Latest news with #ClimateChangeSuperfundAct
Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Opinion - Trump is illegally trying to overturn state climate laws
The foundation of American government rests on a simple but powerful principle: states are not mere departments of the federal government. They are sovereign entities with both the right and the responsibility to protect the health, safety and wellbeing of their residents. President Trump's recent executive order, which instructs the Justice Department to block state climate laws such as New York's Climate Change Superfund Act, is a direct attack on that principle. But executive orders cannot undo duly enacted state laws. Trump's action is a political stunt, not a legal reversal. New York's Climate Change Superfund Act stands on strong constitutional ground. Across the country, states are stepping up to respond to the rising toll of climate-fueled disasters. More than ten states have introduced climate superfund legislation based on a simple idea: those massive, multinational oil and gas corporations that caused the climate crisis should help pay for the damage. This is not only fair but necessary. The costs of climate change are staggering, and without action, those costs are already falling entirely on the shoulders of working families. In New York alone, it will cost an estimated $52 billion to protect New York Harbor from climate change, $75 to $100 billion to defend Long Island, and another $55 billion to safeguard communities across the rest of the state. Without laws like the Climate Superfund, that burden would be borne entirely by local governments, homeowners and taxpayers, who are also seeing climate-driven cost increases in their homeowner's insurance, health care and numerous other expenses. Under our system of federalism, states have always had broad authority to enact laws that protect their people. That authority is rooted in the Tenth Amendment and reinforced by centuries of precedent. Whether regulating public health, consumer safety, or environmental protection, states serve as both innovators and defenders when federal action falls short. The Climate Change Superfund Act continues that tradition. It applies the longstanding 'polluter pays' principle to today's climate disasters. Instead of asking the public to foot the entire bill, it holds the largest, most profitable global fossil fuel companies accountable for the damage their products have helped cause. Trump's executive order does not simply challenge this one law, but rather the very idea that states have the right to hold powerful interests accountable when Washington will not. By branding state efforts as 'illegal' simply because they conflict with his administration's ideological agenda, the president undermines the same state sovereignty that he once claimed to champion. Federalism was never meant to guarantee uniformity across all 50 states. It exists to empower states to meet the specific needs of their people. From fires in the West to floods in the Northeast, extreme weather is overwhelming local budgets. Communities everywhere are being forced to rebuild, and they have every right to demand that the companies who profited the most from pollution help pay for the recovery. Trump's executive is not for families struggling to rebuild after a disaster, nor for mayors trying to repair storm drains, nor for governors strengthening coastlines. Rather, it is for fossil fuel lobbyists, for billion-dollar polluters and for the same corporate interests that have fought climate and economic progress at every turn. The costs of climate change are here; the only question is who will pay those costs. States like New York are choosing fairness. We are choosing to make the biggest global polluters pay. The right to protect our communities belongs to the people and the leaders they elect, and it's not limited by the whims of Washington insiders or oil industry lobbyists. We intend to defend that right, in the courts, in the legislature and in the court of public opinion, for as long as it takes. Liz Krueger is a New York state senator and Jeffrey Dinowitz is a New York assemblyman. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hill
12-05-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
Trump is illegally trying to overturn state climate laws
The foundation of American government rests on a simple but powerful principle: states are not mere departments of the federal government. They are sovereign entities with both the right and the responsibility to protect the health, safety and wellbeing of their residents. President Trump's recent executive order, which instructs the Justice Department to block state climate laws such as New York's Climate Change Superfund Act, is a direct attack on that principle. But executive orders cannot undo duly enacted state laws. Trump's action is a political stunt, not a legal reversal. New York's Climate Change Superfund Act stands on strong constitutional ground. Across the country, states are stepping up to respond to the rising toll of climate-fueled disasters. More than ten states have introduced climate superfund legislation based on a simple idea: those massive, multinational oil and gas corporations that caused the climate crisis should help pay for the damage. This is not only fair but necessary. The costs of climate change are staggering, and without action, those costs are already falling entirely on the shoulders of working families. In New York alone, it will cost an estimated $52 billion to protect New York Harbor from climate change, $75 to $100 billion to defend Long Island, and another $55 billion to safeguard communities across the rest of the state. Without laws like the Climate Superfund, that burden would be borne entirely by local governments, homeowners and taxpayers, who are also seeing climate-driven cost increases in their homeowner's insurance, health care and numerous other expenses. Under our system of federalism, states have always had broad authority to enact laws that protect their people. That authority is rooted in the Tenth Amendment and reinforced by centuries of precedent. Whether regulating public health, consumer safety, or environmental protection, states serve as both innovators and defenders when federal action falls short. The Climate Change Superfund Act continues that tradition. It applies the longstanding 'polluter pays' principle to today's climate disasters. Instead of asking the public to foot the entire bill, it holds the largest, most profitable global fossil fuel companies accountable for the damage their products have helped cause. Trump's executive order does not simply challenge this one law, but rather the very idea that states have the right to hold powerful interests accountable when Washington will not. By branding state efforts as 'illegal' simply because they conflict with his administration's ideological agenda, the president undermines the same state sovereignty that he once claimed to champion. Federalism was never meant to guarantee uniformity across all 50 states. It exists to empower states to meet the specific needs of their people. From fires in the West to floods in the Northeast, extreme weather is overwhelming local budgets. Communities everywhere are being forced to rebuild, and they have every right to demand that the companies who profited the most from pollution help pay for the recovery. Trump's executive is not for families struggling to rebuild after a disaster, nor for mayors trying to repair storm drains, nor for governors strengthening coastlines. Rather, it is for fossil fuel lobbyists, for billion-dollar polluters and for the same corporate interests that have fought climate and economic progress at every turn. The costs of climate change are here; the only question is who will pay those costs. States like New York are choosing fairness. We are choosing to make the biggest global polluters pay. The right to protect our communities belongs to the people and the leaders they elect, and it's not limited by the whims of Washington insiders or oil industry lobbyists. We intend to defend that right, in the courts, in the legislature and in the court of public opinion, for as long as it takes. Liz Krueger is a New York state senator and Jeffrey Dinowitz is a New York assemblyman.
New York Times
23-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
New Study Would Bolster Climate Laws That Would Make Polluters Pay
In 2023, the Winooski River in Vermont spilled its banks, kissing the green truss bridge that spanned it. River water poured onto the marble floors of the State House. Up to nine inches of rain fell within 48 hours, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. A year later, Vermont enacted the Climate Change Superfund Act, which holds oil and gas companies financially responsible for climate damage in the state. Similar legislation passed in New York in 2024 and is pending in California, Maryland, and Massachusetts. Underpinning the laws is attribution science, which models huge numbers of scenarios using global temperature data to determine the likelihood that extreme weather events like floods or heat waves are related to emissions from burning oil, gas and coal. A new paper published on Wednesday in the journal Nature expands this type of work to link the emissions from specific emitters to the economic burden of extreme events. 'The oil industry is alarmed by state climate superfund laws and their growing popularity because they are the first policies adopted anywhere in the world that make climate polluters pay a fair share of the enormous damage their products have caused,' said Lee Wasserman, director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, the New York-based charitable foundation that helped created the climate superfund law. Reaction to the laws was swift. In February, West Virginia and other Republican-led states sued to block New York's law, saying that only the federal government could regulate emissions. President Trump signed an executive order this month calling the state laws 'burdensome and ideologically motivated' and asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to block their enforcement. For decades, environmental lawyers have been considering how to attribute the harm from greenhouse gas emissions, according to Martin Lockman, a climate law fellow at Columbia University's Sabin Center. 'Attribution science is incredibly important because it draws a link between specific activities from a company profiting from fossil fuels and specific harms to states and communities,' Mr. Lockman said. 'If you cause harm you should be responsible for cleaning it up, it's as simple as that.' The new study refines an approach known as 'end-to-end' attribution, which links one particular emitter (a company, for instance) to one particular climate-related impact (extreme heat, for example) to a specific damage (a downturn in the global economy). The study found that Chevron's emissions had caused up to $3.6 trillion in heat-related losses to global gross domestic product. Christopher Callahan, a postdoctoral earth scientist at Stanford University and an author of the study, said such a high cost was still a gross underestimate of the global impact of burning fossil fuels, especially in poorer, tropical regions that are least responsible for emissions. Chevron did not respond to a request for comment. 'That staggering figure represents damages from just one climate impact,' said Delta Merner, associate director of the Science Hub for Climate Litigation at the Union of Concerned Scientists. 'The total harm attributable to major emitters is undoubtedly far greater when the full range of climate hazards is taken into account.' Overall, the paper found that the world would be $28 trillion richer were it not for the extreme heat caused by the emissions from 111 major carbon producers between 1991 and 2020. Since 2017, more than 100 climate-related lawsuits have been filed each year, according to the new study. But the attribution studies those cases relied on often failed to link emissions to estimated economic damages. This new framework could provide a function similar to other big damage and loss cases, like holding tobacco companies responsible for lung cancer cases or pharmaceutical companies for opiate addiction. 'Legal scholars have called this kind of attribution the holy grail of climate liability,' said Justin Mankin, a geography professor focused on climate science at Dartmouth College and an author of the Nature paper. World Weather Attribution, a group run out of Imperial College London, has regularly issued attribution reports over the past decade. 'Sadly we're still the only ones who really do this, and we're not an institution, it's basically a project I do as a university professor working with a team of people,' said Friederike Otto, a physicist who helps to lead World Weather Attribution. Dr. Callahan and Dr. Mankin used open source tools for their models, and they have made the code and data sources they used to compile the global costs of climate change publicly available on their websites. 'We believe in openly transparent science, especially since the work was paid for by U.S. taxpayers,' said Dr. Mankin, noting that much of the support for the research was financed by the National Science Foundation and NOAA, two of the nation's largest climate science agencies that have been targeted for funding cuts under the Trump administration. Extreme weather events continue disrupt communities and strain finances. The 2023 flooding cost Vermont hundreds of millions of dollars, according to Anne Watson, a Vermont state senator who sponsored the bill quantifying the state's damages between 1995 and 2024. It passed the Legislature last year and the state's Republican governor allowed it become law without his signature. Julie Moore, secretary for the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources, helped organize the request for more information to help the state better understand different approaches to attribution science and how to allocate damages caused by greenhouse gas emissions. 'The charge to us is to adopt rules of how we'll apply attribution science and ultimately send out cost recovery letters,' Ms. Moore said. The state law says oil and gas corporations will receive letters at the start of 2027. 'The hope is that it'll result in a significant amount of money coming into Vermont to help both pay for the damage and help us adapt to a hotter, wetter climate that's a result of this carbon in the atmosphere,' Ms. Watson said. 'We need to go to the source of who's responsible for this.'
Euronews
07-02-2025
- Politics
- Euronews
'They helped keep the lights on': 22 states sue New York for its Big Oil-financed climate fund
A new law has been enforced in New York which requires a group of major energy producers to pay $75 billion (€72 bn) into a fund to cover climate change damage. 22 US states filed a lawsuit on Thursday contending that the new law is unconstitutional. While the complainants say this could lead America into an energy crisis, New York spokesperson argue it will help the state's climate resilience plans - and the entire nation to transition away from fossil fuels. The climate fund is to make fossil fuels company pay for historic GHG emissions New York state developed a Climate Change Superfund Act, which requires payments of $75 billion (€72 bn) for damage allegedly done by energy companies from 2000 to 2018. The new law requires major fossil fuel companies to pay into the damages fund over the next 25 years, based on their historic greenhouse gas emissions. However West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey is leading a coalition of 22 states against the fund. The lawsuit says the state law is 'an ugly example of the chaos that can result when States overreach' and highlights that coal, oil, and natural gas were once fundamental to New York. "They helped keep the lights on in Albany, manufacture the steel that supported New York City's iconic skyscrapers, and fuel the industry that keeps New York ports humming,' the lawsuit further says. McCuskey said in statement that he was "proud" to lead the coalition it what he alleges is an "unconstitutional" law. "This lawsuit is to ensure that these misguided policies, being forced from one state onto the entire nation, will not lead America into the doldrums of an energy crisis, allowing China, India and Russia to overtake our energy independence,' McCuskey said. "If we allow New York to get away with this, it will only be a matter of time before other states follow suit – wrecking our nation's power grid.' The other named states are Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming. The New York law could set an example in other states to "defeat Big Oil" The lawsuit accuses New York state of trying to force energy producers and consumers in other states 'to subsidise certain New York-based ' infrastructure ' projects, such as a new sewer system in New York City.' The current sewage system is described by experts as "archaic" and not fit to cope with increasing climate-related storm surges and extreme rainfall. Last September, state highways and one of the subway lines flooded when the remnants of storm Ophelia blew through the city, according to Inside Climate News. The state that put forward the law believes that the environmental fund is an important part of its climate resilience and energy transition and is prepared to fight. In 2021, New York City launched the largest urban climate resiliency project in America. Experts fear that rising sea levels by 2050 could put some of New York underwater, particularly the island of Manhattan. 'We look forward to defending this landmark legislation in court and defeating Big Oil once again,' Paul DeMichele, a spokesperson for Democratic New York governor, Kathy Hochul's office, says.
Yahoo
07-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
22 states sue New York, alleging environmental fund is unconstitutional
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — Twenty-two states sued New York on Thursday, contending that a new law forcing a small group of major energy producers to pay $75 billion into a fund to cover climate change damage is unconstitutional. The lawsuit, filed in Albany, lists state Attorney General Letitia James and other officials as defendants. According to a statement, West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey led the coalition of states against New York's Climate Change Superfund Act, which requires payments for damage allegedly done from 2000 to 2018. The law requires major fossil fuel companies to pay into the fund over the next quarter-century based on their past gas emissions. "This lawsuit is to ensure that these misguided policies, being forced from one state onto the entire nation, will not lead America into the doldrums of an energy crisis, allowing China, India and Russia to overtake our energy independence,' McCuskey said in a release. 'This law is unconstitutional, and I am proud to lead this coalition of attorneys general and brave private energy companies and industry groups in our fight to protect against this overreach," McCuskey added. "If we allow New York to get away with this, it will only be a matter of time before other states follow suit – wrecking our nation's power grid.' 'We look forward to defending this landmark legislation in court and defeating Big Oil once again,' Paul DeMichele, a spokesperson for Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul's office, said in an email. The lawsuit accuses New York state of trying to force energy producers and consumers in other states 'to subsidize certain New York-based 'infrastructure' projects, such as a new sewer system in New York City.' It called the law 'an ugly example of the chaos that can result when States overreach.' According to the lawsuit, New York wants to blame the small group of energy producers for global greenhouse gases that entered the atmosphere from many sources. 'Yet coal, oil, and natural gas were helping New York during that time. They helped keep the lights on in Albany, manufacture the steel that supported New York City's iconic skyscrapers, and fuel the industry that keeps New York ports humming,' the lawsuit said. Besides West Virginia, the states joining the lawsuit are Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Wyoming. The Associated Press
