TV News LIES

Vermont has become the first state to enact a law holding oil firms financially responsible for climate damages, after the Republican governor, Phil Scott, allowed it to pass without his signature late on Thursday.

Modeled after the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program, the Climate Superfund Act directs the state to charge major fossil fuel companies potentially billions of dollars to pay for climate impacts to which their emissions have contributed. It is expected to face legal challenges from the industry.

Under the legislation, Vermont officials will have until January 2026 to assess the total costs to the state from greenhouse gases emitted between 1995 and 2024, including the impacts on public health, biodiversity and economic development. They will then use federal data to determine how much to charge individual polluters for those harms.

Climate advocates celebrated the passage of the law, which won supermajority support in the state legislature from Democrats and some Republicans.

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Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg sounded the alarm bell on climate change, warning that it is already affecting modes of transit.

“The reality is, the effects of climate change are already upon us in terms of our transportation,” Buttigieg said in an interview that aired on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

“We’ve seen that in the form of everything from heat waves that shouldn’t statistically even be possible, threatening to melt the cables of transit systems in the Pacific Northwest, to hurricane seasons becoming more and more extreme and indications that turbulence is up by about 15 percent. That means assessing anything and everything that we can do about it,” he added.

Buttigieg’s comments come days after a passenger on a Singapore Airlines flight died and dozens more were injured after the plane hit severe turbulence last week. He explained that while incidents like that are “rare,” the U.S. still needs to prepare to adapt to the changing climate.

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Powerful storms and tornadoes sweeping across the nation's midsection Sunday killed at least 15 people in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Kentucky, injuring scores, knocking out power to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses across the region and delaying the start of the iconic Indianapolis 500.

In Texas, Cooke County Sheriff Ray Sappington said at least seven people died − four of them children − when an apparent tornado ripped through a neighborhood near Valley View, 60 miles north of Dallas near the Oklahoma border. "Many" people were injured early Sunday when the storm struck a nearby travel center and gas station complex where more than 60 residents had sought shelter, he said.

Sappington said search and rescue efforts were complicated by downed trees and power lines that blocked access to roads.

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Forecasters are warning of another day of heightened risk of dangerous tornadoes in the Midwest on Saturday and telling people in south Texas they may experience triple-digit temperatures — and that’s with four weeks to go before summer starts. Read more...