As Los Angeles County residents embark on the long road to recovery from the devastating January wildfires, California lawmakers are putting forward legislation aimed at making polluters pay for escalating the climate crisis. Big oil and gas companies generating the majority of planet-heating emissions that amplify extreme weather disasters should cover the cost of the damage, according to state officials who unveiled the Polluters Pay Climate Superfund Act in California today. 

“Now’s the time to have them contribute to making a better situation for Californians, and to pay for the damage they knowingly have caused,” assembly member Dawn Addis, a Democrat representing California’s 30th district on the Central Coast, told Sierra. 

Addis, along with California senator Caroline Menjivar, introduced California’s version of so-called climate Superfund legislation that holds major fossil fuel producers liable for their climate pollution. Vermont and New York enacted climate Superfund laws last year. The legislation requires companies responsible for generating over 1 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions over the last 25 or 30 years to pay into a newly created state fund that will go toward financing climate disaster recovery and resiliency projects. The laws are modeled after the federal Superfund program that holds polluters liable for the costs of cleaning up hazardous waste sites. 

California’s bill similarly targets only the largest oil and gas producers and refiners. It tasks state regulators at the California Environmental Protection Agency with developing rules to determine who these responsible parties are and how much each has to pay. The one-time fee assessed on companies will go into a new fund, which will be used to pay for enhancing community resiliency to wildfire risk, installing microgrids and cooling systems, and bringing energy efficiency and solar projects to low-income communities, among other services. The bill mandates that 40 percent of funds go toward communities most impacted by fossil fuel pollution. 

“It’s really focused on making sure that those who have been living with dirty energy and high levels of pollution are the ones who would benefit from this,” Addis said. She added that a recovery policy is especially needed now to “help counteract the attacks that Trump is making on California pocketbooks, and on moves that California is making toward electrification and a greener economy.” 

This polluter-pays legislation, supporters say, has also become even more relevant and necessary in the aftermath of the horrific wildfires that torched LA County in January, destroying more than 16,000 structures and resulting in 29 fatalities. The fires could turn out to be among the costliest weather-related disasters in US history. AccuWeather pegged initial estimates of total damage and economic losses between $250 billion and $275 billion, while a UCLA report estimates total property and capital losses of up to $164 billion and insured losses of up to $75 billion.

“The LA fires show with heartbreaking clarity how much we need this bill to make the biggest climate polluters pay for the astronomical damage they’ve caused,” said Kassie Siegel, director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute. “The public shouldn’t be shelling out billions of dollars every year to recover from severe and deadly climate disasters. By passing this commonsense bill, state lawmakers can put the financial burden of climate damage on giant polluting companies, where it belongs.”

Researchers have confirmed that climate change, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels, helped contribute to the hot, dry, and windy conditions that fanned the flames. These fire-prone conditions were made about 35 percent more likely with 1.3°C of warming above preindustrial levels, according to an analysis from World Weather Attribution (new analysis from Berkeley Earth and the Copernicus Climate Change Service find that the planet surpassed 1.5°C of warming in 2024). Another study from researchers at UCLA found that climate change likely contributed to about 25 percent of the vegetation dryness that helped fuel the devastating and destructive wildfires. 

Some climate scientists and advocates say major fossil fuel companies, whose products are largely responsible for driving climate breakdown, should be held accountable for the resulting damages. 

“It should not continually fall on us to deal with the consequences of Big Oil’s negligence."

A 2023 study found that about half of the increase in fire-prone conditions over the last century or so can be attributed to the emissions traced to just 88 fossil fuel companies and cement manufacturers; those emissions also contributed 37 percent of the total burned area from forest fires in the western United States and southwestern Canada since the 1980s. “The big picture’s very clear. Climate change is driving all of the [fire] conditions,” Kristina Dahl, one of the authors of that study, said during a January press briefing. And yet, she noted, “the companies that are shaping the conditions under which these fires are occurring are largely left off the hook.”

Sam James, who grew up in Altadena, where her family has lived for five generations, said several of her family members lost their homes in the Eaton Fire. The 24-year-old said that while California is used to wildfires, their severity has “escalated dramatically due to climate change and the actions of big oil companies.”

“It should not continually fall on us to deal with the consequences of Big Oil’s negligence,” James said. 

California is facing staggering costs of tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars as the climate crisis intensifies and the state responds and adapts to its damaging impacts. The state also appears to be in the throes of a home insurance crisis as climate-fueled extreme weather prompts insurers to raise rates or refuse to cover the most high-risk areas. 

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A bill introduced in late January by state senator Scott Wiener called the Affordable Insurance and Climate Recovery Act attempts to help address this problem. And like the polluters-pay climate bill, it proposes to make Big Oil help pick up the tab. 

The legislation would allow homeowners and business owners, as well as insurance providers, to recover damage costs and losses from big fossil fuel firms that deceived the public for decades about the climate risks of their products. Individuals who lost their homes or suffered other damage from a climate disaster would be able to sue large oil and gas companies, who would be strictly liable for the damages. In addition to creating that private right of action, the law would establish a cause of action for insurers to take legal action against Big Oil to recover losses resulting from climate disasters, which are increasingly upending the home insurance market and threatening to render some areas of the country virtually uninsurable. 

In California, the FAIR plan is the state-created insurer of last resort for homeowners who otherwise could not get coverage, but this program is becoming overburdened and is not itself able to absorb costly disasters like the recent wildfires, leaving homeowners across the state facing higher insurance costs. The SB 222 bill attempts to address this by requiring the FAIR plan to sue oil and gas companies to recover substantial claims resulting from major climate disasters, as an independent expert assessment determines that litigation benefits outweigh the costs. 

“By forcing the fossil fuel companies driving the climate crisis to pay their fair share, we can help stabilize our insurance market and make the victims of climate disasters whole,” Wiener said in a statement. 

The bill is sponsored by several advocacy organizations including the Center for Climate Integrity, California Environmental Voters, and Extreme Weather Survivors. According to a recent poll from CCI and Data for Progress, 60 percent of surveyed California voters support this legislative proposal. 

Senator Menjivar, one of the bill’s coauthors, said it is part of a legislative package state lawmakers are pursuing this year, “to finally hold polluters responsible for their share of the [climate] costs.”    

That package also includes the new climate Superfund bill, which is backed by a broad coalition of environmental, climate justice, and public health organizations. Menjivar introduced a version of the legislation last year, and it passed through several committees but ran into significant opposition from the oil and gas lobby. 

Supporters are optimistic that this year, it will finally make it across the finish line. 

“Momentum is building, and you can see these bills sweeping across the country,” Siegel said. “Sure, a bill like this is a heavy lift, but the time is right in California.”