RUTLAND, Vt. (WCAX) – Attorneys defended Vermont’s landmark climate superfund law on Monday, as it faces a lawsuit filed by the Trump administration.

Vermont lawmakers passed the Climate Superfund Act in 2024 after devastating flooding in 2023 and other extreme weather events.

The law requires certain large fossil fuel companies to help cover the costs of climate-related damage linked to their emissions between 1995 and 2024.

It is being challenged by the federal government, along with the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and attorneys general from 24 Republican-led states.

They argue Vermont is overstepping and that climate policy should be handled at the federal level.

Attorneys for Vermont and environmental groups asked a federal judge in Rutland to dismiss those challenges, arguing the state has the right to hold companies accountable.

“It was an intense and technical day of legal arguments over whether the Climate Superfund Act passes muster under federal law, and whether it is appropriate under our Constitution and other doctrines, and is going to survive this series of lawsuits that have been filed against it,” said Christophe Courchesne of the Vermont Law and Graduate School.

Vermont was the first state to pass a law like this. New York followed, and more than 10 other states are considering similar measures.

This case could help decide whether those laws move forward.

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Ivy Mix knew only small-town life growing up in Vermont. In 2003, she decided that needed to change.

“I realized the world was a very big place,” she said recently. “I thought I might want to go someplace and see something.”

She left for Guatemala to volunteer and teach photography in an orphanage. She hung out daily in a nearby bar, enjoying the environment at least as much as the imbibements. When she realized she couldn’t pay off the tab she had racked up, Mix started pouring drinks to offset her debts.

A celebrated bartending career began.

The Tunbridge native is a semifinalist in the Outstanding Professional in Cocktail Service category of the James Beard Awards, the top honors in the American food-and-drink industry. The nod recognizes her work at Whoopsie Daisy, the bar she co-owns in Brooklyn. The author and five-time nominee hopes this is the moment she can finally call herself a James Beard winner.

The 20 bartenders in her category include Kate Wise, who grew up in Stowe and works at Juniper at Hotel Vermont in Burlington. Wise said she’s stunned she’s in the same category with a woman she saw give a cocktail-making demonstration years ago at Waterworks Food + Drink in Winooski, the sort of event celebrity bartenders do.

“She is so talented,” Wise said of Mix, who has owned two successful bars.

Catching on to the cocktail boom

Mix spoke with the Burlington Free Press while driving from New York City to Tunbridge. She splits her time living in Brooklyn and her hometown.

“Tunbridge when I was growing up was small and really rural,” Mix said. “It’s still rural, but it was before the demise of the dairy industry.”

Mix and her twin sister, Tess, are the daughters of glass blower Robin Mix and Susan Dollenmaier, founder of the Vermont-based textile company Anichini. They lived off a dirt road with only one house nearby. Mix attended a Waldorf school and then Chelsea High School and became obsessed with horseback riding.

“I horseback rode all the time,” she said. “Before I went to college that’s what I thought I was going to do. Olympic riding was my goal.”

She stayed in Vermont to study philosophy and fine art at Bennington College. While in college she spent time in Guatemala, sowing the seeds of her bartending career.

Mix graduated from Bennington in 2008. She sold her horse and thought she’d become a professor. The economic collapse that year changed her plans. She lived in New York, worked for free at art galleries and hated it. Mix began working at cocktail bars just as that trend was catching on.

“I was like, ‘OK, this is cool,’” she said. “The cocktail revolution was really booming.”

Shining a spotlight on female mixologists

The cocktail revolution, though, felt like it had little room for women.

Mix said the speakeasy “meme” was big then, which meant men in moustaches, arm garters and suspenders. She and friend Lynnette Marrero in 2011 started Speed Rack, which as the movement’s website explains has “been able to shine a spotlight on female mixologists thriving behind bars around the country; and while they are at it, raise money for breast cancer research, education and prevention.”