the credits (projects have until July of next year to start construction, or until the end of 2027 to be placed in service) and by imposing harsh new restrictions on developers’ business relationships with China or Chinese companies. Mere days after he signed the final bill into law, Trump directed the Internal Revenue Service to write tougher guidance governing what it means to start construction, potentially narrowing the window to qualify still further.
“I think all of this fuzz coming out of the Trump administration makes trust among Democrats a lot harder to achieve,” Peters told me this week.
In recent weeks, Trump’s Department of the Interior has issued memos calling for political reviews of effectively all new renewables permits and instituting strict new land use requirements that will be all but impossible for wind developments to meet. His Department of Transportation, meanwhile, insinuated that the department under the previous administration had ignored safety concerns related to radio frequencies while instituting onerous new setback requirements for renewables development near roadways.
Peters acknowledged that bipartisan permitting reform may be a heavy lift for his fellow Democrats — “a lot of Democrats didn’t come to Congress to make permitting oil and gas easier,” he told me — but that considering the high proportion of planned projects that are non-emitting, it would still be worth it to make all projects move faster.
That said, he conceded that his argument “loses a lot of force” if none of those planned non-emitting projects that happen to be solar or wind can get their federal permits approved. “How can I even make a deal on energy unless I get some assurance that will be honored by the President?” Peters told me.
Other energy and climate experts broadly supportive of investment-led approaches to combatting climate change still think that Democrats should push on with a permitting deal.
“All of this raises the importance of a bipartisan Congressional permitting reform bill that contains executive branch discretion to deny routine permits for American energy resources,” Princeton professor and Heatmap contributor Jesse Jenkins posted on X. “Seems like there's a lot of reasons for both sides to ensure America's approach to siting energy resources doesn't keep ping-ponging back and forth every four years.”
But permitting reform supporters are aware of the awkward situation the president’s unilateral actions against renewables puts the whole enterprise in.
“The administration’s recent measures are suboptimal policy and no doubt worsen the odds of enacting a technology-neutral permitting reform deal,” Pavan Venkatakrishnan, an infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress, told me.
At the same time, he argued that Democrats should still try to seek a deal, pointing to the high demand for electrons of any type. Not even the Trump administration can entirely choke off demand for renewables, so permitting reform could still be worth doing to ensure that as much as can evade the administration’s booby traps can eventually get built.
“Projects remain at the mercy of a burdensome regulatory regime,” Venkatakrishnan said. “Democrats should remain committed to an ambitious permitting deal — the best way to reduce deployment timelines and costs for all technologies, including solar-and-storage.”
Venkatakrishnan also suggested that Democrats could, in a bipartisan deal, seek to roll back some of the executive branch actions, including the Interior memo subjecting wind and solar to heightened review or the executive order on the definition of “begin construction.” There would be a precedent for such an action — the 2024 Manchin-Barrasso permitting reform bill attempted to scrap the pause on liquified natural gas approvals that the Biden administration had implemented. But then of course, that didn’t ever become law. (Manchin and congressional Republicans were able to clear the way to permitting a specific project, the Mountain Valley Pipeline in a larger bipartisan deal.)
What could unlock a deal, Yogin Kothari, a former congressional staffer and the chief strategy officer of the SEMA Coalition, a domestic solar manufacturing group, told me, would be the Trump administration getting actively involved. “The administration is probably going to have to lead,” Kothari said. “It’s going to be up to folks in the administration to go to the Hill and say, We do need this, and this is what it’s going to mean, and we’re going to implement this in good faith.”
This would require a delicate balancing act — the Trump administration would have to think there’s enough in a deal for their favored energy and infrastructure projects to make it worth perhaps rolling back some of their anti-renewables campaign.
“The administration is going to have to convince Democrats that it’s not permitting reform just for a subset of industries,” i.e. oil, gas, and coal, “but it is really technology neutral permanent reform,” Kothari said. “On the Senate side, it comes down to whether seven Senate Democrats feel like they can trust the admin to actually implement things in a way that is helpful across the board for energy dominance.”
One reason the administration itself may have to make commitments is because Congressional Democrats may not trust Republicans to stand behind legislation they support and vote for, Peters told me.
“Obviously we’d have to get some face-to-face understanding that if we make a deal, they’re going to live by the deal,” he said.
Peters pointed to the handful of Republicans who successfully negotiated for a longer runway for renewable tax credits, only to see Trump move almost immediately to tighten up eligibility for those tax credits as reason enough for skepticism. He also cited the cuts to previously agreed-upon spending that the Trump administration pushed through Congress on a party line vote as evidence that existing law and deals aren’t necessarily stable in Trump’s Washington.
“If we do a deal — Republicans and Democrats in Congress, the House and Senate, get together and make an agreement — we have to have assurance that the President will back us,” Peters told me.
No bipartisan deal is ever easy to come by, but then historically, “everybody lives by it,” he said. “I think that may be changing under this administration, and I think it makes everything tougher.”