In a flurry of filings, state and nonprofit organizations have asked federal courts to dismiss lawsuits brought against Vermont’s Climate Superfund Act, a first of its kind law demanding fossil fuel companies pay for their pollution.
Those lawsuits, filed by the federal government, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and American Petroleum Institute, a lobby for oil companies, and 24 red states led by West Virginia, claim the Vermont law interferes with federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions and punishes fossil fuel companies while raising costs to consumers.
Last week, Vermont filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuits. The state argued the act does not conflict with federal law, regulate fossil fuel emissions or punish fossil fuel producers. Rather, it will look at the costs to the state of companies burning fossil fuels and will allocate a portion of those costs to those companies to help the state finance adaptation efforts under climate change.
The White House, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the West Virginia attorney general’s office did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication. The American Petroleum Institute directed VTDigger to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because the group is the lead litigant in the case, according to spokesperson Justin Prendergast.
The international scientific community overwhelmingly agrees that climate change is largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels. The warmer atmosphere holds more moisture and can produce more rain in shorter, heavier bursts, and a warmer ocean can fuel stronger hurricanes. Those conditions can lead to more flooding, like those that inundated Vermont in 2023 and 2024, and again in July 2025. Hotter temperatures can also cause more extreme wildfires, contributing to human health risks in far flung places, like the wildfire smoke that hung over the state this summer.
“Our community has been enormously impacted by the climate crisis,” said Grace Oedel, executive director of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont, an organization that supports sustainable agriculture, in a statement issued Friday. “This law helps Vermonters deal with the fallout by funding critical climate adaptation projects, and we are committed to defending this law that will help so many of our farmers and community members navigate these extreme challenges.”
Along with the Conservation Law Foundation, an advocacy group based in New England, Oedel’s group backed up the state by asking federal courts to dismiss the lawsuits Friday. The pair of nonprofits were granted the legal authority to intervene in the lawsuits earlier this summer. The Natural Resources Defense Council, a New York-based environmental group focused on legal action, is providing support for their work through its attorneys.
“Let’s be clear: this law is not a sweeping effort to regulate global greenhouse gas emissions, punish fossil fuel companies, or set federal policy on climate change,” Kate Sinding Daly, senior vice president for law and policy at the Conservation Law Foundation, said in a statement.
The Climate Superfund Act imposes a one-time payment on fossil fuel companies for their emissions between 1995 and 2024. The model is called “polluter pays” and empowers the state to demand payment from polluting companies whose extraction or refining of fossil fuels caused at least one billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions over the last two decades. It’s based on science that connects the increase in greenhouse gas emissions to specific events like the increase in temperatures over time, or a disaster like a hurricane or a flood.
A group of nine economists made an additional filing Thursday arguing the lawsuits didn’t properly reflect the impact of the law. Not a party to any lawsuit, they are academics who study how government policies affect markets and well-being. They include professors who have taught at Columbia, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California-Berkeley. One was the former chief economist of the World Bank, another co-founded the social entrepreneurship center at Middlebury College, and a third chairs the economics department at the University of Vermont.
The group submitted an amicus brief, a legal document that provides additional information to help courts make decisions. They argued the one-time fee on fossil fuel companies demanded by the law wouldn’t impact states or consumers.
That’s because those “fixed costs” are based on past pollution, the economists argued. The potential fee doesn’t impact the costs of future production, or how the companies choose to shift those current or future costs onto customers, they said.
Such a law is different from one that concerns future emissions, like a carbon tax applied to oil companies for every barrel of oil produced, or a liability case that asks an oil company to stop activities that contribute to climate change, the economists wrote. In their arguments against the superfund law, plaintiffs alleged economic harm to the tune of “hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars,” but the economists say this is “implausible.”
“Based on recent performance, such payments are unlikely to threaten these companies, given that the one-time payments may represent only a fraction of a liable company’s profits for a single year,” the brief states.
While the state and federal backlash against the law came just months after President Donald Trump took office, the timeline for demanding payment from fossil fuel companies is still years away. The state treasurer’s office isn’t required to submit a cost report until January 2027. Rules for determining costs will be filed in January 2028, and the state plans to issue final cost recovery demands to oil giants by July 1, 2028.
The Department of Justice argued in its suit that Vermont is attempting to “usurp the power of the federal government by regulating the national and global emissions of greenhouse gases.”
That lawsuit comes as the federal government simultaneously tries to rid itself of such regulations by rolling back emissions standards and attempting to overturn the “endangerment finding” that determined in 2009 that greenhouse gases threatened public health.
