The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a trade group representing some of the biggest fossil fuel companies in the world have sued the state of Vermont in federal court over the state’s landmark Climate Superfund law.
The lawsuit, filed Monday, alleges Vermont’s law is an overreach of state jurisdiction. It also casts aspersions about whether a small state like Vermont can accurately use “climate attribution science” — the discipline that aims to quantify how climate change makes natural disasters worse, and what the cost is — a practice most climate scientists say is credible and borne out by the data and by peer reviewed research.
“One state can’t try to regulate a global issue best left to the federal government,” said Tara Morrissey, chief counsel at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Litigation Center in a statement.
Morrissey called Vermont’s law unconstitutional, adding, “The Chamber and its partners will continue to fight back against excessive overreach by the states that want to usurp the role of federal regulators."
The American Petroleum Institute, a trade group for the fossil fuel industry, and co-plaintiff in the case, declined to comment, referring Vermont Public to the Chamber of Commerce.
Vermont’s Attorney General’s Office said as of Friday, Jan. 3, they had not been served with the lawsuit and therefore declined to comment.
The suit comes just days after New York State passed its own version of a Climate Superfund law, adding legal significance to the action, as it could set precedent for the future of similar laws in other states. Massachusetts, California and Maryland are weighing similar legislation.
Vermont’s Climate Superfund Act is modeled after the federal Superfund program and empowers the state attorney general to pursue payment from major fossil fuel companies for a share of what climate change has cost Vermont since the mid-1990s, in proportion to how much their products contributed to global climate change.
The policy does not target businesses that distribute fossil fuels, like fuel dealers or gas stations, but rather pursues some of the biggest companies in the world.
If Vermont is successful, the state will use those funds to help its residents recover from climate fueled disasters like flooding, and to finance adaptation projects at scale. Buyouts, culvert upgrades and floodplain restorations are all examples of things the money could fund.
More from Vermont Edition: A deep dive on Vermont's Climate Superfund bill
But the fossil fuel industry and Chamber of Commerce allege the Vermont law is unfair and violates federal law.
Legal scholars say they’re not surprised to see the law challenged by litigation, but they are surprised to see a suit so early.
Vermont still has to undergo a process to tally its damages from climate change, and to figure out what size bills to send individual companies, details that have yet to be finalized.
“It’s a shot across the bow by the oil companies,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. “They’re trying to indicate that they’re going to fight this law very hard, and if the suit is thrown out for being too early, they will come back when it’s not too early.”
In the lawsuit, the Chamber of Commerce and API call out Vermont’s disproportionate dependence on fossil fuels, compared with other states.
Roughly two-thirds of Vermont households rely on fossil fuels for heat, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The suit also points out that Vermonters consume more fossil fuels per capita than people in two-thirds of states.
But environmental advocates and climate scientists say those claims are irrelevant. They point to scientific consensus that humans burning fossil fuels is the leading cause of climate change.
And they point to evidence the fossil fuel industry knew about the risk their products posed decades ago.
When it comes to quantifying the damages wrought by burning fossil fuels, scientists say there are well-established models that can do that work.
“This is consensus, mainstream science,” said Justin Mankin, a Dartmouth geographer who studies attribution science, whose work was directly called out in the lawsuit.
“We are increasing our ability to trace losses back to particular emissions, because climate change is no longer some far off abstraction at 2100 — it’s happening now,” he said.
That is certainly true in Vermont, where climate change fueled flooding caused north of $1 billion in damages in 2023, and homeowners and businesses in many communities faced floodwaters again a year later.
Mankin called the lawsuit the latest effort by the fossil fuel industry to undermine established science in support of their profits.
“We live in a world where global warming has occurred and all we’re doing now scientifically is documenting the harms that have happened,” he said. “And we can do that with a great deal of rigor and transparency and a great deal of reproducibility.”
API and the Chamber of Commerce are seeking an injunction prohibiting Vermont from enforcing the Climate Superfund Act. Vermont will have an opportunity to respond in federal court.
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