Oregon lawmakers next week will confront another record bill for the costs of fighting massive wildfires across the state, which have been exacerbated by unseasonable heat and ongoing drought.
These are byproducts of a warming planet, decades of scientific study has proven, as increasing amounts of greenhouse gas pollution from burning fossil fuels gets trapped in Earth’s atmosphere.
If previous years are any indication, Oregon’s Legislative Emergency Board will dip into taxpayer revenues to try to cover the costs, pulling away public dollars that could otherwise be spent on education, healthcare and other critical services and infrastructure.
But testimony submitted on behalf of proposals to create so-called climate Superfunds in Oregon and in 11 other states — modeled after the federal Superfund program that requires polluters to pay for cleanup at the nation’s most contaminated sites — show widespread public support for making some of the most profitable fossil fuel companies in history contribute to damages.
Two proposals in Oregon in 2025 and 2026 from retiring state Sen. Jeff Golden, D-Ashland, garnered packed public hearings and testimonies in support, but ultimately died in committees before getting to the House or Senate floors for a vote.
Across states, public support for climate Superfund bills has been no match for the behind the scenes lobbying of the fossil fuels industry, according to a recent report from Brown University’s Climate and Development Lab. The state Superfund bills target companies like Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and about 50 other oil, gas, coal and cement producers that are directly linked to 80% of the world’s global greenhouse gas emissions during the past decade alone.
“These are companies that have, for at least 40 or 50 years now, known the impacts of their products and have nevertheless worked actively to undermine the science and the reporting and the political understanding and action,” said Timmons Roberts, a Brown environmental studies and sociology professor who worked on the report. “I mean, they’ve thrown everything they have against it.”
Roberts and researchers at Brown pulled together over 4,000 lobbying and committee testimony positions on climate superfund bills submitted across 12 states since 2022, including on 2025 and 2026 proposals in Oregon, to better understand who is opposing climate Superfund bills and what they are arguing.
They found that supporters of climate Superfunds dominated public hearings about the proposals, and the ratio of support to opposition was roughly 3:1 in nearly every state. California and Oregon saw more than twice the amount of testimony in favor of climate superfund bills as any other state.
But behind the scenes, they found powerful industry groups lobbied against the bills across states, including in Oregon. Among them are the National Federation of Independent Business, funded in part by petrochemical company Koch Industries, the American Chemistry Council and the Western States Petroleum Association.
Oregon’s attempts
Most of the powerful opposition testimony was not given in person, Brown researchers found, but in submitted documents and behind the scenes lobbying.
During committee hearings for both of Golden’s attempts to pass climate Superfund bills in Oregon, he most remembers hearing from kids worried about their futures under growing climate change-related disasters.
“Then we had some industry lobbyists come into our hearing and just flatly say: ‘If it passes, every Oregon business would pay much more in energy costs.’ And I’d say, ‘What’s your data? What substantiates that?’ And I haven’t been shown anything,” he said.
Golden said he was particularly frustrated by the fact that bill supporters contributed detailed studies about the potential benefits of the climate Superfund, including one from Nobel-prize-winning Economist Joseph Stiglitz, who challenged lobbyists’ assumptions that oil companies would thrust Superfund costs onto consumers.
“It’s like a lot of public policy disputes,” he said. “One side is prepared with sound data from reputable sources, and the other is just shouting platitudes.”
In Oregon, in-person and written testimony in support of the proposal outnumbered opposition testimony three to one, but testimony from the fossil fuels lobby and powerful business and timber associations made its impact on lawmakers from both parties.
More than 200 opposition testimonies came in spurred by a Facebook post on a page run by the Oregon Natural Resource Industries, or ONRI, page, researchers found.
“Most of my colleagues in both parties, directly or indirectly, get funding from these groups who come in and say the sky is going to fall if we implement this,” Golden said. “I think what legislators need to continually hear is that if you are saying ‘no’ to polluter pays, you are saying ‘yes’ to your constituents paying. There’s not a third choice.”
Roberts said Oregon’s opposition testimony stood out for being largely organized on Facebook, and for the greatest number of opposition comments outright denying the reality of climate change.
“In Oregon we heard sort of the more extreme comments, like ‘this is bulls—,’ and that ‘climate change is a hoax,’” he said.
Golden modeled his proposals off of laws that passed in New York and Vermont.
Neither state’s laws have been able to go into effect, however, because of court cases brought by West Virginia’s attorney general and a group of Republican state attorneys general, the American Petroleum Institute and the Department of Justice under President Donald Trump.
On Monday, a federal judge ruled against New York’s Superfund law, arguing it was an illegal scheme to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. It’s likely the state will appeal. Another case against an oil company for climate damages brought by the city of Boulder, Colorado and that will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in October, could also bear on states’ climate Superfund proposals going forward.
Golden, who is retiring before the start of the next legislative session in January, said he’s spoken with lawmakers who could carry the Climate Superfund proposal forward again, though he declined to provide names.
“There’s not much choice but to bring it back again,” he said. “We’re out of alternatives for paying for the damages of climate chaos in Oregon. They are big and they’ll get bigger, and there’s no other place to turn unless you want Oregonians and taxpayers to pay for it.”
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