Will Polluters Be Let Off the Hook for Climate Damages in the U.S.?
Some states are passing laws to shield industrial polluters from climate liability – and a liability shield bill has just been introduced in Congress.
Credit: Tony Webster via Wikimedia, CC BY 2.0
Jenny Sebold, a single mother of three children, put her “whole heart and soul” into renovating a space in downtown Montpelier, Vermont that she turned into a clothing store and flower shop called Rebel Heart Collective. On July 11, 2023, unusually heavy rains caused the Winooski River that runs through Vermont’s capital city to overflow its banks, inundating the community with several feet of water. This extreme flooding episode, Vermont’s worst in nearly a century, impacted much of the state, drowning homes, farms and small businesses. As Sebold described: “It was devastating.”
The trauma and hardship did not end once the flood waters receded. Sebold’s shop remained closed for over seven months, and during that time she had to make some difficult choices and sacrifices since the shop was her sole source of income. “I had to often wake up in the morning and decide, am I gonna feed myself today, or am I going to send my kid off [to hockey camp] to support his dream?” Sebold said during a 2024 press conference featuring stories of extreme weather survivors. “Meanwhile the rich oil execs get to keep making piles of money. It’s wrong. They’ve got to be held accountable and help rebuild the communities that have been impacted.”
Like Sebold, Roishetta Ozane is a single mom who has directly experienced climate-intensified disasters. As a resident of Sulphur, Louisiana, her community is choked by fossil fuel and petrochemical industry pollution, making the air toxic to breathe. Those same industrial facilities generate greenhouse gas emissions that are fueling the climate emergency, manifesting in the form of superstorms, extreme floods, deadly heat and wildfires, and other damaging impacts. In 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, two major hurricanes hit southwestern Louisiana, displacing Ozane and her six children from their home. “Climate-induced disasters, such as tornadoes and hurricanes, caused by fossil fuel companies’ pollution and negligence cannot go unnoticed any longer,” Ozane said. “It is high time we hold these companies accountable for their actions and demand that they pay for the climate crimes they have committed.”
Extreme weather survivors across the U.S. are echoing these calls for major polluters to be held accountable and to pay for the damage that stems from their fossil fuel products and activities. These calls come as climate disasters continue to ravage communities across the country, in red states and blue states alike. But while the physical reality of climate change doesn’t care about partisan politics, the policy response in terms of whether and how to address it is unfortunately divided along partisan lines. That is the case not just with regulations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (climate mitigation), but also with climate adaptation and accountability initiatives.
Vermont, for example, passed a groundbreaking “climate superfund” law in 2024 that aims to make large fossil fuel producers help pay for some of the climate adaptation costs incurred by the state. The 2023 floods compelled state legislators to act with urgency in passing this first-in-the-nation polluters pay law. New York followed by enacting its own version, and nearly a dozen other states (most with Democrat-controlled legislators) have seen similar climate superfund bills introduced.
Louisiana, by contrast, is considering legislation that would shield the fossil fuel industry from any legal accountability for climate change harms. A bill called the Louisiana Energy Protection Act, which essentially prohibits liability for climate damage in the state, is working its way through the legislature. Similar bills are advancing in Oklahoma and Iowa, the latter of which is awaiting the governor’s signature. And Utah and now Tennessee have already passed climate liability shield bills into law.
“At a time when we need to be doing absolutely everything we can to avert catastrophe, instead of calling the fire department, they’re pouring gasoline on the fire.” - Brian Moench, president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment
Utah, where Republicans have a supermajority in the state legislature, became the first state in the U.S. to enact such a law last month – when the southwest region was literally baking under an extreme heat wave that scientists say would have been “virtually impossible” absent climate change.
“In Utah we’ve just had the warmest winter we’ve ever had,” Brian Moench, president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, told me. “Salt Lake City normally has 34 inches of snow fall on the valley floor in an average winter. This year we had 2.5. We have virtually no snowpack in our mountains. Temperatures have been on and off 25 to 30 degrees above average for this time of year.”
Moench said the state lawmakers’ passage of a bill that immunizes polluters from facing any legal consequences for climate change damage is an outrage. “The bottom line is, at a time when we need to be doing absolutely everything we can to avert catastrophe, instead of calling the fire department, they’re pouring gasoline on the fire.”
Utah does not currently have any climate liability lawsuits filed against industrial polluters, nor has it seen any climate superfund bills introduced, but the new law does foreclose the possibility of any of this litigation or legislation in the future in that state. Tennessee, which enacted its climate liability shield law on April 16, did have a superfund bill introduced, though it did not see much traction in the Republican-controlled legislature. Iowa is poised to become the next state to immunize polluters – including agribusiness and ethanol producers – from climate accountability, and there is also no imminent liability threat to these companies in that state. But climate advocates are concerned that the trend still sets a dangerous precedent at a time when climate impacts are becoming increasingly harmful and costlier as time goes on.
“Forty years from now it’s going to be so much more severe. And if they are able to pass this legislation now, that means there is no recourse for future generations who will experience so much worse,” said Cassidy DiPaola, communications director with the Make Polluters Pay campaign.
At the national level, Republicans in Congress have just introduced legislation that would put an end to all attempts to hold the fossil fuel industry liable for the climate emergency that it played a large part in causing. Representative Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) announced on Friday that she has filed a bill called the “Stop Climate Shakedowns Act of 2026” that “shields America’s energy producers” from what she refers to as “leftist legal crusades”, primarily climate liability suits and superfund laws. Senators Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Ted Budd (R-NC), and Mike Lee (R-Utah) are sponsoring a companion bill in the Senate.
DiPaola said this federal immunity bill is a “sweeping attempt to rig the system for some of the most powerful companies in the world at the expense of everyone else.”
“Across the country, communities are facing rising costs from extreme weather, higher insurance premiums, and strained public budgets. At the same time, evidence continues to show that major oil companies knew about the risks of their products for decades and misled the public. Lawsuits and climate superfund laws are about making sure those costs don’t fall entirely on taxpayers,” she explained. “What this bill would do is shut all of that down. It would dismiss ongoing cases, wipe out laws passed by states, and tell Americans they no longer have the right to take these companies to court. And not because the companies are innocent, but because they are powerful.”
“Such corporate impunity would twist the knife of the climate crisis that is already directly harming people across the country,” Kathy Mulvey, climate accountability campaign director with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a statement. “Congress must not capitulate to wealthy special interests. Communities deserve the right to hold polluters accountable for the deadly and costly harms they are causing.”
The liability shield bills at the state and federal levels are part of a larger, escalating campaign by the fossil fuel industry and its political allies to put an end to all climate liability initiatives and to evade any and all accountability for their role in driving climate breakdown. And the campaign might ultimately end up succeeding to some degree, at least here in the U.S.
The climate superfund laws in Vermont and New York are currently tied up in legal challenges that are likely to take years to resolve, with the Supreme Court having the final say. Bills in other states to make polluters pay, meanwhile, have mostly stalled.
And the fate of climate liability lawsuits seeking damages under state law is more uncertain than ever now that the Supreme Court has decided to intervene in one of the cases at the request of the oil company defendants. The court is expected to hear the case (filed by Boulder, Colorado against ExxonMobil and Suncor) during its upcoming term later this year, on the question of whether federal law precludes state law claims pertaining to global GHG emissions and climate change. If the court rules in favor of the oil companies, it could be the end of many of the climate cases against the industry and potentially the climate superfund laws as well.
According to James May, distinguished professor of law at Washburn University Law School, such a negative ruling has become even more likely now with the court issuing a decision on Friday in favor of oil major Chevron in another case about coastal environmental damage to Louisiana parishes (their equivalent of counties). One of these parishes has already won a $745 million verdict against the company in state court, but that is now in question as the Supreme Court ruled that these coastal damage lawsuits should be moved to federal court, which is seen by industry defendants as a friendlier venue.
Whether it is coastal environmental degradation in Louisiana or climate-related damage in communities across the country, the operations and business model of the fossil fuel industry inflict real harm and steep costs – impacts that the industry has long known about, but has deliberately chosen to lie about and externalize in order to inflate its profits. The question now is whether it will ever be held accountable and forced to pay for the mess it has caused, or whether it will continue to enjoy complete impunity.