Before the floods, Vermont sued Big Oil
The climate crisis has taken on new meaning in the Green Mountain State, which is fighting to hold oil giants accountable in court.
Emily Sanders is the Center for Climate Integrity’s editorial lead. Catch up with her on Twitter here.
Almost two years ago, Vermont Attorney General T.J. Donovan stood in Burlington to announce that his office was suing Exxon, Shell, the American Petroleum Institute, and other oil and gas giants for decades of climate deception that delayed action and created costly and hazardous conditions for Vermont residents. The scale of those costs and hazards was brought into sharp focus this week when communities throughout Vermont were devastated by floods made worse by climate change.
For those who might not think the Green Mountain State is on the front lines of the climate crisis, the events of this week showed that no community is safe. Towns throughout Vermont received more than 8 inches of rain between Sunday and Monday, prompting catastrophic flooding that roared through tiny communities and into peoples homes. Water rescues and evacuations took place as roadways turned to rivers. By Tuesday morning, the state’s capital city of Montpelier was so inundated that people were kayaking downtown. Roads were so impassable that Governor Phil Scott had to hike to the state’s emergency response center. Then, a dam threatened to burst.
As water rose at the Wrightsville Dam, looking to overflow into a river just upstream of the city, Montpelier City Manager William Fraser posted a message on Facebook warning of a “dangerous situation.”
“This has never happened since the dam was built so there is no precedent for potential damage. There would be a large amount of water coming into Montpelier which would drastically add to the existing flood damage,” Fraser wrote. “Unfortunately, there are very few evacuation options remaining. People in at-risk areas may wish to go to upper floors in their houses.” (Ultimately, the water at the Wrightsville Dam in Montpelier came within about a foot of overflow before receding.)
I went to college in Bennington, Vermont, and some of my closest friends now live in Montpelier. On Tuesday, they were trapped in their apartments — thankfully uphill, but unable to get to their jobs — as rescue boats circled apartments downtown and cars and businesses sat underwater. “It’s never happened before so we don’t really know [what will happen]??” my friend Sarah Johnson texted me on Tuesday morning. “Asa and I just keep looking at each other in disbelief.”
Johnson’s partner, Asa Learmonth, is a lifelong Vermonter, and was a teenager when Hurricane Irene hit, flooding homes and causing millions of dollars of destruction. Infrastructure damage in communities along the state’s rivers took years to repair, he said, if it was ever repaired at all. On Monday, Governor Scott said he feared the damage caused by this week’s flooding would be even worse.
“This summer especially I’ve been kind of struck by all the different ways that the climate crisis is manifesting in Vermont,” Learmonth told me Tuesday afternoon. “Growing up in Vermont, the line about climate change was like, ‘At least we’re in Vermont, it’ll be fine here’. We didn’t worry about ticks when I was a kid. We never got wildfire smoke like we did this summer. And then this… I doubt this is going to be the last [major flood] that we live through.”
I have admittedly always thought of Vermont as a safe haven, at least relatively — a place to which I’d migrate one day, where I could consider having a family, even as the climate crisis came to a head. After all, I’d heard lots of reports of people seeking refuge from climate change and other international disasters in Vermont’s bite-sized cities, tight-knit mountain communities, and lush valleys.
Just two days before the flooding hit, Christiana Athena-Blackwell had moved to Plainfield, Vermont, outside of Montpelier, with her three-month-old baby. On Monday, the brook across the road from their house rising rapidly, she and her husband got a knock on their door and were told that everyone on their street needed to evacuate immediately. They scrambled to get their baby and dog into the car and drove through tumultuous roads, barely making it to a friends’ house outside of town with only a few diapers in tow.
“We hadn’t unpacked yet, so when I was trying to leave, I couldn’t think of where anything was,” Athena-Blackwell said. When they returned home the next day, their basement had flooded and their unpacked belongings were destroyed.
“I’m pissed off at the world for not acting sooner and as quickly as freakin’ possible to work on solutions for climate change and renewable energy,” she said. “I have a brand new baby, and I’m scared about his future.”
My partner is from Milton, Vermont, and his family now lives north of Burlington. When his mom messaged me yesterday morning that “so many farms’ crops have been destroyed” in the area, I thought of my friend Lena Greenberg, who works as Food Access Coordinator at the Intervale Center in Burlington, where they harvest and redistribute excess produce to those in need. That program provides free produce to about 400 families per week. The Intervale also supports numerous farms, community gardens, and services.
By 11 a.m. on Tuesday, after a weekend of intensive harvesting by farmers and volunteers preparing for the floods, Greenberg began to see water encroaching from the edge of a field where they were working. Shortly thereafter, the current quickened, and the evacuations began; Greenberg and others went out on kayaks to rescue stranded farmers, while others rushed to move tractors, equipment, and vehicles to higher ground. In one field, they could see swiss chard poking out of the top of the water; in another, they boated over the top of electric fences, which were 4 ½ or 5 feet high.
While Greenberg said it still isn’t clear how much loss has been sustained, the vast majority of the Intervale’s 360 acres of land were underwater as of Wednesday morning — including every last farm field. “There’s going to need to be a huge amount of fundraising to offset the losses farmers are experiencing financially,” they said. “But even if the money is replaced, that food can’t just come back — you can’t replace time and energy and soil and all of the things that go into growing food. We’re going to see the impacts of that on our local food supply for the rest of the growing season, and I’d imagine into the storage crop season as well, which gets us through the winter here.”
Vermont isn’t a coastal state; its infrastructure, buildings and homes weren’t built to mitigate severe flooding like this. As several people pointed out to me, this flooding wasn’t caused by a hurricane or even a tropical storm like Irene — it was just the result of a lot of rain. As The New York Times reported this week, Vermont’s floods are “evidence of an especially dangerous climate threat: Catastrophic flooding can increasingly happen anywhere, with almost no warning. And the United States, experts warn, is nowhere close to ready for that threat.”
Exxon and other fossil fuel companies were well aware of these consequences decades ago, but chose to obscure what they knew and obstruct any action that would help prevent future damage. As Vermont Law School Professor Pat Parenteau put it, “Their failure to warn about the dangers of the products they were promoting has led us to this place.”
That place, Greenberg said, is one Vermonters can’t afford to prepare for on their own. “This summer we have choked on wildfire smoke from Quebec, we have become dehydrated and exhausted and unwell in extreme heat, and today we bathed in raw sewage water that was flooding some of the richest farm fields in the most densely populated part of the state,” they said. “Farmers don’t have money to spend on this, and people don’t have other means to fill the gap when the fields flood. We need money from the entities that left us from such dire straits and enabled decades of deceit and destruction to pay for some of those damages, so that we can build systems that will make it possible for us to survive this flood, and the next one, and the next.”
While Vermont’s climate accountability lawsuit doesn’t seek to recover the costs of local climate disasters like some others do, it uses these damages as evidence of the harm caused by Big Oil’s deception. The case, now being continued under Vermont’s new attorney general, Charity Clark, is strictly focused on upholding the Vermont Consumer Protection Act, and says the companies should be forced to disgorge profits they made while lying to consumers and take “appropriate steps to rectify their prior and ongoing unfair and deceptive acts and practices.”
That’s an essential measure to mitigating further damage — because as Vermont awaits its day in court, the defendants in its case continue to lobby for, lie about, and double down on fossil fuels. Last week, Shell CEO Wael Sawan told the BBC that the world still "desperately needs oil and gas” and that cutting down on fossil fuels would be "dangerous and irresponsible." Aside from those statements being false, “the fact that the world is so dependent on oil and gas is a product of the deceit that Shell and Exxon and the other carbon majors have engaged in for decades,” said Parenteau.
Vermont — and other communities taking the fossil fuel industry to court — can now help hold those polluters accountable.
ICYMI
I went on FAIR’s radio show, CounterSpin, to talk about Big Oil’s relationship with mainstream media. Check that out here.
It is appropriate to place reparations on the shoulders of fossil fuel giants who have known virtually forever of the risk to our beautiful planet 🌎 and done nothing except make big bucks for CEOs while others drown and burn 🔥 much as happened in the cigarette industry. Stop CO2 emissions NOW.