Two California Democrats unveiled a bill Monday that they said would allow insurers and policyholders affected by the Los Angeles fires to sue major oil corporations for their alleged role in the disaster.
That didn't take long.
Democratic California State Sen. Scott Wiener and a host of other Democrats rolled out Senate Bill 222 on Monday, characterizing it as a means to make oil companies atone for the fires and stabilize California's faltering insurance market. This, as residents pick up the pieces from the devastation. Weiner and Pérez say that oil companies bear responsibility for the fires because of their supposed role in climate change. This, even though critics say a litany of policy decisions and failures appear to have much more directly fanned the flames, as evidenced by things like malfunctioning fire hydrants.
"Californians shouldn't be the only ones to pay the costs of devastating climate disasters. From last year's floods to the fires in LA, we know that the fossil fuel industry bears ultimate responsibility for fueling these disasters," Wiener said in a post to X, addressing the new legislation. "The fossil fuel companies knew this was going to happen. They had the studies decades ago, suppressed them & obstructed policy changes to transition away from fossil fuels & toward clean energy."