Last January, Diego Sandoval’s high school in San Diego County closed abruptly one Friday because of wildfires menacing the Southern California area. Classmates evacuated their homes as the fire spread. Frida Vergara, whose school was among the few in the area that didn’t close, recalls that friends with asthma were coughing and wheezing from the smoke.
It wasn’t the first time the students — both 17-year-old seniors in the Sweetwater Union High School District — saw how extreme weather disrupted learning. A year earlier, floods swamped parts of the county, damaging school buildings and closing one for more than a month. The problem is global: At least 242 million students in 85 countries or territories, or 1 in 7 students, lost education time in 2024 because of heat waves, fires, floods and other disasters, according to UNICEF.
Sandoval and Vergara say the connection between events like these and climate change is clear, and scientists agree: Greenhouse gases are trapping heat in the atmosphere and making disruptive and deadly weather events more common. And the two high schoolers say it’s also apparent who should pay for the damage: fossil fuel companies producing the materials that emit those gases.
That’s why, on Oct. 24, they and hundreds of other students across California plan to lead walkouts at their schools in support of state legislation that would put oil companies on the hook financially for infrastructure damage and other costs associated with the climate crisis. Young people at more than 50 high schools have signed on so far.
Known as the Polluters Pay Climate Superfund Act, the legislation is modeled on a 1980 law, passed in response to the infamous Love Canal disaster, that compels companies to pay to clean up hazardous waste they’ve created. Since 2024, two states — New York and Vermont — have adopted laws similar to the California bill that take the superfund concept and apply it to the climate crisis.
“Youth are now seeing that the ones responsible for this are the ones that are profiting billions of dollars off of climate change,” said Sandoval, who attends Eastlake High School, in Chula Vista.
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The California climate bill, introduced in February, lists climate-resilient schools, electric buses, green workforce development and job training as investments that could be covered by the superfund.
But after fierce opposition from the oil and gas industry and the California’s State Building and Construction Trades Council, a union that has often allied with the industry, the bill stalled. Esther Portillo, western environmental health director for the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, which supports the bill, said concerns about a major oil refinery closing and about gas prices rising also deterred legislators, including some Democrats.
Dawn Addis, a Democratic assembly member and one of the bill’s authors, said the legislation will continue to be negotiated when the legislative session resumes in January. Supporters have made progress in responding to legislators’ questions about the bill’s details, she said, adding that she was optimistic about its passage. Addis, a former public school teacher, also commended the students and their activism.
“We want obviously students in the classroom learning but this is an extreme situation,” she said. “The effects of the climate crisis are incredibly, incredibly real for kids.”
The Trump administration and a coalition of conservative states led by West Virginia have filed separate lawsuits to block the New York and Vermont laws. The administration’s lawsuits call the state laws a “brazen attempt to grab power from the federal government and force citizens of other States and nations to foot the bill for its infrastructure wish list.” Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump has canceled billions in clean energy projects, proposed rescinding rules that underpin regulation of greenhouse gases, and backed legislation that cut funding for schools to reduce their climate toll.
Like the California bill, the Vermont and New York laws single out the education system. Vermont’s, for example, talks about the fund paying for energy-efficient cooling systems and building upgrades in schools, among other types of buildings.
“This bill is an incredibly important way to provide states with the ability to pay for necessary projects they should be implementing to save lives,” said Kimberly Ong, senior attorney and senior director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which is representing New York and Vermont in some of the lawsuits.
In California, perhaps more than any other state, the costs to schoolchildren of climate change are mounting quickly. Kids there have already missed more than 54,000 hours of school time so far this year because of extreme weather events, according to an analysis by the nonprofit UndauntedK12, which helps schools green their operations. The Los Angeles Unified School District, which sustained damage in the Palisades Fire in January, says it was forced to set aside $2.2 billion to help pay for repairs.
“Polluter pay bills are interesting and innovative ways to create new revenue for climate adaptation and mitigation without raising taxes on everyone or approving another state bond,” said Jonathan Klein, co-founder of UndauntedK12. “Fossil fuel companies have profited billions of dollars, essentially creating this crisis,” he added, “and they knew what they were doing for decades.”
He noted that it will be important for education groups and students to help ensure that schools are a priority for any revenue that does materialize from such legislation.
Juan Alanis, a Republican state assembly member who voted against the bill when it was before the Standing Committee on Natural Resources, wrote in an email that he was concerned that it unfairly penalized companies that have already contributed money through California’s cap-and-trade program to reduce emissions. “While we all share a bipartisan commitment to combating climate change and protecting Californians from its devastating impacts, AB 1243 takes us down a troubling path of retroactive punishment that creates unnecessary uncertainty for businesses,” he wrote.
His colleague on the committee, assembly member Josh Hoover, called the bill “just another attempt by Sacramento politicians to virtue signal.”
Sandoval and Vergara, the San Diego County students, say they see the influence of Big Oil. Fossil fuel companies spent more than $38 million on lobbying and related activities in California last year, nearly $12 million more than the previous high set in 2017, according to an analysis by Last Chance Alliance, a coalition of environmental, health, climate and labor groups.
Sandoval said that growing up, his schools taught him about the impact of climate change on the environment but little about what he and other students might do to stop it. Getting involved in climate activism has made him see there are steps young people can take beyond, say, using less plastic.
“When I dedicate time to doing this, I know it’s more impactful than, say, my math homework,” he said. “We’re really seeing youth advocate for something that should be so common sense, yet we’re seeing incredible opposition on the other side.”
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at preston@hechingerreport.org.
This story about the impact of climate change was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter on climate and education.
