Make Big Polluters Pay

For many of us, the climate crisis feels too big to tackle on our own, because, let’s face it—individual choices and actions can only go so far. But when individual people team up to join forces locally, and then connect that work to global actions, the results can ripple outward into a powerful whole.

That’s exactly what happened in Milwaukee, where a few Corporate Accountability members who believed that they had a role to play in the global campaign to Make Big Polluters Pay came together to achieve a significant local victory.  

Karen Ingvoldstad, Dean Muller, and others met at a Corporate Accountability house party and decided to organize together. They started a campaign, Wisconsin for Environmental Justice, to pressure the state’s attorney general to hold the fossil fuel industry liable for the climate crisis. After almost a year of local organizing, they moved all 17 members of the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors to pass a unanimous resolution calling on Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul to sue the fossil fuel industry. These supervisors, many of whom are Black, agreed that making Big Polluters pay will benefit their constituents, especially given the disproportionate impact of the climate crisis on urban and rural Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color. This victory is truly hard won considering the political divide in Wisconsin.

This is just one instance where Corporate Accountability, members like you, and allies are gaining ground on making Big Polluters pay. From organizing to demand attorney general in California investigate Big Polluters, to moving delegates at the U.N. climate treaty meetings to advance accountability measures, the call to make Big Polluters pay is becoming widespread. Around the world people are organizing to hold liable industries that have only ever prioritized profit at the expense of people and the planet. Together, we will achieve justice!