Profitable polluters—not Californians—should pay for fossil-fueled wildfires

Former insurance commissioner Dave Jones explains why—and how.

Dave Jones explains why fossil fuel firms must contribute towards remediating the damage their planet-heating products have caused—and tells The Condor how this can be done.

Jones is the former California insurance commissioner and currently serves as director of the Climate Risk Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley. If you missed Part 1 of our interview with Jones (which is all about fossil-fueled insurance risk and California’s fire insurance of last resort, the FAIR Plan), check it out here.

As the LA wildfires raged in January, California’s former Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones posed some important, urgent questions in an opinion piece for the New York Times.

Why, he asked, should homeowners and businesses, insurance companies, municipalities and states be the ones on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars in costs associated with the LA wildfires (and other climate-fueled catastrophes)? What about the oil and gas industry—who have lied about the harmful impacts of their products for decades while reaping extraordinary profits: why aren’t they contributing to remediation and covering damages?

This is no arbitrary line of enquiry when scientists have been able to determine that climate change (primarily the result of the burning of fossil fuels) made the 2025 LA wildfires 35% more likely. In his op-ed, Jones urged for legal mechanisms to be created that take this culpability into account. Excitingly, in the weeks since his piece was published, two bills have been introduced in the California legislature that—if passed—would help to do just that.

MAKING POLLUTERS PAY

Following the lead of Vermont and New York (which have both recently passed similar legislation), California’s Polluters Pay Climate Superfund Act (SB 684 and AB 1243) has been introduced, which would require that the biggest carbon polluters pay their fair share for the catastrophic climate damages they’ve caused. As the bill’s fact sheet explains, Senator Caroline Menjivar and Assemblymember Dawn Addis’s bill would:

• Direct CalEPA to complete a climate cost study: to quantify total damages to the state (through 2045) caused by fossil fuel emissions.

• Direct CalEPA to identify responsible parties and assess compensatory fees: on the largest fossil fuel polluters, proportional to their fossil fuel emissions 1990 through 2024, to address damages quantified in the cost study.

• Fund California's future: Fees collected will fund projects and programs to mitigate, remedy, or prevent climate change costs and harms. The bill prioritizes labor and job standards and dedicates at least 40% of the funds to benefit communities hit hardest by fossil fuel pollution. It will protect Californians and lower costs by funding critical climate solutions, including investments in a clean energy transition, community resilience, home hardening, sustainable infrastructure, and essential workers responding to climate disasters.

INSURING THE FUTURE

Another game-changing bill is SB 222, the Affordable Insurance and Climate Recovery Act, recently introduced by Scott Wiener to the California Senate. If passed, this would offer multiple tools to ensure polluters can be held accountable by insurers and policyholders.

Jones tells The Condor that SB 222 “creates a private right of action for individuals and businesses to bring lawsuits for their injuries and losses associated with the emissions driving the severe climatic events, emissions from the oil and gas companies.”

He adds that the bill “also creates a direct cause of action for insurance companies, so it makes it easier for them to bring lawsuits against the oil and gas majors for their emissions contribution to insurance company payouts.” Finally, Jones told us that the bill “places a duty on the FAIR Plan in California in appropriate circumstances to bring subrogation claims or lawsuits against the oil and gas majors for payouts for events that are driven by climate change, which in turn are driven by emissions from the oil and gas majors.”

Let’s take a look at those three main provisions in a little more detail.

PRIVATE ACTION

Dozens of states and municipalities are suing oil and gas companies for the damages their deceptive practices have caused. While these lawsuits are an important accountability tool, it’s worth emphasizing that they are, as Jones explains, “to recover damages to state infrastructure or municipal infrastructure, costs that the state or city have paid out associated with climate change.” In other words, they “don't recover for the damages and injuries and losses to individuals, families, and businesses.”

SB 222 steps in to fill that breach, by enabling, says Jones, “a private right of action so that private individuals and private businesses can bring lawsuits against the oil and gas companies for their contribution to catastrophic events like the LA wildfires from their emissions.”

SUBROGATION

Insurance companies should also be suing the oil and gas majors for their climate-related losses, Jones has argued. He explains that they possess “the right of subrogation, which is the right to stand in the shoes of their policyholder and then bring lawsuits against third parties whose actions or inactions or negligence cause damage to their policyholder, which in turn causes the insurance company to pay out.”

There is strong precedent for this. Famously, health insurers have sued Big Tobacco to recoup the insurance costs associated with smoking-derived respiratory illnesses. These insurers also brought subrogation claims against opioid manufacturers and distributors for the costs they incurred in the coverage of opioid-related harms.

Subrogation has happened in a property insurance context in California, too. Jones points out that, following the 2018 Camp Fire, insurance companies jointly filed subrogation claims against the power utility PG&E and ultimately were awarded $11 billion to recover money that they had paid out to their policyholders as a result of that wildfire’s damages and destruction.

SB 222 would offer a direct cause of action for insurers to take against the fossil fuel companies which deceived the public about the harmful impacts of their products in order to recoup costs arising from insuring property damaged or destroyed by climate-driven events like the LA wildfires.

FAIRER FOR THE FAIR PLAN

SB 222’s third key provision places a duty on California’s state statutorily created insurer of last resort, the California FAIR Plan, to bring subrogation claims against the oil and gas companies where appropriate. Given its recent request for a $1 billion bailout (half of which all of California’s property insurance policyholders will be forced to pay for), the need for the FAIR Plan to recover costs from the real culprits of fossil-fueled destruction is more apparent than ever.

Against a backdrop of backsliding on climate action at the federal level (thank you, President “Drill Baby Drill” Trump!) greater accountability in the insurance space stands to be a powerful leverage point for change. As Jones pointed out to us, “insurance is unique in that it's solely regulated at the state level.” In other words, this is one major sector of the economy that the federal government doesn't have a hand in regulating. You don’t get much more “Trump proof” than that. That’s not to say it’ll be easy to get SB 222 (or SB684/AB 1243 for that matter) passed. Even in supposedly “green” California, the fossil fuel industry and its avaricious allies carry enormous sway. They will, Jones warns, do everything it can to prevent these becoming law. The LA wildfires’ searing devastation offers a reminder of what’s at stake—and why those of us committed to a fairer, safer, greener future need to do everything we can to get these bills passed into law.

If you missed Part 1 of our interview with Jones (which is all about fossil-fueled insurance risk and California’s fire insurance of last resort, the FAIR Plan), check it out here.