The Vermont law imposes a one-time fee on fossil fuel companies for emissions between 1995 and 2024. A company qualifies as a payee if its extraction or refining of fossil fuels caused at least one billion metric tons of carbon emissions over the last two decades.

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Her position oversees the wonkiest aspect of the 2024 law: determining how much climate change has cost the state. The assessment relies on attribution science, a type of modeling that connects events like heat waves and floods to climate change by determining how greenhouse gas emissions increased the likelihood of the event.

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The law faces major pushback in a pair of lawsuits filed in May by the federal government and 24 states, led by West Virginia, who joined the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute, a lobby for oil companies. The suits claim that the Vermont law interferes with federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.

In November, the Vermont Public Interest Research Group pushed back. The progressive advocacy organization told the courts that the law does nothing to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Rather the law asks polluters to pay for their pollution, much like the original 1980 superfund law asked polluters to pay to clean up contaminated sites, according to the group’s amicus brief.

“Nothing in the Act requires emitters and polluters to change their behavior or mitigate their emissions,” the VPIRG brief reads. “The Act only asks polluters to pay an equitable share of the bill to help Vermont adapt to climate change.”

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“Irrespective of what happens in that case, the work that we’re going to do is incredibly important because we’re going to be defining, really, what the impacts of climate change have been in Vermont,” Minter said.