This commentary is by Paul Burns, executive director of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, and Lauren Hierl, executive director of Vermont Conservation Voters and a member of the Montpelier City Council.
Climate change is hitting Vermont hard — hurting our families, communities, and pocketbooks. Tropical Storm Irene killed seven Vermonters in 2011. A heat wave in 2018 led to the deaths of four senior citizens. Last February, during one of the warmest winters on record, three people drowned after breaking through thin ice on Lake Champlain.
At the same time, the natural wonders that make Vermont such a great place to live and raise a family are under unprecedented strain. Winters are getting warmer. Summers are getting hotter. Climate change is disrupting our way of life.
Climate change is costing taxpayers, too. Just last year, Gov. Phil Scott and the Legislature approved $225 million in taxpayer funding for climate change mitigation measures. And a recent report by Rebuild by Design found that from 2011 to 2021, Vermont had the fifth-highest per-person spending on climate-related disasters in the country.
What we’ve paid already, however, is just a fraction of what we know is coming.
Researchers hired by the state estimate that, if we don’t act to meet our legally binding emission reduction goals, climate change will cost Vermonters at least $7 billion in economic, health and environmental damages over the next 25 years. In a separate UVM study, researchers predicted that property damage from flooding alone could cost Vermont $5.2 billion over the next century.
On top of that, Lake Champlain cleanup — exacerbated by rising temperatures that increase runoff pollution — could exceed $1 billion. And upgrading our state’s transportation infrastructure to deal with more severe weather is likely to cost billions more.
Put it all together and the costs of climate change are staggering. The costs are also inevitable. But who should pay?
The biggest and wealthiest oil companies in the world knew about the dangers of carbon pollution decades ago. ExxonMobil and Shell scientists accurately predicted global warming in the 1970s. Instead of protecting people and the planet, however, Big Oil funded a massive disinformation campaign to fool the public and protect their profits. Worse still, they have left taxpayers to foot the bill. That’s wrong.
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.
Vermont has made polluters pay before. In 2021, the Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics Corp. was required to pay $34 million to clean up PFAS pollution in Bennington County.
Making Big Oil pay is what Sens. Bernie Sanders and Peter Welch proposed for the country in 2021, and now Vermont can join our neighbors in New York and Massachusetts in making it happen at the state level.
A Vermont-specific Climate Change Superfund Act would put Big Oil on the hook to clean up the mess they knowingly made. It would require the huge companies most responsible for greenhouse gas emissions — companies such as ExxonMobil, Shell and Chevron — to collectively contribute $100 million annually over 25 years ($2.5 billion total) to help pay for some of the environmental, infrastructure and public health damage they have caused.
The legislation is modeled on the existing toxic chemical Superfund law (which deals with soil and water pollution); it makes polluters financially responsible for the environmental damage they cause.
Forcing oil companies to help cover Vermont’s climate costs will not raise the price of gasoline or home heating. According to an analysis by the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU Law, because companies’ payments would be based on historical greenhouse gas emissions, oil companies would have to treat these as one-time fixed costs and would be unable to pass on increases in costs to consumers due to economic incentives and competition.
Unsurprisingly, making polluters pay to clean up their messes is wildly popular. A recent poll of voters conducted by Data for Progress found that 64% of Vermonters support a bill that would assess a one-time fee on big oil and gas companies such as ExxonMobil and Chevron to pay a share of the costs for making Vermont’s infrastructure better able to withstand the impacts of climate change.
So, the question before Gov. Phil Scott and lawmakers in Montpelier is: Who do they think should pay for the damages caused by climate change, Vermont taxpayers or Big Oil?
