Ashland Sen. Jeff Golden is trying again to get the Legislature to create a fund to pay for natural disasters with damages collected from big oil

By Robin Linares and Alex Baumhardt, Oregon Capital Chronicle

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 Thursday in the Senate Natural Resources and Wildfire Committee, which he chairs. A previous version of the bill died in the Senate Energy and Environment Committee during the 2025 session, after chair Sen. Janeen Sollman, D-Hillsboro, 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 benefited 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.

Under the bill, Oregon’s Department of Land Conservation and Development 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. The Department of Environmental Quality would identify companies most responsible for those multigenerational emissions and 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 well-being of constituents.

Alex Baumhardt has been a national radio producer focusing on education for American Public Media since 2017. She has reported from the Arctic to the Antarctic for national and international media, and from Minnesota and Oregon for The Washington Post. Robin Linares is the Oregon Capital Chronicle’s AAJA Portland Peter Wong political reporting intern. She is currently a third-year student at Willamette University and the news editor at Willamette’s student newspaper, The Collegian. This story first appeared in the Oregon Capital Chronicle.