Climate Change: Making polluters pay

Climate change threatens human civilization. It threatens to kill a billion people. The costs of stopping it, and of adapting to the damage already done - of moving people and infrastructure to protect them from sea-level rise, and of dealing with the resulting floods, droughts, cyclones, heat-waves, and other extreme weather events - are enormous. So how do we pay for it?

The moral principle here is simple: polluters must pay. And in the US, states are finally moving towards that, with "climate superfund" legislation aimed at billing them retroactively for the damage they have caused:

It’s called a climate superfund bill, and versions of it are floating through legislative chambers in New York, Massachusetts, and Maryland, in addition to Vermont. Though each bill is slightly different, the general premise is the same: Similar to the way the federal Superfund law allows the Environmental Protection Agency to seek funds retroactively from polluters to clean up contaminated sites, states will seek to bill fossil fuel companies retroactively for the costs of addressing, avoiding, and adapting to the damages that the emissions from their products have caused.

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If [Vermont's bill] gets past the governor’s desk, the bill will kick off a multiyear process that, in the most optimistic case, could bring money into the state by 2028. The first step is for the state Treasurer to assess the cost to Vermont, specifically, of emissions from the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels from 1995 to 2024, globally. Regulators will then request compensation from responsible parties in proportion to the emissions each company contributed. The state will identify responsible parties by focusing only on the biggest emitters, companies whose products generated at least a billion tons of emissions during that time. The money will go toward implementing a state “resilience and implementation strategy” to be mapped out in the next two years.

Obviously, we can and should do this here. We already have a model: the retroactive liability for decommissioning costs imposed on the fossil fuel industry. But we need to go further than its targeting of previous permit-holders, and impose costs on owners and directors where they have used limited liability and bankruptcy to avoid paying. These people have ruined the world, and profited by doing so. It is only fair that they pay to fix it.