Vermont enacted a law Friday that will require energy companies to pay huge sums to cover costs purportedly driven by climate change — and several other states may be following suit.
Republican Vermont Gov. Phil Scott allowed his state’s climate “superfund” bill to become law Friday without his signature, obligating energy producers that emitted more than one billion tons of greenhouse gases since 1995 to pay into a “superfund” that would be tapped to pay for disasters purportedly caused or exacerbated by climate change, according to NBC News. The new law is likely to become the subject of a legal battle with the energy industry, and some blue states — including New York and Massachusetts — are looking to pass similar bills in the near future.
“What these states are basically saying is, ‘if you make things we don’t like, we’re going to fine you into oblivion for what you’ve done anywhere in the world. And we’re going to use all that money to pay for products and projects favored by progressives,'” OH Skinner, executive director of the Alliance for Consumers, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The message that corporate America is going to hear, which is really bad for consumers, is stop making things that Vermont and California and New York don’t like, take them off the market and start making whatever New York and California are going to spend these billions of dollars on.”
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