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make polluters pay
Join the National Push to Make Polluters Pay
From January 26 to 30, advocates, lawmakers, students, workers, and faith and community leaders across the country are coming together for a week of action to stop the fossil fuel industry from passing the bill for the climate crisis onto the rest of us.
Jan 26, 2026
Climate change isn’t looming somewhere down the road. For millions of families, it’s already showing up as higher insurance bills, higher utility costs, flooded roads, closed schools, and budgets stretched past the breaking point. And for others, it’s far worse—lost homes, lasting health impacts, and lives cut short. The damage from the climate crisis isn’t a distant projection. The bill is real, and it’s already due.
The problem is who’s paying it.
Right now, American families and state governments are picking up the tab for climate disasters while the fossil fuel companies that knowingly caused the damage keep raking in record profits. Every storm that wipes out a neighborhood, every heatwave that overwhelms hospitals, every wildfire that shuts down a school adds another line item to public budgets, and another cost pushed onto taxpayers and our families.
That imbalance is why, from January 26 to 30, advocates, lawmakers, students, workers, and faith and community leaders across the country are coming together for a Make Polluters Pay Week of Action. It’s the opening push of the 2026 legislative session and a clear signal that polluter accountability is no longer a fringe idea, but a governing priority.
Big Oil accountability is coming. The only question is how much longer taxpayers will be left holding the bill.
The logic is simple: If you caused the harm, you should help pay for the repair.
This is how we already handle toxic waste, oil spills, and industrial contamination. We don’t send the cleanup bill to families who live nearby. We send it to the companies that made the mess. Climate superfund laws apply that same common-sense principle to the climate crisis, and voters understand it.
In fact, support is growing fast. Recent polling shows that 77% of voters now support making oil and gas companies pay their fair share for climate damages, including majorities of Republicans and Independents. Support has jumped more than 10 points in the past year as the real-world costs of climate damage become impossible to ignore.
In 2024, Vermont and New York became the first states in the nation to pass climate superfund laws, requiring fossil fuel companies to contribute billions toward disaster recovery and climate resilience. In 2025, nearly a dozen more states introduced similar legislation. In 2026, that momentum is only accelerating.
The Week of Action reflects that reality. Across the country, states will introduce new climate bills, hold lobby days and town halls, deliver petitions, publish op-eds, walk out of classrooms, and rally public support—all aimed at starting the year with one message: Taxpayers shouldn’t be the default insurer for fossil fuel pollution anymore.
This push is happening now because delay has a cost. Every year we fail to act, the damage compounds and the bill gets bigger. A recent study found that climate costs to the US economy likely topped $1 trillion in 2025. That’s money coming out of household budgets, local tax bases, and already stretched state services.
This is also happening as federal accountability collapses. Agencies meant to protect communities and prepare us for disasters, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Weather Service, are being gutted, with another 1,000 FEMA jobs reportedly on the chopping block just as disasters intensify. At the same time, President Donald Trump is cozying up to fossil fuel executives, helping them dodge accountability and fight efforts to make polluters pay.
Every dollar collected from polluters is a dollar that doesn’t come from taxpayers. Climate superfund funds can build flood protections, harden the grid, prevent wildfires, create lifesaving cooling centers, and keep hospitals and schools functioning during disasters. It also supports good jobs, since rebuilding roads, bridges, and energy systems requires skilled labor. For families, stronger grids mean fewer outages and repairs, and ending fossil fuel subsidies and loopholes can free up billions to lower utility costs, expand clean energy access, and invest in communities instead of corporate giveaways.
The fossil fuel industry wants this conversation to feel radical. It isn’t. What’s radical is a system where companies profit while the public pays, where disasters are treated as unavoidable acts of nature rather than the predictable result of decades of pollution.
Big Oil accountability is coming. The only question is how much longer taxpayers will be left holding the bill. The Make Polluters Pay Week of Action is about answering that question with action. Not someday. Not after the next disaster. Now.
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Make Polluters Pay for the Poles and Wires
The companies that made billions selling the fuels that destabilized the climate can afford to help fix the grid that’s collapsing under it.
Oct 29, 2025
We talk a lot about the cost of energy, but not enough about what’s actually driving it. Across the country, electricity bills are climbing not because of regulation, as the industry claims, but because of the growing costs of the climate crisis itself. The storms, the fires, the floods, and the heat are battering an electric grid that was mostly built half a century ago, and the costs of repairing it are being quietly folded into our monthly bills.
The other side wants you to believe it’s “climate” that’s driving up prices, and they’re right, just not in the way that they mean. It isn’t climate mandates or clean-energy standards. It’s climate disasters. And the truth is, the fastest way to lower costs isn’t to slow down the energy transition, it’s to speed it up. Clean energy brings cheap, reliable power online faster and protects families from the kind of fuel price spikes that come with oil and gas dependence.
That’s where climate superfund laws come in. New York and Vermont have already passed versions that require the biggest polluters to chip in for climate damage. These laws follow the same principle that governs toxic-waste cleanup. If you made the mess, you help pay to clean it up. States are starting to realize that the funds from a climate superfund could cover part of the cost of hardening the grid, things like replacing wooden poles with steel, elevating substations that flood every few years, building microgrids so hospitals and schools can stay open during blackouts, and funding new and more reliable clean energy projects. These projects would help to ease the pressure on ratepayers while making the systems themselves more resilient.
For years, utilities and regulators treated big storms as one-off emergencies. A few poles went down, they rebuilt them, everyone moved on. But the “one-off” has now become, dare I say, the “new normal.” In Maine, the cost of storm recovery has risen more than 30 fold since 2020. Every time a nor’easter slams through the state, Central Maine Power spends millions to replace equipment and clear lines, and then regulators approve a new rider or adjustment that gets added to customer bills. It’s the same story across the country.
The next time a storm knocks out your power or a bill arrives higher than expected, that’s the climate crisis arriving as a tab in your mailbox.
In California, billions have gone toward wildfire mitigation after blazes sparked by utility equipment destroyed entire towns. To prevent future fires, power companies are burying lines, trimming trees, insulating wires—all necessary, and all very, very expensive. According to state filings, utilities’ wildfire-related costs are contributing to 7-12% bill increases for residential customers. What began as infrequent emergency response spending has become a permanent part of doing business for utility companies across the country.
A new national analysis from the Center for American Progress and the Natural Resources Defense Council shows how big this problem has gotten. Utilities in 49 states and Washington, DC have already raised rates or proposed to raise within the next two years. By 2028, those hikes will add nearly $90 billion to household energy bills. That’s billions with a b. And for many families, that means another $30 or $40 a month on top of everything else they’re already struggling to afford.
The reasons are tangled together. The grid is old and failing faster under stress. The price of natural gas has spiked again, partly because exports of natural gas have linked American prices to volatile global markets. And new power-hungry data centers are popping up so quickly that utilities are scrambling to build the power plants to feed them. But one of the biggest single drivers remains extreme weather. Each storm and heatwave adds another layer of cost to a grid that was never built for this world.
The Government Accountability Office has warned that climate change will stress every part of the energy system and that failing to adapt will cost billions of dollars more in the long run. Yet the way we pay for that adaptation hasn’t changed at all. Utilities rebuild, regulators sign off, and the public pays. Fossil-fuel companies whose emissions are fueling the disasters that make all this necessary contribute all of nothing.
It’s tempting to think of this as just another utility issue, a problem for regulators and accountants and not us. But to me, it’s really a measure of how far the climate crisis has crept into our daily life. The next time a storm knocks out your power or a bill arrives higher than expected, that’s the climate crisis arriving as a tab in your mailbox. We can keep pretending it’s inevitable, or we can start sending the bill to the companies that profited from creating the problem.
Climate superfunds won’t solve everything. But they’d at least start to balance the scales. The companies that made billions selling the fuels that destabilized the climate can afford to help fix the grid that’s collapsing under it.
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'Time to Make Polluters Pay': Study Ties Fossil Fuel Pollution Directly to Deadly Heatwaves
"We're talking about real people who died, real crops that failed, and real communities that suffered, all because of decisions made in corporate boardrooms," said one campaigner.
Sep 11, 2025
A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature establishing "that the influence of climate change on heatwaves has increased, and that all carbon majors, even the smaller ones, contributed substantially to the occurrence of heatwaves," is fueling fresh calls for fossil fuel giants to pay for the deadly impacts of their products.
With previous "attribution studies," scientists have generally looked at single extreme weather events. The new study, led by Sonia Seneviratne, a professor at the Swiss university ETH Zurich, is unique for its systematic approach—but that's not all.
"Past studies have mostly looked at emissions from people and countries. This time, we're focusing on the big carbon emitters," explained lead author Yann Quilcaille, a postdoctoral researcher in Seneviratne's group, in a statement.
"We are now at the point where we recognize the serious consequences of extreme weather events for the world's economies and societies—heat-related deaths, crop failures, and much, much more," he said. "People are concerned about who contributed to these disasters."
The researchers found that climate change made 213 heatwaves from 2000–23 "more likely and more intense, to which each of the 180 carbon majors (fossil fuel and cement producers) substantially contributed." They also found that global warming since 1850-1900 made heatwaves 2000-09 about 20 times more likely, and those 2010-19 more likely.
"Overall, one-quarter of these events were virtually impossible without climate change," the paper states. "The emissions of the carbon majors contribute to half the increase in heatwave intensity since 1850-1900. Depending on the carbon major, their individual contribution is high enough to enable the occurrence of 16-53 heatwaves that would have been virtually impossible in a preindustrial climate."
Anybody surprised? Emissions from 14 fossil fuel giants drove 213 major heatwaves since 2000, making >50 deadly ones 10,000× more likely and adding up to +2.2°C increased intensityAll while knowing the impact of GHG emissionsCorporate negligence =Human costwww.theguardian.com/environment/...
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— Ian Hall (@ianhall.bsky.social) September 10, 2025 at 12:37 PM
While the study highlights the climate pollution of "14 top carbon majors," including the governments of the former Soviet Union, China (coal and cement), India (coal), and the companies Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, ExxonMobil, Chevron, National Iranian Oil Company, BP, Shell, Pemex, and CHN Energy, Quilcaille said that "the contributions of smaller players also play a significant role."
"These companies and corporations have also primarily pursued their economic interests, even though they have known since the 1980s that burning fossil fuels will lead to global warming," the researcher added.
In a review of the study for Nature, climate scientist Karsten Hausten from Germany's Leipzig University pointed out that "Quilcaille and colleagues' results, as well as the attribution framework that they have developed, provide a tool to continue the legal battle against individual companies and countries."
"This study is a leap forward that could be used to support future climate lawsuits and aid diplomatic negotiations," he wrote. "Finally, it is another reminder that denial and anti-science rhetoric will not make climate liability go away, nor will it reduce the ever-increasing risk to life from heatwaves across our planet."
Hausten was far from alone in recognizing how the new research could contribute to climate cases. Jessica Wentz, senior fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, pointed to the International Court of Justice's landmark advisory opinion from July that countries have a legal obligation to take cooperative action against the global crisis.
"Initially, when a plaintiff needs to show that they have standing in a case, they have to allege that they have an injury that is traceable to the defendant's conduct," she told CBC, suggesting the new study will help establish that connection.
"The methodologies that underpin these types of findings can also be used in more fungible ways to look at not only the contributions of the carbon majors, but presumably you could use a similar approach to start looking at government," Wentz said.
Christopher Callahan, a scientist at Indiana University Bloomington who has published research showing that economic damages from rising extreme heat can be tied to companies such as Exxon, said that "this study adds to a growing but still small literature showing it's now possible to draw causal connections between individual emitters and the hazards from climate change."
"There is a wealth of evidence now that major fossil fuel producers were aware of climate change before the rest of the public was and used their power and profit to undermine climate action and discredit climate science," he said, adding that it is "morally appropriate" to hold companies accountable for the emissions of their products.
Callahan also gathered some of the relevant research in a series of posts on Bluesky, noting that on the same day that this new study was published, another team "quantified the thousands of heat-related deaths in Zurich, Switzerland that can be attributed to climate change—and showed that dozens of these deaths are due to the emissions from these individual firms."
"Together, this science—and the broader attribution science that preceded it—are building a clear scientific case for climate accountability," he concluded.
Several US states and municipalities in recent years have launched lawsuits and passed legislation designed to make Big Oil pay for driving the deadly climate emergency—and earlier this year, drawing on an essay in the Harvard Environmental Law Review, an American woman filed the first climate-related wrongful death suit against fossil fuel companies.
In a Wednesday statement to The Guardian about the new study, Cassidy DiPaola, a spokesperson for the Make Polluters Pay campaign, said that "we can now point to specific heatwaves and say: 'Saudi Aramco did this. ExxonMobil did this.'"
"When their emissions alone are triggering heatwaves that wouldn't have happened otherwise," she added, "we're talking about real people who died, real crops that failed, and real communities that suffered, all because of decisions made in corporate boardrooms."
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