Vermont has just passed a groundbreaking new law to deal with the effects of climate change by going after the organizations it holds responsible. Bill S.259 allows Vermont to "bill fossil fuel companies retroactively for the costs of addressing, avoiding and adapting to the damages that the emissions from their products have caused" between 1995 and 2024, said Heatmap News. The state will identify responsible companies by "focusing only on the biggest emitters, companies whose products generated at least a billion tons of emissions during that time," Heatmap said. 

Why is the bill controversial?
Some lawmakers, including Vermont Gov. Phil Scott (R), think that while the law may be necessary, Vermont is going to war with an oil company behemoth it cannot manage. "Taking on Big Oil should not be taken lightly," said Scott in a note to the state Senate secretary. 

Unsurprisingly, oil industry lobbyists were angered by the law. The bill "places an unfair burden on domestic companies," the American Petroleum Institute said in a letter to the Vermont House Judiciary and Environment and Energy Committees in April. Environmental activists have hailed the bill as a victory. "While we may be the first place to pass a law like this, we certainly shouldn't be the last," Ben Edgerly Walsh, the climate and energy program director of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, said to The New York Times.

Could other states follow suit?
Some are already trying to. The New York Senate passed a similar bill in May that would "make the most prolific oil and gas producers that have business ties to New York pay $3 billion a year for the next 25 years," said City Limits. The bill had already passed in 2023 but was not included in the state's yearly budget. This time around, activists are hoping for a different outcome. 

Climate superfund bills have also been introduced in California, Massachusetts and Maryland. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and other senators proposed a federal climate superfund act in 2021, but it did not come to fruition. 

Veterans, politicians and dignitaries have been marking the 80th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy today. D-Day, or Operation Neptune, was the largest amphibious invasion in military history, when more than 150,000 troops landed by sea and air along a 50-mile stretch of the Normandy coast. 

What happened on D-Day?
In the early hours of June 6, 1944, Allied troops sailed across the Channel from England and stormed the beaches of Normandy at five separate points, codenamed Utah, Juno, Sword, Omaha and Gold, taking the thinly stretched Nazi defenses by surprise. A total of 7,000 ships were involved in the operation. 

The German command considered the "initial attacks" a "diversionary tactic" and chose not to deploy further units, said the BBC. While the Allies suffered at least 10,000 casualties, with more than 4,000 confirmed dead, they established five vital military access points into Europe by the evening. 

Why was it so significant?
Prior to D-Day, the Allied forces' access to Western Europe had been limited by the fall of France to the Nazis in 1940. By June 1944, an operation was underway to liberate the Italian peninsula, but establishing a foothold in Normandy was essential for a full-scale invasion. 

Following their defeat on the beaches, the Nazi forces in Western Europe were so depleted that the Allies were able to advance, capturing Paris by August 25 and Brussels by September 3. Within a year of the landings, Adolf Hitler was dead and Germany had surrendered, ending the Western theater of the war. 

What if D-Day had failed? 
"Without D-Day, the total defeat of Nazi Germany and return of democracy to Western Europe could not be envisioned as inevitable," said Frank Blazich, the curator of military history at the Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of American History. It was "one of the rare moments in history when the world changed." 

Failure would have shown America to be a "paper tiger," author Michel Paradis said to the "Lawfare Daily" podcast. In practical terms, the conflict would have "dragged on far longer," with the Allies taking a slower route up from the Mediterranean. That would have taken World War II past the point that America developed functioning nuclear weapons. 

"Would the United States have dropped the bomb in Germany?" asked Paradis. And "what would the historic, political, diplomatic results of that have been?" The "number of counterfactuals" shows how important this moment was for the Allies.