Vermont Advances Climate Superfund Amid Federal Legal Challenges

For Sue Minter, Vermont's appointment as the state’s Climate Superfund specialist traces back to firsthand experience with devastating floods starting over a decade ago. During Tropical Storm Irene in 2011, in her role as deputy secretary of transportation, Minter was instrumental in repairing the extensive damage to Vermont’s infrastructure, including hundreds of bridges and hundreds of miles of roads. Later, as executive director of Capstone Community Action, she supported vulnerable and low-income Vermonters displaced by major flood events in 2023 and 2024. With public service dating from the 1990s, Minter was selected in September 2023 to oversee the Climate Superfund Act, a novel state law aiming to hold large fossil fuel producers accountable for their pollution contribution. This law—currently subject to legal scrutiny in federal courts following challenges by the U.S. government and states—imposes a one-time fee on companies that extracted or refined fossil fuels responsible for at least one billion metric tons of carbon emissions from 1995 through 2024. The resulting funds are designated to finance Vermont’s climate adaptation efforts, driven largely by the impacts of fossil fuel emissions. Minter, a former Vermont state representative and 2016 gubernatorial candidate, described her work as a meaningful extension of recovery efforts she pioneered after Irene. Her focus is on ensuring taxpayers are not left to cover the escalating costs of climate disasters unilaterally. As program manager, she coordinates the intricate process of quantifying Vermont’s climate change expenditures through attribution science. This scientific methodology links extreme weather events—such as heat waves and floods—to climate change by calculating how increased greenhouse gas emissions have raised the probability of such occurrences. She leads collaboration with Industrial Economics, Incorporated, alongside Vermont’s treasurer’s office and the Climate Action Office within the Agency of Natural Resources. State Treasurer Mike Pieciak acknowledged the assessment as technically demanding, emphasizing the rigor of the forthcoming report due in January 2027. Afterward, the Agency of Natural Resources will spend up to another year applying these findings to calculate financial liabilities for major fossil fuel corporations including Chevron, ExxonMobil, and British Petroleum, aligning with the legislation’s directives. Minter underscored the focus on credible, scientific substantiation rather than arbitrary estimates. Though Pieciak refrained from projecting total costs before the report’s completion, a Vermont Resilience Implementation Strategy recently identified hundreds of potential resilience projects with preliminary costs reaching into the hundreds of millions. Minter’s experience with flood recovery and resilient infrastructure, honed through her tenure managing post-Irene reconstruction and advocating for federal funding through FEMA, informs her approach. Investments made with state and federal dollars post-2011 measurably mitigated damage from subsequent floods in 2023 and 2024, which cumulatively inflicted over $1 billion in losses. However, uncertainty about future FEMA disaster declarations complicates funding prospects. Notably, Vermont’s latest flood disaster declaration was denied by the prior federal administration. Minter cautions that without a robust recovery program, it will be increasingly difficult for Vermont’s communities to afford necessary resilient designs. Thus, the Superfund law gains additional importance as a potential financial safeguard for taxpayers. Legal opposition to Vermont’s Climate Superfund Act is substantial. Filed in May by the federal government and 24 states led by West Virginia, alongside industry groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and American Petroleum Institute, lawsuits argue that the state law unlawfully interferes with federal authority under the Clean Air Act over greenhouse gas regulation. In response, advocacy groups including the Vermont Public Interest Research Group (VPIRG) argue the law does not regulate emissions but rather compels polluters to contribute fairly to adaptation costs, similar to the original 1980 Superfund law's polluter-pays framework. VPIRG and others emphasize that the law neither mandates emission reductions nor behavioral changes, but addresses equitable financial responsibility. VPIRG's executive director, Paul Burns, detailed the organization's long-standing commitment to climate superfund initiatives, initially supporting proposed federal legislation to tax fossil fuel companies for major climate-related damages. When federal efforts stalled, advocates shifted focus to state-level action, leading to strong local support in the aftermath of the 2023 floods. Parallel arguments in favor of the law have been presented by the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont and the Conservation Law Foundation. Vermont has requested dismissal of the pending federal lawsuits, while the government continues to press for the law’s invalidation. The state has sought an extension to respond to these legal motions, anticipating the courts will determine how to handle the multiple filings. Regardless of legal outcomes, Minter asserts that defining Vermont’s climate change impacts remains a critical, ongoing endeavor for the state’s adaptation planning and accountability efforts.