BANGOR DAILY NEWS • February 24, 2026
As a society, we’ve decided you can’t just throw trash from your car and you can’t dump chemicals in the water. So why is it that we let oil and gas corporations off the hook for the mess they’ve created? As early as the 1950s, there was knowledge among oil producers that CO2 would warm the planet, but things got really damning by the 1970s. Exxon hired its own science team to investigate and model the impact of fossil fuel emissions on the Earth. Despite this knowledge, Exxon went on to fund climate misinformation campaigns and kept pushing its product as safe for the Earth. Now, Maine has a mess to clean up in the form of the costly damage created by more extreme storms, higher sea levels, droughts and other climate disasters. LD 1870 would require oil and gas corporations to pay us back for the damage that they caused. ~ Keith Carson, director of environment and science communications, Maine Conservation Voters