Vermont was the first state to try to hold polluters accountable for climate disasters. New research aims to assign specific responsibility.
In 2023, the Winooski River in Vermont spilled its banks, kissing the green truss bridge that spanned it. River water poured onto the marble floors of the State House. Up to nine inches of rain fell within 48 hours, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage.
A year later, Vermont enacted the Climate Change Superfund Act, which holds oil and gas companies financially responsible for climate damage in the state. Similar legislation passed in New York in 2024 and is pending in California, Maryland, and Massachusetts.
Underpinning the laws is attribution science, which models huge numbers of scenarios using global temperature data to determine the likelihood that extreme weather events like floods or heat waves are related to emissions from burning oil, gas and coal.
A new paper published on Wednesday in the journal Nature expands this type of work to link the emissions from specific emitters to the economic burden of extreme events.
“The oil industry is alarmed by state climate superfund laws and their growing popularity because they are the first policies adopted anywhere in the world that make climate polluters pay a fair share of the enormous damage their products have caused,” said Lee Wasserman, director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, the New York-based charitable foundation that helped created the climate superfund law.
Reaction to the laws was swift. In February, West Virginia and other Republican-led states sued to block New York’s law, saying that only the federal government could regulate emissions. President Trump signed an executive order this month calling the state laws “burdensome and ideologically motivated” and asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to block their enforcement.