There is a national movement to make major fossil fuel producers pay for damages and recovery from, and preparation for, climate-related disasters like wildfires, floods, and heat domes.
Here’s a short video from Fossil Free Media describing the Make Polluters Pay idea.
Legislation has been passed into law in New York and Vermont to bill multinational fossil fuels companies to create climate superfunds ($80 billion in New York) to help cover the costs of climate change, and similar bills have been introduced in several other states. Oregon Third Actors turned out with many others to support Oregon’s Superfund bill (Senate Bill 1187) in 2025, but the bill failed to make it out of committee.
This year, a similar bill, Oregon’s Climate Resilience Superfund Act (Senate Bill 1541), was introduced to the legislative short session by Senator Golden of Ashland and was heard in his Senate Committee On Natural Resources and Wildfire on February 5th. This bill will charge the largest, multinational fossil fuel firms proportional to the amount of greenhouse gas produced from the fuel they extracted and sold from 1995-2024 to establish a Climate Superfund Account. 30% of funds will be allocated directly to wildfire prevention. The remaining funds will be distributed by the state to pay for local climate recovery and resilience implementation. 40% of the funds overall will be devoted to highly impacted environmental justice communities. Here is the “one-pager” description of the bill.
A video recording of the February 5th hearing is posted here. It’s worth watching the first 30 minutes of the hearing which presents expert testimony from the Oregon legislators, the staff who created the bill, and experts from New York and Vermont who created, passed, and defended the successful superfund bills in those states. The next hour and a quarter was devoted to one-minute testimonies, including Third Actors David Parker, Katie Larsell, Ernie Niemi, Cindi Bethal, and Jane Hickman, and firefighters and constituents harmed by fire and smoke, and a few lobbyists from business associations who clearly hadn’t understood the bill.
Third Act Oregon is a member of the Oregon Make Polluters Pay Coalition of over 40 organizations working to pass this bill. Here’s a photo of the coalition members at the February 5 hearing.
Third Actors in Portland, Corvallis, and Eugene are having meetings with local elected officials who are faced with these costs but lack the resources to pay for them. We want to persuade them to support this bill as a cost recovery and tax relief bill for the damage already done to the environment. Local officials carry weight with their state legislators, and were key to passing the Superfund bill in New York State. If you want to join this effort, come to the meetings of the Third Act Climate Finance Resilience Team at 3 pm on Wednesdays weekly through March, and monthly thereafter if the Superfund bill fails to pass in this session. See the Events listings on our web page for the link to this informal meeting.
What you can do:
If you haven’t already done so, please sign the petition supporting the Superfund bill here.
You can talk about the Oregon Climate Resilience Superfund with your family, friends, neighbors, and organizations, and write to your local elected officials or state legislators to inform them about this potential new major source of funding. Why should citizens pay the entire cost of climate change? The fossil fuel companies helped make this mess, and they should help pay to clean it up.
Come to Salem on Advocacy Day, Monday February 16, to lobby your legislators. Sign up here.
