Marylanders can’t afford the cost of a climate superfund

Marylanders are already feeling the strain of rising costs in their utility bills, at the gas pump and in the everyday expenses of running a household or a business. Those pressures do more than squeeze budgets. They shape where people can afford to live, whether employers can hire and grow, and where businesses choose to make their next investment.

That reality should be front and center as Maryland considers the findings of its “Cost of Climate Change Study” and any renewed effort to enact a climate superfund law.

During the 2025 legislative session, lawmakers considered but did not pass the RENEW Act, which would have imposed billions of dollars in retroactive assessments on certain oil and gas companies for activity that occurred decades ago. Instead, Maryland authorized a study examining the costs associated with climate change.

That study, due Dec. 1, should give policymakers an objective assessment of the costs, consequences and tradeoffs of any policy that follows.

Importantly, Maryland’s own agreement establishing the study recognizes one of the questions that deserves serious scrutiny: Whether requiring fossil fuel companies to compensate the state could result in costs being passed on to taxpayers.

That question cannot be an afterthought.

Maryland families and businesses do not operate separately from the energy system on which our economy depends. We rely on affordable, reliable energy to heat and cool homes, commute to work, manufacture products, operate hospitals, move goods through the Port of Baltimore, and keep stores and restaurants open.

When government imposes billions of dollars in new costs within that system, policymakers should not simply assume those costs disappear. They can affect investment, infrastructure, supply and, ultimately, the prices families and employers pay.

There is another reason for caution.

Before Maryland follows other states down this path, lawmakers should look carefully at what is happening beyond our borders.

New York enacted a climate superfund law requiring fossil fuel companies to pay $75 billion toward climate-related infrastructure. In the span of less than a month, two federal courts struck it down. Both concluded that the law was preempted by federal law, including the Clean Air Act.

At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court this week heard arguments in Suncor Energy v. Board of County Commissioners of Boulder County, a case involving whether federal law prevents state-law claims seeking damages for harms attributed to interstate and international greenhouse-gas emissions.

The cases are not identical, and the Supreme Court case is not a direct challenge to a climate superfund statute. But together they raise an important question for Maryland: Why rush toward a new state liability regime when the legal boundaries surrounding state efforts to assign financial responsibility for global emissions are being actively contested?

Federal climate policy itself is also shifting. The Environmental Protection Agency has recently changed significant portions of the federal greenhouse-gas regulatory framework, including vehicle and power plant rules.

Whatever one thinks of those changes, they reinforce a basic reality: greenhouse-gas policy operates in a complicated national legal and regulatory system. Maryland should understand how a new state program fits within that system before asking families and employers to bear the consequences if it does not.

Maryland must confront the costs of climate change and prepare for future resilience needs. But we should not address one set of costs without understanding whether the proposed solution creates another.

That makes it especially important that the final analysis examine the full picture, including potential impacts on taxpayers, consumers, energy prices, businesses, investment, jobs, competitiveness and energy reliability.

When the study is complete, lawmakers should use it to weigh both the benefits and the risks of what comes next.

Before Maryland moves toward a climate superfund policy, policymakers should be able to answer three questions with confidence: Do we understand the legal and economic consequences well enough to move forward? Will it make Maryland less affordable? And who will ultimately bear the cost?