Earlier this month, the State of New York passed a new climate superfund law to help fight climate change. Under this new law, the state’s top greenhouse gas emitters could pay $75 billion to the state over the next 25 years to help cover damage already done to homes, roads and bridges, as well as the cost of preparing for increasingly extreme weather in the years to come.

Affected companies are promising to fight this new law in court, but there is legal precedent for states creating their own “cost recovery” types of superfunds. In fact, three other US states (Maryland, Massachusetts and Vermont) have also been attempting to pass simliar kinds of legislation.

Another potential inroad against polluters being tested by states are lawsuits like the one filed by Maine’s attorney general in late November against major oil companies, alleging that “large oil conglomerates, knowing the risks climate change posed to the public, fabricated a public-relations campaign to mislead consumers about the role of greenhouse gases and human action in climate change.” This approach has historical precedent as well. The 1998 Master Settlement Agreement between 52 US states and the four largest tobacco companies in the US settled dozens of state lawsuits brought to recover billions of dollars in health care costs associated with treating smoking-related illnesses. These suits alleged that tobacco companies misled the public about the risks of cigarettes and conspired to prevent the development of safer cigarettes. As Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway describe in their landmark book, Merchants of Doubt, fossil fuel companies engaged in exactly this same behavior over decades to discredit climate science and scuttle climate policy.

Unlike the damages wrought by smoking, though, even a multi-billion dollar class action settlement against fossil fuel companies won’t begin to cover the damages being inflicted by climate change.

Indeed, one might argue that spending the next 10 years trying to assign legal liability might distract us from working together toward urgently needed solutions. Should we enlist fossil fuel companies as allies in this urgent fight against rising temperatures instead of fighting them in court over who’s to blame (or maybe in lieu of litigation)? This is just personal conjecture, not representative of the viewpoint of CDRANet or anyone in it. But in my mind anyway, winning a $250 billion settlement from fossil fuel companies in 2035 (to be paid in installments until the year 2100) won’t make a lick of difference in our effort to stop global warming, whereas investing $100 billion right now might make all the difference in the world.