Vermont and New York recently became the first states to create “Climate Superfund” laws, which will require energy companies to help pay for the costs of dealing with extreme weather and climate change.

As wildfires devastate the Los Angeles area, some are asking if California could become the third.

“Taxpayers are shouldering 100 percent of the burden of climate-fueled disasters,” said Kassie Siegel, director of the Climate Law Institute at the Center for Biological Diversity, adding that this kind of legislation would “take some of the burden off Californians.”

But whether these new laws can survive what are expected to be fierce legal challenges from the oil industry and its allies is an open question. The first salvo was filed last month in Vermont federal court by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute. The suit called on the court to block Vermont’s law, arguing that it was unconstitutional and would impose “irrational and arbitrary punishment” based on flawed calculations.

“Vermont is not home to any of the energy producers it hopes to regulate,” the lawsuit said. “Nevertheless, it seeks to impose significant monetary penalties on those producers, potentially subjecting other states to increased energy costs, while reaping the financial benefits.”

The new state laws are modeled after the decades-old federal Superfund program, which requires companies to pay for cleaning up hazardous waste. That was a fairly straightforward approach to remediation: Specific sites — say, an old factory or a waste dump — could be identified, investigated and individually addressed.

By contrast, the climate superfund laws rely on emerging fields of science to more broadly quantify economic losses that can be attributed to climate change, and to determine which companies are most responsible.

The laws in Vermont and New York are similar but not identical.

Vermont laid out a long road map to figuring out how to assess damage from global fossil fuel emissions between 1995 and 2024, and assigned the State Treasurer and Agency of Natural Resources to oversee that process. They have solicited proposals from outside experts.

Justin S. Mankin, a geographer at Dartmouth College and director of its Climate Modeling and Impacts Group, was among the experts who submitted early proposals for how Vermont could conduct its assessment. Using a field of research known as “attribution science,” he said, “we are able to attribute factors that cause outcomes in a host of complicated systems all the time, and climate-change attribution is no different.”

Attribution science is an emerging field that has enabled researchers to say with confidence whether, or how much, some natural disasters were intensified or made likelier by global warming.

New York takes a slightly different approach than Vermont, requiring companies deemed responsible for most emissions between 2000 and 2024 to collectively pay a figure it has already put at about $3 billion a year for 25 years. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation is in charge of figuring out which companies will have to pay.

In California, a climate superfund bill was introduced last year and did not advance, but Ms. Siegel said that she expected the bill to be reintroduced soon. Similar bills have also been proposed in Maryland, Massachusetts and New Jersey.

The climate superfund laws are running on a parallel track to a raft of lawsuits by state and local governments accusing oil companies of covering up the danger of climate change and saying that they should bear the costs. Those lawsuits are facing varying reception in state courtrooms around the country.

Last month a judge in Vermont Superior Court allowed that state’s suit to proceed, adding it to the list of cases that have survived motions to dismiss. But on Tuesday in New York State Supreme Court, Justice Anar Rathod Patel dismissed a suit brought by the city, writing that it was “effectively repurposing” allegations that had been dismissed in a previous suit. That previous dismissal was upheld in 2021 by a federal appellate court, the Second Circuit, in a ruling that is often cited by the oil companies and their allies.

The lawsuit against Vermont’s climate superfund law, for example, relies heavily on the Second Circuit decision, arguing that it made clear that federal law — not state law — governs the complex issue of global and interstate greenhouse gas emissions. The judges wrote that the main federal law on emissions, the Clean Air Act, stipulated that emissions should be regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency, not courts.

Phil Goldberg, special counsel for the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project, which opposes the climate litigation, pointed to a suit that was dismissed last year in Baltimore as a sign of the weakness of the whole batch of cases. “It should be clear that lawsuits are a misguided approach to addressing the very real challenges of climate change,” he said. The city of Baltimore is appealing.

Patrick Parenteau, senior fellow for climate policy at the Environmental Law Center at Vermont Law and Graduate School, said the Los Angeles wildfires could eventually result in juries that are sympathetic to climate lawsuits in California. “Just imagine a jury in Los Angeles hearing a case like this,” he said, referring to allegations that oil companies had covered up what they knew about climate change. “That’s what the companies are terrified about.”