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How California’s Kids Are Taking On Big Oil

After last year’s devastating wildfires, young Californians are spearheading a growing movement to force polluters—not taxpayers—to pay for the damage.

California students campaign for the Polluters Pay Climate Superfund Act.

At his home in Pasadena, high schooler Atticus Jackson frantically shoved his belongings into his car as the sky turned a deep orange. A few hundred feet away, the fire climbed up the mountain and a cloud of red and gray smoke obscured the view. He drove out of his city, ash raining down on the sidewalks below, in complete shock. “It felt like my world had been thrown off its center,” he said.

The catastrophic Palisades fire, along with the Eaton fire, razed more than 50,000 acres in southern California. Experts say they were fueled by climate change. Galvanized by the disaster, Jackson founded a Sunrise Movement chapter in Foothills, the area that includes Pasadena and Altadena, to advocate for environmental justice in his community. And, exactly a year after the blaze narrowly missed his house, Jackson met with contingents from the national Sunrise Movement in Altadena for a rally to demand accountability and transparency from local leadership.

As he marched through Altadena twelve months later, Jackson said the streets looked eerily similar to how they did in the immediate aftermath of the fires: “The debris might have been cleaned up, but there were still dozens and dozens of empty lots reduced to the foundation.”

Estimates have ballooned to more than $250 billion in damage, making the fire one of the costliest in US history. “Recovery is happening very slowly, and for a lot of residents, it’s really expensive,” said Jackson. But to him, and the other young people touched by the fires, the solution is clear: make fossil fuel companies pay.

California’s youth have pushed for a state bill that would do just that. The Polluters Pay Climate Superfund Act is modeled after federal legislation that requires companies to clean up toxic spills and hazardous waste sites. The proposal, which has analogous statutes in Vermont and New York, aims to hold fossil fuel companies, not taxpayers, financially responsible for climate change damages like the LA fires.

To youth advocates, the bill is common sense. “If you make a mess, you should be the one to clean it up,” said Sofia Carrasco, a high school activist with San Diego 350’s Youth v. Oil Campaign.

The act has become the flagship policy goal for environmental advocacy organizations like Sunrise Movement and 350.org, who are touting it as a mechanism to address the growing costs of climate change. Amid California’s projected $3 billion budget deficit, it offers a new source of funding for the state. Around 40 percent of the funds would also be specifically earmarked for disadvantaged communities most burdened by environmental impacts, like air pollution.

“The biggest thing we hear when we try to implement some sort of solution is that we don’t have the money,” said Mani........

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