Jamie Henn lives in Concord.

We can’t usually hear Bow Brook from our house here in Concord, but on Monday afternoon on Dec. 18, it was a roaring torrent, echoing around our winter woods. The flow was nothing compared to the deluge up north, however, where rivers like the Saco, Pemigewasset, and Ellis turned into raging white water, jumping their banks, damaging roads, and flooding properties across the region.

Monday’s storm capped off a year of extreme weather here in the Northeast and around the world. The disasters come so fast these days it can be hard to keep track. Was it really just seven months ago that our skies were filled with smoke from the wildfires in Quebec? How can our neighbors over in Montpelier be underwater again, when the last “hundred year flood” was just this August?

Scientists are clear that these extreme weather events are directly connected with the changes in our climate. As the world continues to burn fossil fuels, the greenhouse gasses we add to the atmosphere trap ever more heat, adding more energy to the climate system, thereby fueling more extreme weather across the globe. And it’s getting worse: of the ten hottest years on record, all have occurred since 2010, with 2023 coming in as the hottest ever recorded.

As climate disasters intensify and become more frequent, the costs of their damages continue to rise. Between 1980 and 2022, the U.S. on average experienced roughly 8 different billion-dollar weather disasters a year, according to NOAA. Between 2018 and 2022, that number jumped to an average of 18. This year, we experienced over 25, bringing total costs to over $57 billion by just this September.

Here in the Northeast, we’re not nearly as vulnerable to climate impacts as many places around the world, but the costs are rising here, as well. Over the last five years, the number of billion-dollar weather events in the Northeast has doubled, to as many as 18 a year. And extreme weather is only one economic cost of the climate crisis, just ask our ski areas about the impact of warmer winters, or local officials about the dangers of sea level rise along our coast. Not to mention the health impacts of hotter summers, increased tick populations, and the ongoing air pollution caused by fossil fuels.

As costs rise, so do questions about who is going to pay. Right now, the answer is all of us. Whether it’s the immediate cost of disaster recovery, higher insurance premiums, or an increase in local taxes, the public is picking up the bill. Meanwhile, there’s a group that’s been entirely left off the hook: the fossil fuel industry.

Companies like Exxon, Chevron, and Shell have known for decades that the burning of fossil fuels caused global warming and would lead to catastrophic impacts. Exxon’s own scientists predicted with remarkable accuracy the exact warming trend that we’re seeing today. And the company clearly believed the science: Exxon raised their oil rigs to withstand sea level rise. They just forgot to tell the rest of us.

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Instead, the industry went on to spend billions of dollars on propaganda campaigns designed to mislead the public about the scale of the problem and block any political action to address it. Now that the climate crisis has become undeniable, they’ve switched tactics, greenwashing their products, while continuing to undermine the deployment of the renewable energy that could replace them.

While they lie to us, the industry has continued to rake in record hauls, profiting off the war in Ukraine and other geopolitical tensions, while using these conflicts to gouge us at the gas pump and drive up our home heating bills. In 2022, Exxon made over $55 billion in profits, more than twice as much as the year before. Just as tobacco companies continued to push cigarettes even after they knew smoking caused cancer, or the Sacklers sold opioids as addiction and deaths skyrocketed, the fossil fuel industry has continued to promote, advertise, and keep us hooked on their product long after the damages were clear.

That’s why more than 40 states and municipalities, representing a full quarter of the U.S. population, are now suing fossil fuel companies to help make them pay their fair share of the damage they’ve done. Since researchers can accurately calculate each company’s share of total greenhouse gas emissions, it’s relatively straightforward to come up with a percentage these companies should pay towards the total costs of climate impacts. And the idea is remarkably popular: recent polling shows that around two-thirds of likely voters support making oil and gas companies pay a share of the costs caused by their pollution.

Sadly, here in New Hampshire, many of our lawmakers seem content with us continuing to pay the bill. In May, the House rejected an effort led by Rep. Tony Caplan to urge the governor and attorney general to join other New England states in suing Big Oil. But as the costs of climate disasters mount, and we watch more of our public funds diverted from things like schools and public safety to pay for damages and clean up, pressure will only grow on New Hampshire politicians to take action. After all, someone has got to pay, why not the fossil fuel companies who lied to protect their profits?