More than 40 U.S. cities and states have sued oil companies in recent years, attempting to recover the costs of climate-related weather disasters and mitigation measures. Eleven states have passed “climate superfund laws” with the same goal.

President Trump calls these actions “ideologically motivated” and has told the Justice Department to fight them. He also wants to eliminate federal disaster programs and shift the costs of weather catastrophes to states. He apparently believes that if we ignore climate change, it will go away.

It won’t. And whichever level of government takes responsibility for uninsured disaster damages, taxpayers ultimately foot the bill.

There is a more equitable approach based on the “polluter-pays principle” — a sensible idea in international environmental law that says that polluters, not their victims, should pay for the damage their products cause. In the case of fossil fuels, the polluters producers, consumers and governments that subsidize them.

Fossil-energy companies, determined to avoid responsibility, have been using the tobacco industry’s obfuscation playbook. In the 1990s, Big Tobacco knew from its own studies that smoking caused cancer. Its spokespersons and executives denied it, lied about it under oath and refused accountability.

But Big Oil knows how that worked out. State attorneys general sued the largest tobacco companies to recover the public costs of treating smoking-related illnesses. In 1998, 52 states and territories reached a settlement in which Big Tobacco agreed to pay states billions of dollars annually in perpetuity. Last year, the payments totaled

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