Should Fossil Fuel Companies Pay For Climate Disasters?

Our disaster recovery systems are failing people. New York could provide a path forward.

By Katie Nixdorf, More Perfect Union

It’s been nearly three months since Hurricane Helene ripped through western North Carolina and residents are still reeling in its aftermath. Meanwhile, FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is scaling back operations, to the dismay and outrage of residents.

“We are living in what feels like a third-world country,” Lauren Murray, a resident of Black Mountain, North Carolina, told More Perfect Union. “It is so much bigger than anybody can truly wrap their head around… We have all of these people living in tents all around here. Does that add up to you?”

The systems that are supposed to help people recover and rebuild seem to be failing. One policy in New York, however, could provide a pathway for disaster survivors to get more support and make disasters less damaging in the first place.

In June, the New York legislature passed the Climate Change Superfund Act, a policy that would help fund infrastructure and responses to extreme weather events. Crucially, the fund would be built not from taxpayer dollars, but from fossil fuel companies who have contributed to climate change.

“We do this in other instances where a company is responsible for a chemical plant explosion or an oil spill,” said Samantha Montano, an Assistant Professor of Emergency Management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy. “So to extend that out to the ways in which they have impacted the climate… seems to be kind of a reasonable extension of accountability that they should have had all along.”

Governor Kathy Hochul has until the end of the year to sign the bill into law — and if she chooses to sign it, it could pave the way for other states to follow suit.

The fund would raise $75 billion over the next 25 years — a crucial change especially as federal funds are becoming more constrained. FEMA now spends roughly six times more on disaster recovery than it did ten years ago, according to an analysis of Congressional Research Services data. The agency has already spent close to half of its budget for FY2025, since it has to budget not just for upcoming disasters but for ones that happened decades prior.

“FEMA is still paying out money for Katrina Recovery 19 years later,” Montano said. “There is no possible way for our current approach to emergency management to meet the needs of the future, particularly in the context of the climate crisis. And the way I know that is because it's not meeting the needs of today.”

We spent three days in Western North Carolina to dig into how our disaster recovery system works and what we need to change to cope as climate disasters become more frequent and more damaging. Watch our full video here.