Press Releases
September 3, 2020
MAINE, NEW JERSEY, VIRGINIA — A new series of digital ads launching this week in congressional districts in Maine, New Jersey, and Virginia shows candid conversations with real residents who are asked whether they or the polluting oil and gas industry should be responsible for paying billions of dollars to combat floods and sea-level rise.
U.S. coastal communities will need to spend an estimated $400 billion to protect homes, businesses, and infrastructure from sea-level rise by 2040, according to a study last year from the nonprofit Center for Climate Integrity (CCI) and Resilient Analytics.
In the ads, released as part of CCI’s “Pay Up Climate Polluters” campaign, a narrator speaks to residents who live in the following communities: Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District ($11.2 billion estimated cost), Maine’s 2nd Congressional District ($10.9 billion estimated cost), and New Jersey’s 3rd Congressional District ($2.4 billion estimated cost):
Narrator: “We have a plan to fix all this damage caused by Big Oil companies: [Your state’s] taxpayers are going to pay.”
The narrator then tells residents what their share of those bills would mean per-person.
Watch the 30 second ads to see their responses.
The ad campaign comes after separate polls found that more than two-thirds of voters in the three congressional House districts support suing oil and gas companies to hold them accountable for their pollution and to require them to pay for damages related to climate change.
“Big Oil has spent decades telling people that they are responsible for climate change, hoping to blame-shift the massive cost of climate adaptation to taxpayers,” said Richard Wiles, executive director of the Center for Climate Integrity. “These ads show that once you show people the pricetag, they immediately understand that polluters should pay.”
CCI’s polling found support increased in each district once voters learned more about the financial impact of climate change and the evidence that fossil fuel companies engaged in widespread climate disinformation campaigns after knowing their products would be “potentially catastrophic.”
Read the poll results for each state here