I am still trying to formulate my thoughts after what happened in Vermont a few towns over from me on Wednesday.
If you're unaware, on Wednesday, ICE agents surrounded a house near an elementary school without a warrant and the community took action. Our contact chain to get people to the scene worked. Really well. Protestors formed a human chain, blocking ICE from the house and getting a toddler to a safe location. Protestors held for six hours straight, requesting that a warrant be produced, until our city and state police assisted ICE by teargassing and brutalizing protestors and eventually entering the home. They arrested protestors and three immigrants. NONE were the individual ICE had a warrant for, he wasn't even in the house. The people taken into custody were here seeking legal asylum.
Vermont is one of the whitest states in the country and has some of the lowest % of immigrants. Just throwing that out there for reasons...
I don't know what's going to happen over the next few days. I'm trying to formulate my anger at what happened and the pride i feel for how effective our community response was together. Just know that VT is small, but takes this shit so seriously. They don't call us the Brave Little State for nothing. We threw JD Vance out in like a day in 2025. We should be boiling sap right now. But we have time for this too.
"We owe no allegiance, we bow to no throne,
Our ruler is law and the law is our own;
Our leaders themselves are our own fellow-men,
Who can handle the sword, or the scythe, or the pen." - The Song of the Vermonters, 1779.
After Vermont and New York passed "climate Superfund" legislation, 11 states have introduced similar bills this year.
"As climate disasters strain state budgets, a growing number of lawmakers want fossil fuel companies to pay for damages caused by their greenhouse gas emissions.
Last May [2024], Vermont became the first state to pass a climate Superfund law. The concept is modeled after the 1980 federal Superfund law, which holds companies responsible for the costs of cleaning up their hazardous waste spills. The state-level climate version requires major oil and gas companies to pay for climate-related disaster and adaptation costs, based on their share of global greenhouse gas emissions over the past few decades. Vermont’s law passed after the state experienced torrential flooding in 2023. In December [2024], New York became the second state to pass such a law.
This year, 11 states, from California to Maine, have introduced their own climate Superfund bills. Momentum is growing even as Vermont and New York’s laws face legal challenges by fossil fuel companies, Republican-led states, and the Trump administration. Lawmakers and climate advocates told Grist that they always expected backlash, given the billions of dollars at stake for the oil and gas industry — but that states have no choice but to find ways to pay the enormous costs of protecting and repairing infrastructure in the face of increasing floods, wildfires, and other disasters.
The opposition “emboldens our fight more,” said Maryland state delegate Adrian Boafo, who represents Prince George’s County and co-sponsored a climate Superfund bill that passed the state legislature in March. “It means that we have to do everything we can in Maryland to protect our citizens, because we can’t rely on the federal government in this moment.”
While the concept of a climate Superfund has been around for decades, it’s only in recent years that states have begun to seriously consider these laws. In Maryland, federal inaction on climate change and the growing burden of climate change on government budgets have led to a surge of interest, said Boafo. Cities and counties are getting hit with huge unexpected costs from damage to stormwater systems, streets, highways, and other public infrastructure. They’re also struggling to provide immediate disaster relief to residents and to prepare for future climate events. Maryland has faced at least $10 billion to $20 billion in disaster costs between 1980 and 2024, according to a recent state report. Meanwhile, up until now, governments, businesses, and individuals have borne 100 percent of these costs.
“We realized that these big fossil fuel companies were, frankly, not paying their fair share for the climate crisis that they’ve caused,” Boafo said.
Recent bills have also been spurred by increased sophistication in attribution science, said Martin Lockman, a climate law fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. Researchers are now able to use climate models to link extreme weather events to greenhouse gas emissions from specific companies. The field provides a quantitative way for governments to determine which oil and gas companies should pay for climate damages, and how much.
Vermont’s law sets up a process for the government to first tally up the costs of climate harms in the state caused by the greenhouse gas emissions of major oil and gas companies between 1995 and 2024. The state will then determine how much of those costs each company is responsible for, invoice them accordingly, and devote the funds to climate infrastructure and resilience projects. New York’s law, by contrast, sets a funding target ahead of time by requiring certain fossil fuel companies to pay a total of $75 billion, or $3 billion per year over 25 years. The amount each company has to pay is proportionate to their share of global greenhouse gas emissions between 2000 and 2024. Both Vermont and New York’s laws apply only to companies that have emitted over 1 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions over their respective covered periods. That would include Exxon Mobil, Shell, and other oil and gas giants.
Maryland’s law is so far the only climate Superfund-related legislation to pass a state legislature this year, although Governor Wes Moore vetoed the measure late on Friday [May 16, 2025]. The original draft of the bill would have required major fossil fuel companies to pay a one-time fee for their historic carbon emissions. But over the course of the legislative session, the bill was amended...
Climate advocates decried the governor’s decision, calling it “an inexplicable reversal of a position that threatens to stymie Maryland’s climate progress for negligible budget savings.” In a joint press release by three environmental groups, Kim Coble, executive director of the Maryland League of Conservation Voters, said, “This veto is not fiscal responsibility, it’s a definitive step in the opposite direction of our climate goals.”
In California, environmental groups are optimistic about the chances of a bill passing this year. This is the second year a climate Superfund bill has been introduced in the state, and the sponsors of the new bill have focused on building a broad coalition of environmental, community, and labor groups around the proposal, said Sabrina Ashjian, project director for the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the UCLA School of Law. This year’s legislation was introduced shortly after the devastating Los Angeles wildfires in January, which could amplify lawmakers’ sense of urgency. The bill has now passed out of each legislative chamber’s environmental committee and is awaiting votes in their respective judiciary committees. If passed, the bill will next move to the full Senate and Assembly for a final vote.
In the meantime, legislators are keeping a close eye on ongoing legal challenges to Vermont’s and New York’s laws...
Climate experts told Grist that with huge amounts of money and liability at stake, lawsuits from the fossil fuel industry weren’t unexpected. Boafo said that given how much financial and political support the Trump campaign received from oil and gas corporations, it’s not a surprise that the Justice Department has sued New York and Vermont. Pursuing these laws invites inevitable opposition — but avoiding the growing costs of climate devastation is even riskier, advocates said.
Lawmakers are “passing these bills because in writing budgets, in dealing with the day-to-day operation of their states, they’re facing really serious questions about how our society is going to allocate the harms of climate change,” said Lockman. “I suspect that the lawmakers who are advocating for these bills are in it for the long haul.”"
Driving in Vermont: cruise control is my best friend, this is the american dream, i am gliding like a phoenix through the stars, no one uses their blinker on the highway but it doesn't matter because you are a partner in a beautiful mountain dance with only two participants and no audience
Driving in massachusetts: one lane is going 30mph over the speed limit, another is going 10mph under, the third one has been under construction for 30 years, and a car just cut through all three lanes with only 6 inches of extra space and no blinker
Driving in Connecticut: you can tell town boundaries by where the paving abruptly changes, the car that just cut you off has New York plates and both a "Mean People Suck" and a "Trump 2028" sticker on it
