Truthout interviews economist Michael Ash about the proposed Extreme Weather Superfund, a plan to charge fossil fuel companies for the damage caused by climate-driven disasters. The fund would collect $100 billion per year from carbon majors that released more than 1 billion tons of CO2-equivalent emissions since 1995. That money would split roughly $75 billion for infrastructure hardening and $25 billion for disaster response, with a supplemental levy for exceptional years. Ash argues the policy is retrospective, unlike carbon pricing, so it targets liability for past emissions rather than changing future fuel prices. It borrows the polluter pays and joint and several liability structure from the original Superfund law. The article also connects the proposal to recent cuts at FEMA and to attribution science that links specific extreme weather events to human-caused climate change.
