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The long-standing aspiration of the environmental movement to hold polluting companies responsible for their actions is closer to being fulfilled in Vermont, a state in the northeastern United States, on the border with Canada. Both houses of parliament in Burlington, its capital, this week approved a bill designed to make Big Oil pay for damages caused by climate change disasters to which they contribute through their practices. The bill will run into billions of dollars.
The norm was voted with overwhelming majorities in the Senate (only three votes against, and 26 in favor) and in Congress (94-38), and now it is time for it to return to the upper house for a second approval, before sending it to the Republican Governor Phil Scott to sign it. Once these procedures have been completed, the Climate Superfund Law, which has been named as such, will become the first of its kind in the United States. There are already four States – Maryland, Massachusetts, California and New York – that are halfway through their respective processes to carry out similar legislation. It is also foreseeable that its approval will mark the beginning of a fierce battle in the courts, with the lawyers of these large companies looking for any legal loophole to avoid payments.
Vermont has been inspired by a program from the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, that forces polluting companies to clean up their toxic waste, or pay the US government to have authorities take care of it.
To account for what is owed, the regulatory text includes tools to calculate the extent to which climate change has contributed to extreme weather events in Vermont, and the money that those episodes, some as recent as last summer’s floods, , cost the State. To do so, consideration will be given to, among others, the economic, public health or biodiversity damage in a territory whose inhabitants are known in the rest of the country, both for cultivating their eccentricities and for their lifestyle in contact with nature. nature. Once that amount is determined, it is distributed based on the tons of carbon dioxide that each company affected by the law emitted between 1995 and 2024. And there, the international database will be used. Carbon Majorswhich points out the largest private polluters on the planet.
Mosquitoes and giants
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To gauge the unequal fight that is coming in the courts, Republican Senator Randy Brock, who voted against the law, recalled that “ExxonMobil has annual sales of $344.6 billion,” while Vermont’s budget amounts to “ about 8.5 billion dollars.” “[Es la pelea de] A mosquito against a giant,” he concluded.
Of the States that could follow the example, New York, where one of the two chambers, the Senate, has already given the Yeah to a similar text, it is the one that has the most advanced thing. In Washington, two Democratic senators, Bernie Sanders, undoubtedly the best-known politician from the depopulated State of Vermont (it has more or less the area of Catalonia and something like the population of Seville), and Chris Van Hollen (Maryland) tried to introduce a provision to make polluting companies pay in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), signed by President Joe Biden in the summer of 2022. It was one of the great legislative achievements of the first Biden’s mandate, in addition to the most important rule to date passed in the United States to address the effects of climate change, although it did not go as far as Vermont is about to go now. Had it survived in the IRA draft, it would have cost Big Oil about $500 billion.according to a project whose promoters called: The climate fund law “he who pollutes, pays”.
Last July, devastating and unusual rains devastated Vermont, leaving two dead and about $1 billion in damage. Another episode of heavy rainfall came in December 2023. Then, Governor Scott, who does not participate in the denialist whims of some of his party members, declared: “Climate change is real. I don’t think anyone should be surprised by this, nor that we can use the traditional methods that have served us against storms for the last 100 years. It was demonstrated to us with Irene and with the floods of July, and now, just five months later.” Irene was the name that meteorologists gave to a hurricane that devastated the East Coast of the United States in 2011, and that hit Vermont especially.
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