On the evening of Dec. 10, 12 self-identified elder climate activists sat around the Christmas tree in the New York State Capitol, in Albany, singing carols as they waited to be arrested. The protesters, who were there to support New York’s Climate Change Superfund Act, had been told by police they would face criminal misdemeanor trespass charges if they stayed put.

“Normally, for a protest like this, we’d expect to be written a citation rather than charged with a misdemeanor,” said Michael Richardson of Third Act Upstate New York, which helped plan the civil disobedience. “But there were enough of us ready to take the elevated charges. We knew it would have fewer consequences for us than a younger person.”

The next evening, another seven elders gathered around the Christmas tree in expectation of being arrested. Protests continued into a third day, dramatically capping off a campaign that had worked for two years to pass a state law making fossil fuel companies pay for damage caused by an escalating climate crisis.

On Dec. 26, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul bowed to the activists’ demands by signing the Climate Change Superfund Act, which will force fossil fuel companies to pay an estimated $75 billion over 25 years into a fund for addressing the impacts of climate change.

“This legislation is about getting resources to people in need,” said Jamie Henn of Fossil Free Media. “We’re already seeing states and municipalities drain their budgets as they try to respond to increasingly expensive extreme weather disasters. This bill helps fill those gaps while pointing a finger at the corporations who are most responsible.”

The Climate Change Superfund Act faced a long road to passage, despite widespread public support for the idea of holding polluters accountable. December’s protests pushed it over the finish line while garnering national attention.

“Our job was to put an exclamation point at the end of a very long sentence New York’s climate movement wrote over the course of two years,” Richardson said. “Civil disobedience changed the dynamic of discussions going on in the governor’s office, leading to the bill’s passage. But it took a lot of work from people all over the state to get us to this point.”

A long fight

The push to pass the Climate Change Superfund Act began in earnest in early 2023, when New York’s legislature became the first in the country to introduce a bill making polluters pay for climate damage. It died in the state assembly after clearing the senate — but in 2024, climate groups and supportive lawmakers returned with a new version of the bill.

“It passed the state senate again, really easily,” said Sara Gronim, an organizer for 350 Brooklyn. “Meanwhile, in the state assembly, we had support from a majority of members, but leaders who were reluctant to move the bill forward.”

By June, time was running out to get the legislation through the state assembly. The previous month, Vermont had passed its own Climate Change Superfund Act, but now New York lawmakers like Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie seemed ready to let the clock run out on their state’s own version without bringing it to a vote.

“We’d been meeting with lawmakers, having people call and email their representatives, that sort of thing,” Gronim said. “We’d done rallies and letter-writing days. But Speaker Heastie seemed impervious to all of it.”

On the final day of the legislative session, high school students from the state’s Fridays for Future organization traveled to Albany and staged a die-in outside the legislative chambers. “It was beautifully dramatic,” Gronim said. “There had been no major climate change legislation passed by the assembly that year up to then, and I think the students made Heastie realized he needed to emerge with something climate-related in hand.”

At 3 a.m. on June 8, in the final hours of the legislative session, the assembly passed the Climate Change Superfund Act in a 95-46 vote. “It literally came down to the waning minutes,” Richardson said. “We were relieved, but we still needed the governor to sign it.”

New York has led the nation on climate action before, for example when it became the first state with significant gas reserves to ban fracking in 2014. However, for months the Climate Change Superfund Act languished on Gov. Hochul’s desk.

“Industry came out very hard against the bill, and they had the governor’s ear,” Richardson said. “When we heard her in the press echoing concerns about the bill, we knew there was a very real chance she would let it die.”

Harnessing civil disobedience

A diverse grassroots coalition of groups supported the Climate Change Superfund Act, including NYPIRG, Fridays for Future New York City, Environmental Advocates New York and New Yorkers for Clean Power. However, it was Third Act, which works to enlist people over 60 in the climate fight, that took the lead, with its local chapters, on an 11th-hour push to secure Hochul’s signature.

“We didn’t want to have the typical kind of rally that happens over and over during the legislative session,” Richardson said. “So, we decided on an old-fashioned teach-in like those organized against the Vietnam War in the ‘60s.”

The action kicked off with another die-in at the Capitol led by youth activists on Dec. 10. Then, for two successive days, hundreds of activists participated in the teach-in outside Hochul’s office. “It was an intergenerational, interfaith, intercultural coalition of people of all ages,” Richardson said.

The sit-in around the Christmas tree, on Dec. 10 and 11, brought a true civil disobedience element to the protests. Over half the activists risking arrest belonged to Third Act chapters from Upstate New York, New York City and Vermont.

“Having us out there helped put force behind the arguments of our allies in state government urging Hochul to sign the climate Superfund bill,” said Richardson, who was one of those arrested. “The attorney general was coming forward saying he can defend it in court, while the state comptroller said it was fiscally sound. We even had multiple members of Congress come out in favor.”

In the end, the protests not only persuaded Hochul to sign the bill, but helped focus national attention on the ideas behind the Climate Change Superfund Act in a particularly striking way.

“Pageantry is very important in any social movement, and that informed how we planned our protests,” Richardson said. “Nineteen elders being arrested on criminal trespassing charges for singing songs around a Christmas tree made for a compelling image.”

That image spread far and wide in the news and social media, sparking a national conversation about holding polluters accountable for climate damage in New York and beyond.

The death of Big Oil?

The campaign to pass the Climate Change Superfund Act unfolded against a backdrop of extreme weather that has made climate change tangible for more and more people.

“Just in this past year, New York suffered a string of climate catastrophes from deadly heat, to killer storms, to wildfires and polluted air,” said Eric Weltman of Food and Water Watch, a national organization that supported the bill. “Similar impacts are being felt at a national level, as we see with the catastrophic fires in Southern California. It shows why legislation like this is so important.”

New York’s climate Superfund law and the similar legislation in Vermont are both based on highly successful state and federal Superfund laws that require polluting industries to pay into a fund for cleaning up waste sites. Over 1,300 toxic dumps have benefited from the national Superfund law.

Like that legislation, climate Superfund laws are based on the principle that taxpayers shouldn’t foot the bill for damage caused by polluting industries. The idea has far-reaching appeal with voters, according to climate groups’ internal polling.

“The message works in different ways for different audiences,” said Fossil Free Media’s Jamie Henn. “You can be someone on the left who cares about the climate crisis, or someone on the right who believes in law and order and doesn’t like paying taxes. Either way, there’s something to like about this approach.”

While so far only New York and Vermont have passed climate Superfund laws, that could change quickly. Other states where activists are working to advance similar legislation include Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts and California.

“So far, California and Maryland are farthest along,” Henn said. “Both had climate Superfund bills introduced in their last legislative sessions, and I think we’ll see many more states follow suit in 2025. We held an organizing call for interested state legislators in December that attracted over 60 lawmakers from around the country.”

Climate Superfund laws can’t directly fund the clean energy transition. Rather, the money they raise will help communities rebuild in the wake of climate-related catastrophes. New York’s law is expected to raise $3 billion a year for such projects.

“Here, like everywhere, we have bridges washed out by storms, libraries that get flooded, elementary schools that don’t have correct ventilation for wildfire smoke,” said Gronim of 350 Brooklyn. “Two summers ago, the view outside my window was orange because of Canadian wildfires. Kids were in school at that time. Money from this law will go to the infrastructure repairs and renovations we need.”

However, perhaps the farthest-reaching consequence could be the potential of climate Superfund laws to make polluting companies change their behavior as they realize they will be held liable for climate damage.

“There is no way the fossil fuel industry can continue expanding production if they have to pay for the harm they’re doing,” Henn said. “The math just doesn’t add up. The damage done by burning a barrel of oil today far outweighs the benefits, especially when we have better, cheaper renewable alternatives.”

An argument launched by the New York Climate Superfund bill’s opponents was that payments made by corporations will be passed on to consumers. However, supporters say this ignores the extent to which taxpayers already pay for climate damage.

“We’re paying all the costs right now, through state and local taxes that go toward rebuilding after disasters, that is if there’s enough money to do it all,” Richardson said. “I ask you: How do you pass a cost on to someone who’s already paying 100 percent?”

Even in places that likely won’t pass their own climate Superfund laws anytime soon, having a bill introduced by sympathetic lawmakers can help reframe the conversation over climate damage.

“We’re not going to see this pass tomorrow in Florida, for example, but it’s a hell of a great fight to have there,” Henn said. “If your state is experiencing extreme climate impacts, you don’t have to sit by helplessly anymore. There’s finally something you can point to as a means of making those who are most responsible fund the cleanup.”

Unsurprisingly, fossil fuel companies and their allies have been steadfast in their opposition to climate Superfund bills. The American Petroleum Institute and U.S. Chamber of Commerce have already filed a lawsuit against the Vermont version, which climate groups are preparing to defend in court.

“Oil companies are freaking out, because they know these laws will eat into their profits,” Richardson said. “It happened to toxic polluters like Dupont under the original Superfund, and to Big Tobacco companies when we held them accountable. Now, fossil fuel companies risk being penalized just as our economy reaches crucial renewable energy tipping points. It could mean the end of Big Oil.”

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