Climate Cost Report Underway Even as Vermont’s Climate Law Faces Lawsuits

For Sue Minter, Vermont’s newly appointed climate superfund specialist, the floods started early.

Back in 2011, when Tropical Storm Irene thrashed Vermont, Minter — serving as the state’s deputy secretary of transportation — helped rebuild the 600 miles of destroyed road and hundreds of damaged bridges. Just over a decade later, as executive director for Capstone Community Action, a regional anti-poverty nonprofit, she helped low-income and vulnerable Vermonters displaced by the 2023 and 2024 floods.

With a history of public service dating back to the 1990s, Minter was tapped in September to be the program manager for the state’s new Climate Superfund Act. That legislation, overshadowed by a pair of federal lawsuits seeking to dismantle the law, seeks to hold major oil companies accountable for their pollution. Now, Minter is pushing the law forward while the courts consider whether the state law will survive. On Monday, the federal government again asked the courts to void the law.

The Vermont law imposes a one-time fee on fossil fuel companies for emissions between 1995 and 2024. A company qualifies as a payee if its extraction or refining of fossil fuels caused at least one billion metric tons of carbon emissions over the last two decades.

Those payouts would help the state finance adaptation to climate change, largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

“This current job is so meaningful to me because it’s getting back to the mission that I was on in 2011,” said Minter, a former state representative from Waterbury who made an unsuccessful bid for governor in 2016. “In the future those dramatic costs shouldn’t be borne entirely by taxpayers.”

Her position oversees the wonkiest aspect of the 2024 law: determining how much climate change has cost the state. The assessment relies on attribution science, a type of modeling that connects events like heat waves and floods to climate change by determining how greenhouse gas emissions increased the likelihood of the event.

Minter is managing that cost assessment, working with the consulting team — Industrial Economics, Incorporated — along with the state treasurer’s office and the Climate Action Office under the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources.

“We’re in the phase where we’re rolling up our sleeves and doing the analysis,” said Mike Pieciak, Vermont’s state treasurer. “For our office this is the most technical and scientific part of the work.”

In January 2027, the treasurer’s office will submit a report to the Agency of Natural Resources, which will have another year to connect those costs to oil companies like Chevron, Exxon and British Petroleum to determine which oil giants owe what to Vermont, according to the law. “This is a rigorous report,” Minter said. “We’re not just putting a number out there, we’re really establishing credible scientific evidence for what these costs have been and what they’re projected to be in the future.”

Pieciak said he didn’t want to speculate at the total cost until the report was done, but a Vermont Resilience Implementation Strategy published by his office and the Agency of Natural Resources in September identified 300 resilience-related measures the state could pursue at an estimated cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Resilient Design

Minter came to Vermont in the 1990s and learned about climate change through activists like former Vice President Al Gore and Vermont writer Bill McKibben. But she didn’t see the impacts of a warming atmosphere causing more extreme rain events until 2011, when Irene caused record flooding in Vermont.

“She has a unique experience and background having been the recovery czar in Hurricane Irene,” Pieciak said. “So whether it’s Irene or more recent flooding, Sue very much understands the impact climate change has on Vermont and the importance and need to prioritize making our communities more resilient.”

A big part of Minter’s job in emergency response was to convince the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, to pay for resilient investments to mitigate future floods. The resiliency built with federal and state dollars after Irene helped reduce the impacts of floods in 2023 and 2024, Minter and Pieciak said. The damages from those two flooding events cost more than $1 billion, according to the resilience strategy report.

“But right now we are not at all sure what FEMA’s future will be,” Minter said, noting that the Trump administration denied Vermont’s most recent disaster declaration over this summer’s floods. She said without a federal safety net, the superfund law was even more vital to ensure taxpayers wouldn’t foot the bill for climate-related disasters.

“A resilient design can protect and reduce costs in the future,” Minter said. “Unless we have a recovery program that can help with these investments, it’s going to be harder and harder for Vermonters to do.”

Climate Lawsuits

The law faces major pushback in a pair of lawsuits filed in May by the federal government and 24 states, led by West Virginia, which joined the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute, a lobby for oil companies.

The suits claim that the Vermont law interferes with federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.

In November, the Vermont Public Interest Research Group pushed back. The progressive advocacy organization told the courts that the law does nothing to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Rather the law asks polluters to pay for their pollution, much like the original 1980 superfund law asked polluters to pay to clean up contaminated sites, according to the group’s amicus brief.

“Nothing in the Act requires emitters and polluters to change their behavior or mitigate their emissions,” the VPIRG brief reads. “The Act only asks polluters to pay an equitable share of the bill to help Vermont adapt to climate change.”

Paul Burns, VPIRG’s executive director, said the organization has been long-involved with pressing for a climate superfund law. First, the organization backed a federal climate superfund law. In 2021, U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Marykand, drafted legislation to tax major oil and gas companies for climate disasters based on the greenhouse gases emitted from 2000 to 2019. The cost recovery was estimated at $500 billion over 10 years.

When that ambitious plan failed, VPIRG turned to state leaders.

“In the wake of the (2023) flooding, we brought the voices and concerns of Vermont residents, farmers, and businesses to policymakers as they considered this legislation,” Burns said in an email. “That’s a big reason why support for the law was so strong.”

Their amicus brief followed a similar argument made by previous groups, including the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont, an agricultural nonprofit, and the Conservation Law Foundation, an environmental advocacy group in New England. In August, Vermont asked federal courts to dismiss lawsuits brought against the state’s Climate Superfund Act.

The U.S. government filed its reply on Monday, again asking the courts to void the law. The state has asked for an extension until January to respond. After that, the court will decide how it will address the flurry of motions filed since the summer, according to Vermont’s Attorney General’s Office.

“Irrespective of what happens in that case, the work that we’re going to do is incredibly important because we’re going to be defining, really, what the impacts of climate change have been in Vermont,” Minter said.

This story was originally published by VTDigger and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.

Topics Lawsuits