Proposed Climate Superfund Act, Seeking Restitution from Polluters, Is ‘Basic Kindergarten Ethics’
February 9, 2026
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PROVIDENCE — It’s not often you can say a piece of legislation is easy enough for a kindergartner to understand: if you make a mess, it’s your job to help clean it up.
That’s the message climate advocates are bringing to Smith Hill this legislative session for the second year in a row, with the introduction of new Superfund-style legislation. It’s called the Climate Superfund Act, introduced by Rep. Jennifer Boylan, D-Barrington, and Sen. Linda Ujifusa, D-Portsmouth, and will charge fees to fossil fuel companies that contributed more than a billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions over the past 25 years.
The bill directs the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management to crunch the numbers to find out how much the state is spending on mitigating climate change and charge fossil fuel companies for their presence in the Ocean State accordingly.
Aaron Regunberg, director of Public Citizen’s Climate Accountability Project and a former state representative, spoke at a press event Feb. 3 pinning the blame on fossil fuel companies such as ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Shell for making massive profits on oil and gas while directly contributing to the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change.
“It’s an idea so simple my 4-year-old son understands it,” Regunberg said. “It took him a little while to internalize, but if he pulls his stuffed animals outside the toy box, he needs to help pick them up and put them back.”
The impacts of climate change — rising sea levels, increased flooding, higher costs of property insurance, greater risk of wildfire, extreme weather, ocean acidification — are all directly affecting Rhode Island and are all expected to snowball the next century. Roads, seawalls, and municipal sewer systems will have to be moved, heavily rebuilt, or completely reconfigured as the state sees greater coastal and inland flooding. To say nothing of the increased risk of hurricanes, snowstorms, or even long-term droughts that could dry up water supplies.
“These are all messes that Big Oil predicted, that Big Oil caused and profited from causing, yet these are all messes that as of now we’re being forced to pay for,” Regunberg said. “We’re being asked to clean up on our own with zero contributions from the polluters who caused this mess.”
Rhode Island is the seventh state this year to introduce climate superfund legislation. Massachusetts, Maine, Virginia, New Jersey, Oregon, and Illinois have introduced similar bills in their legislatures. Vermont and New York have already passed their own superfund bills.
The bill, if enacted, has three main parts. First, DEM would identify any climate change response work eligible to be charged to fossil fuel companies, followed by DEM calculating just how much emissions each fossil fuel company was responsible for with a proportional charge attached.
It’s not dissimilar to how the federal Superfund program works; the entity responsible, or closest identifiable party, is required to clean up the pollution at a site identified in the program. The federal initiative, often seen as a massive success, can take years of legal wrangling, negotiating, and planning before a site is finally remediated.
In Rhode Island’s case, who would have to pay? Any oil or gas company with a local presence in the state, such as a pipeline, sea terminal, or retail outlet, according to Boylan.
“Rhode Island needs to be there and get its fair share from these companies,” Boylan said. “They don’t get to walk away and have the public pick up the tab. It’s not about punishment, it’s about responsibility.”
Boylan declined to speculate how much the legislation could raise if passed, leaving the final details to be worked out later by DEM. New York state already crunched the numbers on its carbon emissions tab and said oil and gas companies owed the state $75 billion for damages caused by climate change.
One guarantee if lawmakers choose to pass the legislation, it will undoubtedly attract multiple lawsuits aimed at overturning it. Twenty-two states, led by states with Republican attorneys general, sued New York over its legislation.
Last year Vermont Public Radio reported the Trump administration filed a lawsuit in May contesting the legislation, coming on the heels of a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and American Petroleum.
Timmons Roberts, a professor specializing in climate change at Brown University, said while New York and Vermont were attracting the brunt of the lawsuits, it should get easier for states moving forward.
“Rhode Island really needs this funding to pay our climate costs, and we have a tool at our disposal that embodies the issue of fairness,” he said. “It’s basic kindergarten ethics.”
It is time to make the polluters pay, and if we do not get the climate crisis under control the economy will crash and burn.
I hope they make the wind farms who will be dumping super heated chlorinated water into our ocean and also the clear cutting solar AHOLES pay also. But we all know that won’t happen!
It’s obviously not that simple. Without fossil fuels life expectancy would be back to where it was in 1900– around 48 years– and we would have an economy that is a fraction of the size it is now. We would be reading by candlelight, heating our homes by burning wood, and traveling by horse, and the general filth would make for a very dangerous environment, with rampant disease. Almost none of the things we now take for granted, including electricity, would be available. The general standard of living would be extremely low. This is completely different than tobacco, which provided no benefit to society.
By the logic of this childish bill, we should also shake down everyone who ever drove a car, truck or tractor, every food company that produced wrappers that ended up in landfills along with the stores that sold this food, every restaurant that served meals that resulted in people eating too much which added to health care costs, and on and on.
And obviously the “polluters” aren’t going to just write a check if a bill like this were to pass. There would be years of litigation, and the state would waste its very limited resources on a hopeless effort.
The other thing that a bill like this does is harm an already horrible business climate– the state is ranked dead last in a recent poll of best places to start a business, and this kind of bill just makes it worse.
We need to focus our efforts on fostering a better economy that produces jobs and doesn’t force so many smart young people to leave the state, rather than the endless effort to extract rents from everyone in sight. Always looking for the bad guys to blame for the state’s woes is a losing approach. The bad guys are us– with our failing schools, our government that spends vastly more than it should (something like double per capita that New Hampshire spends), and our failing infrastructure.
“It’s not often you can say a piece of legislation is easy enough for a kindergartner to understand: if you make a mess, it’s your job to help clean it up.” So who made the mess?? You me and EVERY RI person who breathes. THAT $$$ Confiscated from so-called billionaires and billionaire companies Is really just going to be charged back to every Rhode Islander who buys gasoline oil i& other fossil fuels that get us through the winter and electricity generation TOO. Seems like all the so called environmental organizations consider global warming a giant problem? Yet the same environmental organizations Sierra Club, NRDC, etc. Played a major part in canceling nuclear power plants like Pilgrim and Vermont Yankee and somehow expect $$$$ == wind and solar to supply us with energy??? That they hate nuclear power shows that we are not in a climate crisis because if we well then as much as we fear nuclear power we’d be building it But it’s the safest way to generate electrons! https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/12/clean-energy-china-xinjiang-uyghur-labor/ == When Clean Energy Is Powered by Dirty Labor-Most solar panels come from China, and using them to fuel a clean energy transition risks reliance on Uyghur slave labor in Xinjiang. Somehow China & India which the majority of the emissions are coming from now 2026 are not stopping and building more coal plants. We have never burned more coal than we are burning right now 2026 thanks to China and India but their people are much more prosperous because of it. But the the Sierra Club is to drive us into economic ruin and energy poverty which is real poverty that’s lawyering is going to produce. How come we can’t build some power plants some nuclear power plants?????
And of course, we must all realize that the “polluters” being targeted will simply pass these costly penalties back down to all of us as consumers. That’s after they cost us millions of dollars in litigation costs which they all factor into the cost of doing business. And let’s not forget that just about everything we consume has a waste product associated with it which will ultimately become a target for corrective action. So, regardless of who actually does the cleanup it will be consumers and taxpayers who pay the bill. Fixes are never easy, cheap or fair.