Make Polluters Pay. Period.

When Your Home Insurance Goes Up in Smoke 🔥 A Look At How Fossil Fuel Companies Privatized Their Profits & Socialized The Losses.

Photo by Sasun Bughdaryan on Unsplash

Before we get into the “meat” of today’s story, I want to address two other oil spills that occurred in the last month, in addition to our last story:

Newport News, Virginia. More than 7,700 gallons of jet fuel spilled into the James River last Friday near Newport News Shipbuilding during a transfer to an aircraft carrier.

The spill happened around 1 p.m. on February 13, and as you can see from the news story below, over the weekend, residents started to smell it.

The city of Newport News confirmed in a statement Sunday evening that the cause of the spill was under investigation and that nearby residents may smell the odor.

“Out of an abundance of caution, residents and boaters are advised to avoid areas of the river where fuel sheen is visible or where odors are especially strong,” the statement advised. “Individuals who experience persistent symptoms are encouraged to seek medical guidance.”

SMH. 🤦‍♀️

Local drinking water remains safe, according to the Virginia Department of Health.

Wayne, West Virginia. About 2,400 homes were without water service for 3 WEEKS because of alleged vandalism at a substation that led to the leak of nearly 5,000 gallons of oil into Twelvepole Creek, which runs through Wayne before draining into the Ohio River.

Wayne water customers were under a Do Not Consume order from January 16 to February 6. Hydrocarbons were found in the Wayne water system, according to the state Department of Health.

A class action lawsuit claims the town knew its water system was vulnerable to contamination because of the substation location. The plaintiffs say the town’s water system has been subject to failures, leaks, breaks and maintenance conditions that hat could delay or complicate mitigation and restoration of water service following contamination.

The Fight For Who Should Pay For Increasing Insurance Premiums

Let me tell you something I’ve learned after decades of fighting corporate giants who think they can poison our communities and walk away clean: they always know. And they always count on us being too tired, too broke, or too scared to fight back.

Well, guess what? We’re not backing down anymore.

Right now, families in California, Hawaii, and New York are getting crushed by skyrocketing insurance premiums. Not because they did anything wrong. Not because they’re bad at managing their money. But because the fossil fuel industry has spent the last 50 years turning our planet into a tinderbox while lying about it every step of the way.

And who’s paying the price? You are. The single mom in Altadena who lost everything in the Eaton fire. The condo owner in Maui watching their premiums shoot up 50% in a single year. The Brooklyn family whose insurance just doubled in three years. Meanwhile, ExxonMobil posted more than $28 billion in profits last year.

It’s sick.

That’s why lawmakers in California, Hawaii and New York have introduced measures to authorize their attorneys general to sue fossil fuel companies on behalf of residents whose insurance premiums have soared amid climate disasters.

They Knew What They Were Doing

These oil companies knew exactly what they were doing. Internal documents show they understood the climate crisis they were creating back in the 1970s. Their own scientists warned them that burning fossil fuels would warm the planet and cause exactly the kind of catastrophic weather we’re seeing now.

And what did they do with that information? They buried it. They launched massive PR campaigns to sow doubt. They spent billions convincing the public that climate change was a hoax while they quietly prepared their own facilities for rising seas and extreme weather.

Every time I talk about climate and weather in this newsletter, I get a barrage of folks telling me I’ve been “compromised” and that climate change is a “not real.” Kids, follow the money!

What incentive do I have to talk about these insane, worsening weather events and what incentive does Big Oil have to bury this critical information?

They protected themselves and left the rest of us to drown, sometimes literally.

Insurance companies are fleeing California so fast it makes your head spin. In less than ten years, reliance on California’s Fair plan, the insurance of last resort, has grown 500%.

Five. Hundred. Percent.

That’s what happens when private insurers decide covering climate disasters isn’t profitable enough and just abandon people.

“They just packed up and left,” Hawaii State Senator Jarrett told The Guardian. He’s talking about insurers fleeing Hawaii after the devastating 2023 Maui fires caused more than $2.3 billion in claims.

But he could just as easily be talking about how fossil fuel companies have abandoned any sense of responsibility for the crisis they created.

The Real Refugees

Rasheed Ali stood at a press conference in California earlier this month and said something that should shake every one of us, “We became refugees overnight.”

This is America. And we’re creating climate refugees in our own country.

Rasheed had insurance. He did everything right. But his decades-old policy never got adjusted to reflect his home’s real value. So when the Eaton fire took everything, insurance didn’t come close to covering it. There’s a “massive financial gap” his family is struggling to fill, a gap that shouldn’t exist. That gap was created by an industry that knew this was coming and did it anyway.

You know what the American Petroleum Institute (API) had to say about bills that would hold their member companies accountable? They called it a “coordinated campaign against an industry that powers everyday life.”

Are you kidding me?!?

You know what else powers everyday life? Having a roof over your head that doesn’t burn down in climate-fueled wildfires. Having insurance you can actually afford.

California housing prices are already outrageous, and now many families face challenges affording their home insurance due to rising premiums and limited options, especially in high-risk areas affected by wildfires.

It’s time to make polluters pay for the mess they created—a mess they knew all about.

Here’s how it would work: These new state bills target fossil fuel companies worth at least $500 million that do business in those states. Money recovered in court would go directly to covering residents’ rising insurance rates. It would help fund the Fair plans that have become the only option for thousands of families after private insurers bailed. In California, funds could even help to fire-proof low- and middle-income homes.

In Hawaii and New York, the bills go even further, giving insurance companies themselves the legal right to sue the fossil fuel industry after a climate disaster. That’s important. Because when insurance companies have to pay out billions for climate-fueled disasters, they either raise everyone’s rates or they leave. Either way, regular people get screwed while oil companies count their profits.

The LA wildfires in January 2025 destroyed more than 18,000 homes and properties. The fires were named the most destructive in the modern history of the city of Los Angeles and estimated to be one of the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history.

California’s Fair plan expects to pay out $4 billion in losses. To cover that, they had to ask insurers for $1 billion, and half of those costs will likely be covered by jacking up rates.

Sierra Kos, who founded the disaster survivor network Extreme Weather Survivors, put it perfectly, “Survivors should not be the ones forced to carry the financial burden of disasters that fossil fuel companies knowingly helped create.”

The Usual Playbook

Of course, the oil industry is fighting back. They always do. It’s the same tired playbook.

We’re talking about an industry that made hundreds of billions in profits while creating an existential crisis. They can afford to pay their fair share. They just don’t want to.

The API’s spokesperson said these bills would set “a dangerous precedent of state overreach” by “retroactively penalizing companies for meeting consumer demand.”

Meeting consumer demand? They created the demand! They spent decades making sure we stayed dependent on fossil fuels, while hiding what it was doing to the planet. That’s not meeting demand. That’s manufacturing dependence while suppressing the truth.

“There’s going to be a lot of pushback. We know that the oil companies have tons and tons of money, and they are going to put a lot of pressure on our legislators and policymakers not to pass this legislation. So that means that we now have a big job to do. We have got to get out there. We’ve got to organize,” said Dolores Huerta, the legendary labor organizer who’s fought corporate power for longer than most of us have been alive, at a California press conference.

She’s right. This is going to be a fight. Big Oil doesn’t give up easy. They’ll spend millions lobbying against these bills. They’ll run ads. They’ll make threats. They’ll do whatever it takes to avoid accountability.

But here’s the thing they always forget: we’ve got something they don’t. We’ve got the truth on our side. We’ve got families who’ve lost everything. We’ve got communities that have been abandoned. We’ve got mountains of evidence that they knew exactly what they were doing.

And increasingly, we’ve got lawmakers who are fed up with watching their constituents get destroyed while oil executives give themselves bonuses.

State Senator Scott Wiener, who introduced California’s bill, said, “We know that the years ahead are going to be dramatically more dangerous, tragically, when it comes to climate disasters, and we can’t allow Californians, our residents, our small businesses, to be left holding the bag.”

He’s absolutely right.

Then EPA Made It Worse

Just as states are trying to hold polluters accountable, the EPA decided to throw gasoline on the fire.

Last week, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin stood in the White House Roosevelt Room and announced what he called “the single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history.” He eliminated the 2009 Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding and all federal emission standards for vehicles.

They’re calling it a win for taxpayers. They claim it’ll save Americans $1.3 trillion.

Let me tell you what it’s really going to cost us.

Zeldin called the Endangerment Finding the “Holy Grail of the climate change religion.”

Religion. As if the science of climate change is some kind of faith-based belief system instead of documented fact. As if the families losing their homes in wildfires or giant, once-in-a-lifetime storms and floods, are just making it up. As if insurance companies fleeing entire states is mass hysteria.

Here’s what the Trump EPA won’t tell you: eliminating vehicle emission standards doesn’t make climate disasters go away. It makes them worse.

When those disasters get worse, you know who pays? Not the EPA. Not Trump. Not the oil companies celebrating this decision.

You do! Through your insurance premiums. Through your tax dollars when disaster relief runs out. Through your home equity when your neighborhood becomes uninsurable.

The Real Math

The EPA claims they’re saving Americans more than a trillion dollars by eliminating vehicle emission standards. They say it’ll cut $2,400 off the cost of each new car.

But they’re not counting the other side of the ledger. They’re not counting what it costs when we make climate change worse instead of better.

California’s Fair plan is expecting to pay out $4 billion just from the January 2025 LA wildfires. The Maui fires caused $2.3 billion in claims. And those disasters are happening in a world where we HAD emission standards trying to slow climate change.

Now imagine what happens when we accelerate it instead.

Your insurance premium isn’t going to drop $2,400 because your neighbor bought a cheaper car. But it sure as hell is going to keep climbing when the wildfires get bigger, the hurricanes get stronger, and the floods get worse because we decided to pump even more carbon into the atmosphere.

The EPA claims that “even if the U.S. were to eliminate all GHG emissions from all vehicles, there would be no material impact on global climate indicators through 2100.”

Let’s review.

We’re ignoring that vehicle emissions are a major contributor to overall U.S. emissions, accounting for nearly 30% of our total greenhouse gas output.

Second, let’s get back to the classic polluter’s playbook: “Well, we’re just one country, so why bother?” as if that excuses making things worse.

Most importantly, it completely ignores that every bit of warming we prevent matters. Every tenth of a degree matters. Every wildfire we don’t have matters. Every home that doesn’t burn down matters.

Who Really Pays?

Here’s what’s going to happen now that the Trump administration has eliminated federal vehicle emission standards.

More carbon in the atmosphere means worse climate disasters. Worse climate disasters mean higher insurance payouts. Higher insurance payouts mean insurance companies either raise premiums or flee the state entirely. When they flee, residents are forced onto Fair plans funded by taxpayers.

The EPA says they’re “returning the American Dream” by making cars more affordable. But what good is saving $2,400 on a car if you lose your $300,000 home because it became uninsurable?

What good is a cheaper vehicle if you’re paying an extra $5,000 a year in insurance premiums? Or your property taxes go up because your state has to bail out the insurance system?

This is exactly the kind of short-term thinking that got us into this mess in the first place.

Administrator Zeldin also eliminated “off-cycle credits” including the start-stop feature he calls “almost universally despised.” Fine. I don’t care about the start-stop button.

But gutting emission standards entirely? That’s not about consumer choice. That’s about letting automakers pollute more while Americans pay the price through climate disasters.

The Timing Couldn’t Be Worse

Think about the timing here. States are introducing bills to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for the insurance crisis their emissions created. And the Trump administration responds by... making it legal to emit even more?

It’s like watching someone’s house burn down, and instead of helping put out the fire, you show up with a can of gasoline.

A few states are trying to recover costs from past climate damage, but the Trump EPA just guaranteed there will be a lot more damage in the future.

Because here’s the thing about climate change: it’s a multiplier. It makes everything worse. Worse air quality during heat waves. Worse flooding that spreads pollutants. Worse wildfires that fill the air with toxics. You can’t separate climate from public health. They tried to pretend you could, and people are dying because of it.

And It Gets Even Worse

You thought your insurance premiums were the only thing fossil fuels were destroying? Think again.

While we’re talking about holding Big Oil accountable for the insurance crisis, let’s not forget about the other ways they’re poisoning us. Fossil fuels aren’t just burning down our homes through climate disasters. They’re also contaminating the water we drink.

See the examples of spills we talked about at the beginning of this article.

Fossil fuels make up about 79% of total U.S. primary energy production. That’s a lot of drilling, a lot of mining, and a whole lot of opportunities to pollute our water supply.

Look at fracking, a process where they inject high-pressure chemical fluids into the ground to extract natural gas. Those chemicals don’t just stay put. They leach into aquifers. They contaminate groundwater. A study found that in areas with shale gas development, there’s 17 times more methane in the drinking water.

The EPA has identified more than 1,000 contaminated sites related to coal ash in the U.S. alone. Coal ash ponds, which contain arsenic, mercury, lead, and other heavy metals, leak into rivers and streams. They seep into groundwater. They poison wells. Communities living near these sites have elevated cancer rates, but the coal companies keep operating because cleaning up their mess would cut into their profits.

And oil spills? Don’t even get me started. The Exxon Valdez disaster released millions of gallons of crude oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989. That was 35 years ago, and they’re still finding contaminated areas. Marine ecosystems destroyed. Fishing industries devastated. Water that was clean for thousands of years, ruined in a matter of hours.

But big spills like that make headlines. You know what doesn’t? The everyday contamination. The pipeline leaks. The storage tank ruptures. The runoff from mountaintop removal mining that’s laden with heavy metals and toxins. All of it flowing into streams, into rivers, into the water supply.

And don’t forget industrial runoff discharges heavy metals, hydrocarbons, and toxins directly into waterways.

As many as 1 in 10 American deaths today are caused by air pollution from fossil fuels, according to Bloomberg. But water pollution from the same industry? That’s harder to track, harder to prove, and a lot easier for companies to deny. Which is exactly why they keep doing it.

Gasoline and oil spills from vehicles seep into soil and eventually make their way into water supplies. Small spills seem insignificant, but they add up. Across millions of vehicles, across decades, it’s massive contamination that we’ve just normalized.

So when we talk about holding fossil fuel companies accountable, we’re not just talking about insurance premiums. We’re talking about the air our kids breathe. The water they drink. The food they eat. The planet they’re going to inherit.

The fossil fuel industry has been poisoning us for decades, and they’ve known about it the whole time. They studied it. They documented it. And then they buried the evidence and kept drilling.

States Are On Their Own

The EPA’s latest action sends a clear message to states: you’re on your own.

The federal government isn’t going to help slow climate change. It isn’t going to help make cars cleaner. It isn’t going to help prevent the disasters that are bankrupting your insurance markets.

Good luck with that insurance crisis! We’re too busy eliminating “climate change religion” to care that your residents are losing their homes.

This is exactly why the bills in California, Hawaii, and New York are so critical right now. With the federal government actively making things worse, states have to take matters into their own hands. They have to hold polluters accountable because the EPA sure isn’t going to do it.

These three bills are part of something bigger. Seventy state and local governments across the US have already sued Big Oil for deceiving the public about the climate crisis. Vermont and New York passed “climate superfund” bills requiring the largest oil companies to help pay for climate adaptation.

Now, with the federal government abandoning any pretense of addressing climate change, these state-level actions aren’t just important, they’re essential.

The walls are closing in.

For decades, fossil fuel companies privatized the profits and socialized the losses. They made money hand over fist while the costs of their business model--the fires, the floods, the hurricanes, the uninsurable homes—got dumped on regular people.

That’s not capitalism. That’s not free market economics. That’s theft.

They stole our climate stability. They stole our sense of security. And they’re trying to steal our ability to hold them accountable.

What You Can Do

If you live in California, Hawaii, or New York, call your state legislators. Tell them you support these bills. Tell them about your insurance premiums. Tell them you’re tired of paying for a crisis you didn’t create.

If you live anywhere else, demand similar legislation in your state. Because this isn’t just a California or Hawaii or New York problem. Insurance premiums are rising everywhere. Climate disasters are hitting everywhere. And fossil fuel companies are profiting everywhere.

Get loud. Get organized. Get involved.

The oil industry is counting on us being too overwhelmed to fight back. They’re counting on us accepting that skyrocketing insurance premiums are just the “new normal.”

But I’ve learned something fighting corporate polluters for the last thirty years. They can only get away with what we let them get away with. The moment we stand up, the moment we organize, the moment we demand accountability, that’s when things start to change.

The Bottom Line

The EPA claims they’re saving you money by making cars cheaper. But they’re costing you a fortune in insurance premiums, disaster recovery, climate damage, water treatment, healthcare costs from pollution-related illnesses, and environmental cleanup. They’re just hiding those costs and pretending they don’t exist.

That’s the polluter’s playbook, and it’s worked for decades. But not anymore.

The fossil fuel industry needs to pay. Not with meaningless PR campaigns about how green they’re becoming. Not with token investments in renewable energy while they keep drilling and keep poisoning our water. With actual money. Money that goes to the people whose lives they’ve destroyed. Money that helps communities adapt to the crisis they created. Money that fire-proofs homes and funds insurance programs and rebuilds what their business model burned down. Money that cleans up contaminated water and treats the illnesses their pollution caused.

Senator Keohokalole said something that really resonated with me, “Without a doubt, the increasing incidence of really devastating natural disaster events is what’s driving the insurance crisis. Whose fault is that? We know.”

We have the receipts. We have the science. We have the truth.

And more importantly, we have each other. We have survivors who are willing to stand up and tell their stories. We have lawmakers who are willing to take on Big Oil and Big Energy. We have organizers who know how to build movements.

The insurance crisis isn’t just about premiums. It’s about power. It’s about who gets to profit from destroying the planet and poisoning our water and who gets stuck with the bill. It’s about whether we’re going to let corporations get away with knowingly creating multiple crises and then walking away clean.

I’ve spent my life fighting for communities that powerful corporations thought they could ignore. Communities whose water was poisoned. Communities whose children got sick. Communities who were told their health problems were their own fault, not the fault of the companies dumping toxins in their backyard.

And I can tell you this: they always think they’re going to win. Right up until they don’t.

---

Additional Resources

How ‘Big Oil’ works the system and keeps winning

Oil & Gas Action Network

Center for Climate Integrity

350.org

Fossil Fuel Industry’s Influence on Public Opinion, Policy, and Media Narratives

Fossil fuel companies’ climate communication strategies: Industry messaging on renewables and natural gas

Networks of climate obstruction: Discourses of denial and delay in US fossil energy, plastic, and agrichemical industries

U.S. Senate Committee On The Budget

---

Let’s keep the conversation rolling in the comments below!