Climate change is already harming people in communities across Rhode Island. In Westerly and Narragansett, homeowners face skyrocketing flood insurance premiums. In Newport, historic sites require multimillion-dollar protections from rising seas.
In Providence, the hurricane barrier — once considered more than adequate — now represents just the beginning of necessary infrastructure investments. And the list of climate harms goes on and on.
These mounting costs are falling disproportionately on taxpayers, small businesses, and vulnerable communities, yet they are in large part the result of reckless conduct undertaken by major fossil fuel companies that are responsible for generating the vast majority of all the global greenhouse gas emissions that have caused our planet to heat up.
Recent exposés of internal documents show that these Big Oil companies have long understood with shocking accuracy that their fossil fuel products would cause, in their own words, “catastrophic” climate harms that would do “great irreversible harm to our planet,” “have serious consequences for man’s comfort and survival,” create “more violent weather — more storms, more droughts, more deluges,” and cause “suffering and death due to thermal extremes.”
Instead of finding new business models or at least warning the public and government officials, these companies conspired to wage a massive disinformation campaign to prevent regulators, investors, and consumers from understanding the risks their products were creating. And now regular people are paying the price.
That’s not fair. The companies that created this mess should help pay to clean it up. That’s exactly what the Rhode Island Climate Superfund Act, introduced by state Senator Linda Ujifusa and state Representative Jennifer Boylan, would require — that Big Oil companies help our state adapt to the climate crisis they knowingly caused, in an amount commensurate with the proportion of overall global emissions they are responsible for generating.
Vermont and New York have already passed similar mechanisms to force fossil fuel companies to help fund climate mitigation and adaptation efforts. Rhode Island should join them — particularly given our unique vulnerability as the ocean state.
Someone will have to pay for the climate harms and extreme weather disasters our communities are already facing, and that we will continue to experience with growing regularity and lethality in the coming years.
Should all of that burden be borne by working families and local businesses? Or should the corporations that made trillions of dollars creating this crisis help Rhode Islanders respond?
By supporting the Climate Superfund Act, Rhode Island lawmakers would ensure that at least some of the costs of climate change fall on those most responsible. Rhode Islanders have already paid too much for Big Oil’s reckless conduct. It’s time to make the polluters pay.
Aaron Regunberg is a former Rhode Island state representative and director of the Climate Accountability Project at Public Citizen. Cassidy DiPaola is a native Rhode Islander and director at the Make Polluters Pay campaign.
