Vermont becomes the first state to make oil companies pay for climate change damage

It's a polluter-pays model affecting companies engaged in the trade or business of extracting fossil fuel or refining crude oil attributable to more than one billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions during the time period. Vermont has become the first state to enact a law requiring fossil fuel companies to pay a share of the damage caused by climate change after the state suffered catastrophic summer flooding and damage from other extreme weather.