Los Angeles Fires Underscore Activists’ Call: Make Polluters Pay for Disasters

The day after Christmas in 2024, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the Climate Change Superfund Act (CCSA) into law. Widely acclaimed by environmental advocates, the CCSA is a milestone: As the first climate legislation of its kind, it will bring the power of the state to bear on fossil fuel industries, mandating a meaningful degree of corporate accountability for the climate crisis.

The moment seems primed for action, and corporate liability for climate change is of course long overdue. Climate advocates hope that this model can be replicated nationwide, as vast amounts of mitigation and relief funding will be essential in the very near future — as the catastrophic fires still engulfing large areas of Los Angeles County, California have underscored to grim effect.

Novel Restitution

New York’s CCSA is modeled on the 1980 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) — popularly known as the Superfund program. Like its noteworthy namesake, the CCSA will charge polluting corporations for the cleanup costs of their noxious effluents. However, the “climate Superfund” policy does differ from its predecessor, by virtue of the fact that the harms of carbon emissions are geographically distributed.

Namely, rather than being obligated to cover the cleanup of a particular site, New York State’s top polluters — the list will be determined by state agency review — will now have to earmark some of their grotesque profits to pay into a fund dedicated to climate-related disaster and mitigation costs in the state. Accruing at a rate of around $3 billion a year for the next 25 years, this is a not-inconsiderable sum, exceeding even the state’s largest single annual climate investment to date.

The oil industry has long hewn to the classic formula of privatizing the profits and socializing the costs, continuing to amass obscene returns while knowing full well that the price is a livable planet. Climate Superfund legislation represents a robust means of rebalancing such warped excesses. Naturally, advocates are eager to replicate this new restitution framework elsewhere.

The notion that all of the costs incurred by climate change might be dodged by the perpetrators of the crisis is a distasteful one, to say the least. After all, the alternative to making polluters bear the cost of a disaster is to allow it to redound to the taxpayer, as it would more or less by default. That aspect alone helped earn the CCSA a wide base of support. The New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG), a student-led policy research nonprofit that was instrumental in creating the CCSA, counted the backing of over 400 youth, faith and environmental organizations, along with more than 100 in-state elected officials.

“What certainly moved the needle on this was the sheer volume of organizations who were in support,” NYPIRG Executive Director Blair Horner told Truthout.

“It’s in a sense a policy unicorn” because of the way that, in this instance, environmental benefits harmonized with cost savings for local governments, creating an alignment of incentives, as Horner explained. “That’s why we had this widespread support among local elected officials, who [would otherwise] have to raise property taxes when the road gets washed out.”

Not that there weren’t major obstacles. “Any time you advocate for a measure that’s never been done before, it’s a steep hill to climb,” he said. “And when you’re taking on the oil industry, that is a very steep hill to climb.”

Horner described how lawmakers often mistakenly assumed the measure was a carbon tax — a reliably unpopular proposal. There were also questions of legal viability, and of contesting the predictable industry counternarrative that the legislation would cost consumers at the pump. But think tank research found the legal obstacles surmountable, and the latter charge totally baseless.

The concept of the climate Superfund had initially come out of work on climate resiliency that accompanied NYPIRG’s advocacy for the 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. High mitigation needs were projected, noted Horner, and yet no funding was in place to meet them.

“Policy makers have just been whistling past the graveyard, talking about the need to do something about it — and no one was doing anything about it,” Horner said. “Unless something was done, the cost would be 100 percent borne by taxpayers. And we didn’t think that was right. We thought the polluters should pay.”

New York State’s top polluters now have to earmark some of their grotesque profits to pay into a fund dedicated to climate-related disaster and mitigation costs in the state.

In conversations with State Sen. Liz Krueger, who would become a co-sponsor of the eventual state-level CCSA, Horner and NYPIRG helped devise the Superfund-based model. In 2021, a federal bill along those lines was introduced in the Senate by Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and backed by notables like Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, with companion legislation led by Rep. Jamaal Bowman in the House. The sponsors “worked hard to put that into the reconciliation package that would be in Build Back Better,” said Horner. “But as you know, Build Back Better didn’t go anywhere.”

In response, NYPIRG and other planners and advocates shifted to retarget the state level, with ultimate success. The analogous legislation that was passed around the same time in Vermont, Act 122, was also the result of organizing efforts that were interconnected with and inspired by NYPIRG and other CCSA advocates’ initiatives.

The CCSA quickly became a lodestar, a testament to what is possible. In Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey and California, as well as at the federal level in the House and Senate, climate Superfund bills have already been advanced. But so far, these other cases have not met with such swift and comprehensive victory — far from it, unfortunately.

Replicating the wins in New York and Vermont will not be easy, as a number of fortuitous circumstances aided the passage of those bills. Notably, in the case of New York, industry opposition groups were far outnumbered by supporting organizations, and the oil lobby was generally caught off guard. “Now why is that?” ventured Horner. “Well, I think it’s partly because we organized and we did a good job. But partly it’s because I think [oil] people didn’t think it was going to happen. The industry focused on other issues.”

Moreover, even the CCSA and Act 122 will undoubtedly face significant legal and political challenges to their implementation. Already, the industry has “filed a lawsuit to block Vermont,” Horner pointed out. With corporations now aware that such bills are politically feasible, future incarnations will face intensified resistance. Indeed, in opposing California’s climate Superfund effort, the fossil fuel lobby has already proven that its influence is far from spent.

The New Abnormal

Truman Capps, 36, is a writer who has lived in Los Angeles for 15 years. Anticipating some amount of fire is just part of being Californian — but the infernos that have now consumed 40,000 acres and 12,000 structures around metropolitan Los Angeles are jarring outliers, a new and sudden extreme. Capps spoke of how he and his family were forced into a frantic evacuation as a result of the Sunset Fire in Runyon Canyon.

“We’re all used to fires being something that happens nearby, but far away: Santa Clarita, or Santa Barbara, or the Inland Empire,” Capps told Truthout. “A very ‘it can’t happen here’ mindset.” Previous Los Angeles brushfires, he added, “have always been extinguished so quickly that I think I had a certain false sense of security.”

The stunning escalation, and the scale of loss to both culture and human life, involved in these fires has brought the impending toll of climate change into unpleasantly sharp focus for many, shaking complacency and long-held certainties. The fire risk now reaches past the far fringes of the exurbs and into highly developed areas.

“What was most jarring about these fires was how quickly they went from being minor brushfires to massive, existential threats,” said Capps. “In a matter of minutes, we went from hanging out and cooking dinner to running around the apartment in a panic trying to figure out which of our belongings we wanted to bring with us and which ones we’d be fine never seeing again.”

The fires — certain to be a disaster for insurance as well as the state budget and economy — are making an urgent and unsettling case for climate Superfund legislation. Even before the recent fires, studies had anticipated Los Angeles County alone would need approximately $780 million per year in climate protection costs.

A CCSA-like measure, the Polluters Pay Climate Cost Recovery Act, SB 1497, was introduced in the California legislature in February 2024 by Democratic State Sen. Caroline Menjivar; it could have raised tens of billions within two decades. Unfortunately, SB 1497 failed to receive the necessary votes in committee, and Menjivar was forced to render it inactive. California, an oil-producing state, has a fossil fuel lobby of immense power. That might account in part for why, so far, climate Superfund efforts have stalled in Sacramento.

Woody Hastings is the director of the “Phase Out Polluting Fuels” program at the nonprofit advocacy group and think tank The Climate Center (TCC). The TCC was a staunch advocate of SB 1497, and will be pressing for a new version of the bill as the two-year legislative session begins.

So far, climate Superfund efforts have stalled in Sacramento.

As Hastings told Truthout, SB 1497 “was a number-one priority bill for us.… We made sure to do the best we could to get it through the legislature. That meant showing up and speaking in support, signing coalition letters, meeting with legislators, educating legislators, reaching out to constituents — all those things you do in a campaign to try to move the needle.”

Perhaps it’s telling that, as quoted by Politico, one Kevin Slagle of the Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA), echoed Hastings’s words, in the precise inverse: “This was certainly a priority bill for us,” the oil industry spokesperson said. In other words, it was the industry’s priority to eliminate it. The WSPA and the California Chamber of Commerce came out against Menjivar’s bill, releasing a “Floor Alert” to legislators that deemed SB 1497 a “JOB KILLER” in shrieking red capitals. (“A very, very stale talking point from the oil industry,” Hastings remarked.)

Yet even the oil lobby’s threats, though well-worn and predictable, still have purchase: Hastings agreed that the Floor Alert might well have helped keep SB 1497 from winning the necessary votes in committee. Asked if it could have had an impact, he replied, “It always does, it always does … that kind of thing does influence the legislature every single year, yes. It’s going to be an uphill battle.”

Using its obscene profits, Hastings said, the industry has “spent record amounts of money lobbying the California legislature to stop the legislature from adopting or enacting commonsense bills, on everything from clean energy to frontline community support.” Indeed, Chevron and the WSPA top the list of total state lobbying expenses. (California would also be well-served to limit its enormous loopholes for oil companies to fix budget issues that have, among myriad other harms, deprived firefighters of adequate water supply in fighting the Los Angeles blazes.)

But despite the daunting task, the bill’s sponsors, The Climate Center, and other advocates are unswervingly dedicated to taking on the giants of fossil fuels. Their next attempt at moving the Polluters Pay Climate Fund Act forward is just getting started in the legislative session presently underway.

Just as hearteningly, in fact, something similar is occurring at the federal level — the defunct federal climate Superfund legislation that NYPIRG helped create has been reintroduced in the Senate by Sen. Chris Van Hollen, joining its counterpart in the House. While a second Trump administration and a Republican-dominated Congress will make for unpredictable circumstances, climate advocates, who have already won meaningful and real change, have proven that they will refuse to fold.

For his part, Los Angeles evacuee Truman Capps said he, and likely his fellow voters, would be very eager to support a climate Superfund law in his state. “I’d love to see California force corporations to pony up for disaster relief. Forcing big corporations to pay to clean up after climate disasters is an easy sell with California’s electorate.”

As he reflected, “What’s most concerning to me in the wake of these fires is how our elected officials appear to be completely uninterested in making any changes in light of this new reality.… It seems like [leaders’] plan is to just keep doing what we were doing before and hope that nothing bad happens again.”

NYPIRG’s Blair Horner expressed hopes that this sort of complacency will be shaken. “God knows what the fires in California are going to cost, but one thing’s for sure: [the price] will be massive … I would think that if anything, the wildfires in California would make taxpayers in California acutely more sensitive to the overwhelming financial burden of climate change.”