Dear RCC Supporter,

Today, Senator Chris Van Hollen, Representative Jerry Nadler, and Representative Judy Chu made history with their attempt to enshrine polluters’ responsibility for climate change into our code of law. That’s right – after decades of blatant disregard for our environment and the communities suffering from climate crises, Big Oil is being taken to task by the Polluters Pay Climate Fund Act of 2024.

What is the Polluters Pay Climate Fund Act?

This groundbreaking legislation would hold the biggest, most historically polluting fossil fuel corporations accountable for knowingly contributing to and exacerbating climate change through their exorbitant greenhouse gas emissions.

It would require the worst polluters to pay $1 trillion over 10 years into a climate superfund which would be reserved for investing in climate solutions, resilience, and repair of environmental justice communities.

Why Should I Support It?

The Polluters Pay Climate Fund Act isn’t just lip service to climate justice advocates in our camp. It’s a just, popular, possible, and needed way to address the climate emergency.

Climate change is here and we need bold solutions. The historic investment in clean energy from the Inflation Reduction Act was an unprecedented step toward achieving our emissions reduction goals, but we need to continue to push for more. Much more. Clean energy investments still pale in comparison to oil and gas investing and the fossil fuel industry giants are not showing any signs of willingness to rapidly decarbonize. Over 10 years, the superfund associated with this legislation would bring in $1 Trillion. Now that’s a figure that corresponds to the scale of our situation.

The Polluters Pay Climate Fund Act targets the appropriate actors: Big Oil and other fossil fuel giants that have profited for decades from polluting our planet. They stopped at nothing, not even the possibility of planetary demise, to rake in billions. Their time to pay up is overdue.

Not only is the legislation just, it’s popular.

Just this May, Vermont ratified its own state climate superfund bill, and other states are expected to follow suit. The majority of Americans support legislation that requires Big Oil and Gas to pay a share of climate costs, and this bill provides the structure for them to do it.

How Does it Work?

The logistics behind the bill are simple. The corporations who have emitted the most – specifically, those who have emitted at least 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide from 2000 to 2022 – will pay to address the consequences of climate change. The Treasury Department would be authorized to charge these corporations $1 trillion total over the next 10 years, proportionally to polluters’ own emissions, thus establishing the superfund, or Polluters Pay Climate Fund. The fund will be allocated in a number of ways to mitigate the worst impacts of the climate crisis --  improving infrastructure, cleaning up polluted sites, and providing disaster relief for extreme climate events. Nearly half of the fund will be used for climate impact remediation in environmental justice communities.

As our window to reduce emissions and ward off irreparable climate impacts shutters, it’s more important than ever that we implement bold policy solutions. Luckily, with champions like Sen. Van Hollen, Rep. Nadler, and Rep. Chu, action is on the agenda – and so are polluters paying the piper.