SACRAMENTO— A bill to assess fees on the largest fossil fuel polluters to pay for the climate damage they’ve caused in California was introduced in the state legislature today.

The Polluters Pay Climate Superfund Act (SB 684/AB 1243), by Sen. Caroline Menjivar (D-San Fernando Valley) and Asm. Dawn Addis (D-San Luis Obispo), would create a program under California’s Environmental Protection Agency to assess fees on the largest historical producers of climate-heating pollution. It would force these fossil fuel polluters to pay for their increasingly devastating and costly damage to the state.

The bill comes after historic wildfires that ravaged Los Angeles, causing more than $250 billion in damages and killing 29 people. Climate change has lengthened the fire season, causing the overlap of dry, fire-prone conditions with intense Santa Ana winds.

“The L.A. fires show with heartbreaking clarity how much we need this bill to make the biggest climate polluters pay for the astronomical damage they’ve caused,” said Kassie Siegel, director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute. “The public shouldn’t be shelling out billions of dollars every year to recover from severe and deadly climate disasters. By passing this commonsense bill, state lawmakers can put the financial burden of climate damage on giant polluting companies, where it belongs.”

Under the bill, the state would calculate climate damages through 2045 and assess compensatory fees from fossil fuel producers or refiners responsible for more than 1 billion tons of greenhouse gas pollution between 1990 and 2024. The fees would be proportional to polluters’ emissions during this period.

The fees will then go into a new Polluters Pay Climate Fund to remedy the damage polluters caused the state — intensified wildfires, cycles of flooding and drought, heatwaves, superstorms and sea-level rise — all while profiting off their deadly products.

The fund invests in California’s future, supporting projects such as community resilience and hardening against wildfire risk, solar panels and energy storage installation in low-income communities, and assistance for firefighters and other essential workers in climate disaster response.

Fossil fuels account for nearly 90% of all carbon dioxide emissions and more than 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Peer-reviewed research of polluters’ own self-reported data demonstrates that roughly two-thirds of man-made carbon dioxide and methane emissions were caused by just 90 of the world’s largest fossil fuel producers.

“Profiting off destruction has been the Big Oil playbook for far too long,” said Siegel. “It’s past time we took on these corporate behemoths who’ve sold off our future and our fragile planet to line their own pockets.”

Vermont and New York enacted similar legislation into law last year.

The bill is sponsored by the Center for Biological Diversity, Campaign for a Safe and Healthy California, and California Environmental Voters and backed by a broad coalition of climate scientists, legal scholars and economists, as well as more than 140 public health, community advocacy and environmental organizations.