Extreme Climate Activists Aren’t Going Away

President Trump is clearly serious about his campaign promise to “unleash American energy.” From the day he took office he has signed numerous executive orders to accomplish this. He’s working to enable new projects to come online that will for the first time open federally owned lands for production and will also provide good-paying jobs. The president is swiftly overturning burdensome Biden-era regulations.

However, extreme climate activists, recognizing that they are now shut out of federal power, are increasingly turning to the states to push their agenda and stymie President Trump’s bold energy goals. These radicals are pursuing a two-pronged approach: They’re pushing numerous lawsuits in friendly state courts to cripple energy companies with judicial lawfare, while simultaneously pursuing state “climate superfund” bills. This type of legislation permits states to force fossil fuel companies to pay lots of money into special state funds to pay for alleged past damages from climate change. In reality, it’s a shakedown. In response, President Trump on April 8 signed an executive order “protecting American energy from state overreach” whose strategies jeopardize U.S. energy dominance.

These lawsuits have escalated since 2017—the start of Donald Trump’s first term—as climate activists seek to have state courts and state laws dictate national energy policies and our approaches to alleged climate-change damages. These are matters that are legally up to Congress, the Environmental Protection Agency and various international bodies.

Climate activists have no problem ignoring this as they push forward with their suits. They baselessly target prominent energy producers, ignoring inconvenient real-world facts, such as China is the top global emitter with its proliferation of coal-fired power plants. These lawsuits are meritless, which is why a number of them are getting dismissed in state courts.

For example, in January Maryland Circuit Judge Steven Platt threw out a suit filed by Annapolis and Anne Arundel County against numerous companies, saying that federal law preempted state law claims against the energy companies. Judge Platt’s ruling joins the growing list of rejected climate lawsuits. After similar dismissals in Delaware and Baltimore last year, other cases have been tossed this year out in New York City and New Jersey because activists had no business using state laws to sue over interstate conduct or worldwide emissions, revealing the distorted legal theories and faulty foundations these suits rest upon.

New Jersey Superior Court Judge Douglas Hurd, in dismissing the Garden State’s lawsuit, held that “despite the artful pleading by the plaintiffs in this case, this court finds that plaintiffs’ complaint, even under the most indulgent reading, is entirely about addressing the injuries of global climate change and seeking damages for such alleged injuries.” The White House’s recent executive order further recognized these lawsuits’ consequences, which undermine national security, federal interests and interstate commerce.

However, climate extremists are not giving up. As state litigation gets roundly dismissed, northeastern state legislatures are forging ahead with so-called climate superfund laws, whereby states can retroactively hold liable and impose costs on energy companies for emissions from past decades. They’ve advanced these laws regardless of the inconvenient fact that energy production was not only legal but also demanded by states themselves during the period in question. Vermont and New York are the first two states to pass such far-fetched legislation. More are likely to follow suit.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s version of such legislation requires companies to pay more than $75 billion over the next quarter century for emissions from 2000 to 2018.

If left standing, such laws would ultimately ruin U.S. energy production, leaving us dependent on Russia, Venezuela and OPEC. At the same time, these extremist laws don’t force foreign companies to pay into state-run funds. Instead, they target only domestic producers, which are among the lowest-emitting energy outfits, relative to global averages. So we should obliterate American energy production without targeting higher-emitting countries. Weird.

Fortunately, New York has been sued by a coalition of 22 states, led by West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey, on the grounds that its climate superfund law is an unconstitutional overreach of state power. And the White House’s executive order has rightly directed U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi to investigate these climate superfunds and lawsuits for their myriad legal violations, with a 60-day deadline to recommend “additional presidential or legislative action necessary to stop the enforcement” of these measures.

No longer in majority elective power in Washington, climate extremists are clearly trying every trick in the book to undercut America’s dominance, while attempting a mammoth money grab. They’re resorting to unconstitutional means to handcuff domestic energy production. While state courts have increasingly dismissed climate lawsuits as meritless, superfund laws are growing in popularity as another way to gut U.S. energy prowess. Lawmakers must act before reliable and affordable American energy suffers.