For more than 60 years, America’s response to global climate change has operated like a hot potato tossed endlessly between the presidency, Congress, and the courts. William S. Becker, a former regional director at the U.S. Department of Energy and author, detailed in The Hill that this legislative paralysis has left local communities and federal taxpayers footing the bill for a crisis that fossil fuel companies spent decades obfuscating.
From Lyndon Johnson’s Warning to Bipartisan Stalls
The game of political catch began in 1965. Science advisers to President Lyndon Johnson warned him that fossil-fuel pollution was triggering a vast geophysical experiment capable of altering Earth’s climate in ways deleterious to humans. Johnson relayed the warning to Congress, yet neither he nor lawmakers enacted controls on greenhouse gases.
In 1988, more than twenty years afterward, a premier government climate expert testified before Congress that human-driven global warming was actively affecting the United States and stood poised to intensify meteorological disasters.
Lawmakers responded with several bipartisan climate bills. By 1992, the Senate ratified America’s involvement in the first international climate treaty.
That momentum fractured quickly. The fossil energy industry alongside Republican lawmakers launched a campaign to discredit and deny climate science, turning the issue highly partisan. Subsequent Democratic administrations under Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden attempted to implement climate-action programs, only to watch Congress and their Republican successors scuttle them.
Shifting the Battleground to the Supreme Court
As legislative avenues closed, the dispute migrated into the legal system. Back in 2004, New York City joined with eight distinct states to launch the inaugural major lawsuit pressing for lower carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.
Courts ruled that only the Environmental Protection Agency could regulate the emissions.
Faced with that boundary, state, local, and tribal governments shifted tactics. Instead of suing to limit emissions, they filed dozens of lawsuits demanding financial compensation for climate-related damages. The lawsuits maintain that the fossil-energy industry kept the dangers hidden and spurred on usage for decades, despite knowing early on that their merchandise would fuel global warming.
None of those lawsuits have gone to trial. The U.S. Supreme Court is currently hearing Boulder County v. Suncor Energy Inc. The court will not determine whether the county should receive damages during these proceedings. Instead, the lawsuit tests whether federal law preempts state-level climate-damage claims, with a ruling anticipated next spring.
Subsidizing Profits While Disasters Mount
While the litigation crawls through the judiciary, the financial toll on the public escalates. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that the U.S. suffered more than 400 billion-dollar disasters between 1980 and 2024, pushing total damages near $3 trillion. Taxpayers absorb these costs alongside mounting legal bills for municipal lawsuits.
At the same time, fossil fuel companies continue collecting massive financial backing from the government. During 2024, oil and gas firms received $18.2 billion in implicit subsidies from all levels of government in the U.S., stacked alongside $1.1 trillion in explicit subsidies encompassing unpriced social and environmental costs and foregone revenues, all while oil and gas companies continue to rake in record-breaking profits.
What Congress Must Fix Next Year
Litigation continues to expose deep fractures in federal climate law regarding the financial burdens imposed on the American public. According to the proposals outlined by Becker, Congress has four specific mechanisms available next year to settle the issue permanently:
- Regulation: Explicitly identify greenhouse gases requiring regulation and grant the EPA unambiguous authority to resolve major legal questions.
- Liability: Establish clear statutory guidelines for when energy producers bear liability for climate damages and apportion responsibility between producers and consumers.
- Compensation: Create a federal trust fund for states and localities, requiring fossil energy companies to pay into it based directly on their emissions, mirroring historical models like the Superfund, the Oil Spill Liability Fund, or the Black Lung Disability Trust.
- Future Generations: Define the government’s legal obligations to upcoming generations, mandating that long-term climate consequences factor directly into federal decisions.
Who in federal leadership will finally force a permanent resolution to the costs of fossil fuel consumption, and whether lawmakers will override decades of industry lobbying to establish a mandatory compensation fund remain open questions.
