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Keith Carson was a television meteorologist for almost 20 years working at News Center Maine in addition to The Weather Channel. He is currently director of environment and science communications at Maine Conservation Voters.
Minutes before sitting down to write this, I was supervising my 7-year-old picking up Legos that had been strewn all over his room during a play date. Any parent knows it can be a battle to make this happen, but it’s teaching our children an important lesson: “If you make a mess, you clean it up.”
Almost everyone agrees on this principle. That’s why, as a society, we’ve decided you can’t just throw trash from your car, you can’t dump chemicals in the water, heck, you might even get put on blast for leaving your airline seat a mess. So why is it that we let oil and gas corporations off the hook for the mess they’ve created?
It’s important to understand; they knew.
As early as the 1950s, there was knowledge among oil producers that CO2 would warm the planet, but things got really damning by the 1970s. Exxon hired its own science team to investigate and model the impact of fossil fuel emissions on the Earth. In 1977, its senior scientist, James Black, said, “In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels.” Read his 1978 report — it’s eye-opening.
Despite this knowledge, Exxon went on to fund climate misinformation campaigns and, of course, kept pushing its product as safe for the Earth. And now, as you know, Maine has a mess to clean up after in the form of the costly damage created by more extreme storms, higher sea levels, droughts and other climate disasters.
But there’s a way to have these oil and gas corporations pay for at least some of the cleanup and future-proofing we now need to do. It’s LD 1870. While this bill wouldn’t hold these corporations accountable for the lies they told, it would require them to pay us back for the damage that they caused.
Those costs can be astronomical, just the back-to-back storms of January 2024 cost Maine an estimated $90 million in repairs. This bill would create a superfund, paid into by the world’s largest oil and gas corporations, to cover the expenses of infrastructure repair, resiliency measures, and other disaster-related costs. A superfund would give the state the resources it needs to reinvest in communities and make us all stronger before the next climate disaster hits.
The science shows that major fossil fuel producers have contributed a disproportionate share of the carbon pollution driving climate change. The Climate Superfund bill relies on this science to ensure that polluters — not local communities — bear the financial responsibility for the damage caused by their products.
Maine lawmakers should move this bill forward to hold fossil fuel companies accountable and ensure they pay their fair share of the damage their products have caused.
