However, Jim Stanley of the Western States Petroleum Association, a trade group whose members include the state’s largest refiners, said in a statement that the legislation would likely raise gas prices and “retroactively punish companies for providing a legal product.” Stanley called the bill “a misguided proposal to retroactively punish companies for providing a legal product that was, and remains, critical to our state’s economy.”
The Western States Petroleum Association spent nearly $3.5 million on lobbying in the first quarter of 2025, and Chevron spent more $3.7 million. While oil companies did not use all of that money to oppose the Climate Superfund Act, the legislation was among a list of bills and agencies they tried to influence.
In comparison, one of the bill’s prominent supporters, the Center for Biological Diversity, spent just over $51,000 on lobbying efforts in the first quarter of the year.
Supporters don’t buy the oil industry’s claims that gas prices would skyrocket if the bill were to become law. Maya Golden-Krasner, deputy climate director at the Center for Biological Diversity, argued that prices would be unaffected and said the oil companies’ efforts to sink the bill reveal a lack of ownership in their role in exacerbating flooding in places like Texas, wildfires in Los Angeles, and record-breaking heat summer after summer.
Members of the Fallen Leaf Lake Fire Department from El Dorado County work to extinguish hot spots, known as mopping up a wildfire, in Altadena, Los Angeles County, on Jan. 10, 2025, after the Eaton Fire swept through the area earlier in the week. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)
“This is the opportunity to hold them accountable and use that money to invest in the transition as quickly as possible to get out from under the thumb of the oil industry,” Golden-Krasner said.
Still, she said, there were also lingering questions about the bill, including whether the costs would be passed on to taxpayers or whether people might lose their jobs as a result. Additionally, legislators got caught up in reducing the state’s budget and passing an overhaul of the California Environmental Quality Act, a landmark environmental law that critics say has slowed development and made it too expensive to build.
As a result, Golden-Krasner said, the team behind the Climate Superfund Act decided to turn “it into a two-year bill.”
“This bill is absolutely not dead,” she said. “It has a huge amount of support among Californians, and everybody is still really enthusiastic about pushing for it. So, we just needed a little bit more time. It’s a really big idea.”
