Sam Drevo walks by the burned foundation of his mother's home in Gates following the 2020 Labor Day fires. A proposal from Sen. Jeff Golden would create a climate superfund to help pay for wildfire prevention and response. (Photo courtesy of Tyler Westfall)
A bill that would require some of the largest, most profitable oil and gas companies in history to pay damages for disasters fueled by climate change is back on the table after the Oregon Legislature failed to pass it less than a year ago.
State Sen. Jeff Golden, D-Ashland, is again championing the Climate Superfund Bill, along with several Portland and Salem-area Democrats.
Modeled after similar laws in New York and Vermont, Senate Bill 1541 would create a new disaster fund housed in the Oregon Treasury, seeded with millions of dollars in damages paid by the handful of companies most responsible for emitting planet-warming greenhouse gasses causing catastrophic climate change.
These include 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.
Golden reintroduced the bill during a public hearing on Thursday in the Senate Natural Resources and Wildfire Committee, where he is a vice-chair with Sen. Todd Nash, a Republican from Enterprise. The bill previously died in the committee during the 2025 session, after Sen. Janeen Sollman, a Democrat from Hillsboro and Golden’s vice-chair at the time, said there wasn’t enough time to consider it.
Roughly 60 audience members, including many hoping to give in-person testimony, filled the hearing room Thursday. Overall, more than 70 people signed up to provide in-person or online testimony. Many supported the bill, with advocates ranging from local government officials and religious leaders to wildland firefighters describing the impacts of extreme weather events in their backyards.
“This never gets easier,” said Talent Mayor Darby Ayers-Flood.
In September 2020, a third of the town burned down in the Almeda Fire, destroying hundreds of homes and dozens of the town’s brick and mortar businesses. In the five years since, Ayers-Flood noted that children remain traumatized and the town has yet to fully recover from the loss.
“In the 20 years that I have served as a public official, the climate conversation has always been about tradeoffs and education. Now, it’s about survival,” she said.
Others testified on the importance of holding polluters accountable.
“We are all in some way responsible for this climate catastrophe, but only a few of us have gotten filthy stinkin’ rich from it,” said Pastor Brennan Guillory of McMinnville. “It is time for those who have benefitted the most to start paying to fix this disaster.”
Two representatives from the natural resource industry and business industry groups testified against the proposal.
“This bill would further weaken Oregon’s competitiveness at a time when leaders are emphasizing economic recovery and growth,” said Sharla Moffett, a lobbyist for the trade group Oregon Business and Industry. Moffett said she was concerned that requiring the companies to pay damages would raise the price of fuels in Oregon.
Polluter pays
The proposal is modeled off of the 1980 federal law that created “superfund sites.” These are sites that are so badly contaminated that the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to declare they must be cleaned up, and to force the parties responsible for the damage to reimburse the government for its work.
Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality would assess how much money the state has spent on fires, floods, heat domes, droughts and other natural disasters linked to planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from 1995 to 2024, and identify companies most responsible for those multigenerational emissions. The agency would issue cost recovery notices to the companies, who would in turn pay damages that would go into the climate superfund.
From there, the state would use the money to invest in climate change and natural disasters adaptation and response.
Thirty percent of the climate superfund dollars would be set aside for the Oregon State Fire Marshal’s Office to be used specifically for wildfire prevention and response across the state. Another 40% of funds would be directed to the State Fire Marshal or the Department of State Lands and Conservation for climate change resilience projects that benefit disadvantaged communities that bear disproportionate climate impacts from greenhouse gas pollution.
If passed, Oregon’s climate superfund law would likely be challenged in court, as similar laws have been in New York and Vermont. The Trump administration and the American Petroleum Institute have argued the laws violate their due process rights because it imposes a retroactive penalty.
But Geoff Hand, a Burlington, Vermont-based lawyer who has worked with attorney generals in New York and Vermont on their suits, said the superfund law has already shown that it is legal to do so, and that it is in these cases that states are “at their zenith,” because they have statutory powers to protect the health and wellbeing of constituents.
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