As Mainers face rising electricity and gas prices and our towns struggle to deal with the damage from increasingly worse flooding and destructive storms, oil and gas companies continue to rake in record profits year after year.
It’s Time for Oil & Gas Companies to Pay for the Pollution They Create
Town and county budgets face pressures at every level. It’s fundamentally unfair to expect Maine taxpayers to be on the hook for keeping people and property safe from a problem they didn’t create.
Climate change is here, and there is a straight line between the impacts being felt across our state and the pollution created from coal, oil, and gas. Farmers, fishermen, loggers, and communities statewide are all having to adapt, and they shouldn’t be forced to do it alone. They need help.
Right now, the cost burden of climate damages falls squarely on the shoulders of taxpayers, straining municipal budgets, increasing property taxes, and forcing hard decisions like whether to invest in needed upgrades to sewer and water systems or repair damaged roadways and working waterfronts.
The world’s largest fossil fuel corporations created this problem, and should pay their fair share to help local communities fix the damage being inflicted by rising sea levels, high winds, destructive storms, and other impacts of climate change.
The facts paint a clear picture that the time to act is now:
- Since 2024, the State of Maine has spent more than $90 million to repair climate damages to public infrastructure. That doesn’t even account for the hundreds of millions that families and towns have spent repairing homes, businesses, and other properties.
- The three-year period between 2022 and 2025 saw nine statewide emergency declarations—an average of three per year.
- Over the previous 40 years, Maine only averaged a single emergency declaration annually.
A Climate Superfund for Maine Will Support Local Cities and Towns
Creating a Climate Superfund for Maine would ensure that payments from large oil and gas corporations, rather than taxpayer dollars, cover the costs of projects that protect people, businesses, and property from the devastating impacts of climate change and help our communities adapt to new climate realities.
This commonsense solution is modeled after the successful national Superfund program for toxic waste, and the “make polluters pay” principle that underpins Maine’s product stewardship laws for harmful waste like mercury batteries and paint. These proven approaches have withstood legal challenges for decades and, through attribution science, can also be applied to damages caused by climate change.
Maine is moving in the right direction. In 2026, the Maine legislature passed LD 1870, laying the groundwork for a new Maine Climate Superfund program. The law directs the State of Maine to produce a report by January 2028 that details the financial impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on our biodiversity, natural resources, public infrastructure, and more.
How You Can Help Pass a Climate Superfund for Maine
- Sign the petition to oppose immunity for Big Oil and support the creation of a Climate Superfund for Maine;
- Urge Maine’s Congressional delegation to oppose immunity for Big Oil by calling their offices and joining our August recess events in Portland and Lewiston;
- Participate in the DEP study of climate damages to give an accurate representation of the total cost of climate change to Maine;
- Work with your city or town to pass a resolution in support of a Climate Superfund as Bath, Yarmouth, and Rockland have already done;
- Encourage your state legislators to support the establishment of a Climate Superfund for Maine.
This isn’t just about shaking a finger at the world’s largest polluters. This is about bringing an estimated hundreds of millions to billions of dollars–coming from polluting corporations–to Maine to respond to the escalating impacts of climate change without putting state and municipal budgets underwater.
Thanks to existing successful programs like Maine’s Community Resilience Partnership, we know that funding locally-directed resilience projects work for our communities. Now, we just need a sustainable funding source to supercharge those efforts and keep up with the pace of climate damages. The next two years will be critical in determining whether Maine is able to access the funding it needs to keep our communities safe during an era of climate change.
Big Oil Taking a Page Out of Big Tobacco’s Playbook
The world’s biggest oil and gas companies are pushing President Trump and his allies in Congress to give these mega corporations a get-out-of-jail-free card by passing a Fossil Fuel Immunity bill, which would provide blanket immunity for big polluters, protecting them from having to pay for the damages they’ve caused. If passed this fall, this bill would undermine the efforts underway in Maine, Maryland, New York, Vermont, and more than a dozen other states to protect their own citizens by passing climate superfund laws.
The influence of Big Oil over the Trump administration is anything but subtle. From direct campaign contributions to closed-door meetings, fossil fuel executives are paving the way for billions of dollars of profits as working families face rising electricity and energy prices. In one White House meeting, when Big Oil CEOs complained about state climate superfund efforts. Records show that Trump’s policy advisor Stephen Miller texted these concerns to then Attorney General Pam Bondi, telling the fossil fuel executives: “I’m on it.” Within two months, the federal government had sued both Vermont and New York, kicking off costly legal proceedings.
Here in Maine, we can’t let President Trump’s climate denial and close relationship with the world’s biggest polluters get in the way of progress. Mainers made clear last year that they want our elected officials to pursue a Climate Superfund to protect our future. We will continue to stand up to say Maine will not accept blanket immunity for Big Oil at our expense.
Maine’s Polluters Pay Legacy
This wouldn’t be the first time Mainers have held corporations accountable for causing harm to our state.
In 1998, Maine participated in the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, winning over $50 million annually in damages from Big Tobacco to help cover the cost of treating health issues associated with tobacco products.
In 2021, Maine became the first state in the nation to pass Extended Producer Responsibility for packaging, requiring manufacturers that produce waste to pay for processing their trash.
Most recently, Maine won in court against Big Pharma, pulling down over $230 million to treat opioid addiction from large pharmaceutical corporations that perpetuated the opioid epidemic.
There are sixteen Environmental Protection Agency Superfund sites in Maine, ranging from landfills to mining sites to waste pits to industrial brownfields, each of which has received funding from the polluters responsible for damaging the land and water.
A Climate Superfund would not be a novelty for Maine, but rather the continued application of a deeply held principle: if you make a mess, you clean it up.
Fact Check: Will a Climate Superfund Raise Prices?
Big polluters often claim that holding them accountable will result in higher prices for consumers, but it’s not true. Maine’s climate superfund would only apply to a small number of the world’s biggest polluters that have done business in Maine. Because of competition in the fossil fuel markets, these few companies couldn’t raise prices for consumers without colluding closely together, which would be illegal. In addition, Nobel Prize-winning economists have studied the impact of one-time fees based on past behavior on companies, and found that they: “will not increase costs to consumers, nor decrease energy production levels or downstream government tax revenues.” In short, these are predictable scare tactics coming from big companies that don’t want to clean up the messes they’ve made, and shouldn’t be believed.
You can read more here: Enacting the “Polluter Pays” Principle. NYU School of Law, Institute for Policy Integrity.
The Path to a Maine Climate Superfund
Despite heavy lobbying from fossil fuel companies to try and block progress, the ball is now rolling toward the creation of a climate superfund for Maine. The Maine Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) will shortly issue a request for proposals to conduct the study that will assess the true cost of climate damages in Maine, which will include opportunities for public engagement.
The final report will be delivered to the Legislature in January of 2028, at which point the Environment and Natural Resources Committee will be able to put forward legislation to establish a Climate Superfund. Winning on significant climate legislation is always hard work, and it will be essential for those of us who care about the future of Maine’s environment and the health of our communities to make their voices heard throughout the legislative process.
Right now, we need to make sure that Maine’s Congressional delegation holds firm in their opposition to Big Oil immunity legislation, which is anticipated to emerge in the fall of 2026 as part of the budget process. Senator Susan Collins is a particularly important voice in this process as the Chair of the Appropriations Committee and needs to hear from her constituents that Maine does not want to see Big Oil let off the hook to pollute Maine free of charge.
If we pass the federal hurdle and a Climate Superfund program is passed into law by the Maine State Legislature in 2028, the program will be eligible to receive fees from polluters that are responsible for over 1 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions between 1995 and 2024, ensuring that only the largest international fossil fuel companies (none of which are based in Maine) are on the hook to pay for climate damages. The amount each corporation owes will be calculated according to their relative level of contribution over that time.
A Climate Superfund for Maine will not only hold polluters accountable for the damage they are doing to our environment, it is a necessary step toward giving our cities and towns the tools they need to protect their residents, local businesses, and infrastructure from the increasingly damaging impacts of climate change.
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