It has long been established that the availability heuristic plays a role in shaping individuals' decision-making. In particular, fortuitous encounters with salient events like a major natural disaster changes how available those events are to individuals' memories — influencing people's perception of how likely those events, and the class of events they represent, are to occur. In the environmental realm, such increased availability of adverse environmental events can increase people's perceived environmental and climate risk. This paper explores a novel application of this heuristic to the realm of legislative decision-making by examining the impact of proximity to adverse environmental events on environmental bill outcomes and legislator voting decisions. Focusing on state-level bills from 2008 to 2024, I find that increased proximity to adverse environmental events decreases, rather than increases, the odds of pro-environmental legislative outcomes. In fact, legislators experiencing increased availability of environmental risk are less likely to vote in favour of either pro or anti-environmental legislation, regardless of their political alignment. This suggests that in the legislative context, increased availability of adverse environmental events may be related to a decrease in interest in environmental legislation in general, and lead legislators to focus on other legislative realms or political interests instead.This has implications for how legislative decision-making may change in the face of our changing climate as adverse environmental events increase across the world, and represents a step towards a clearer understanding of how the availability heuristic may manifest in a legislative context.