Judge strikes down New York’s climate superfund law

 The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York struck down the state’s Climate Change Superfund Act on Monday, ruling that the 2024 law is invalid under the federal Clean Air Act. The law set up a cost recovery scheme whereby fossil fuel companies would pay into a fund used to finance climate change adaptation-related infrastructure projects. The state’s argument rested in part on the Trump administration’s decision earlier this year to rescind the Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding on greenhouse gases, which gave the agency authority to regulate climate pollution. Judge Brenda K. Sannes dismissed that argument in her decision, citing the Supreme Court’s ruling in American Electric Power v. Connecticut from 2011, which, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo put it, “established companies’ protection from federal public nuisance claims over greenhouse gas emissions. That decision sprang from the Court’s earlier 2007 decision that the Clean Air Act covers greenhouse gas emissions — which the EPA is now contesting.”

 

The case was one of at least four the Trump administration has pursued against states attempting to make fossil fuel companies cover the costs of adapting to climate change. Judges have already ruled against its attempts to prevent Hawaii and Michigan from suing fossil fuel companies, however a case against a similar superfund law in Vermont is still pending. “New York’s law would have expropriated $75 billion from energy companies around the world during an energy emergency and in direct defiance of American foreign policy and federal law,” Adam Gustafson, principal deputy assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Energy and Natural Resources Division and the administration’s lead attorney in this case, said in a statement. “We will continue to fight for affordable, reliable energy for all Americans.”