Ruling Clouds Liberal Push To Tax Energy Companies for Changing Weather

Empire State consumers and businesses are scoring a reprieve, for now, with a federal judge’s rejection of a state law that seeks to extort billions from energy companies for changes in the weather. The law, backed by ecological militants and enacted by Albany Democrats, had sought to extract some $75 billion over 25 years from companies that supply coal, gas, oil, and other energy resources that fuel the state’s economic activity. What folly. New York lawmakers had in 2024 passed the Climate Change Superfund Act, putting a de facto tax on energy providers under the euphemism of a “climate change adaptation cost recovery program.” Yet the Democrats’ ham-fisted attempt to punish energy companies would merely have passed the billions of dollars in levies onto New York consumers and businesses in the form of higher prices, further impeding the state’s struggling economy. The Albany solons claimed they had the ability “to determine with great accuracy the share of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere by specific fossil fuel companies over the last 70 years or more,” the climate law stated. This, they added, made it “possible to assign liability to and require compensation from companies commensurate with their emissions during a given time period.” Yet where’s the logic, or legality, in a retroactive tax of this stripe? Activists pointed to the settlement funds generated by litigation against the tobacco industry and opioid producers as templates for the climate levy. Lawmakers salivated over the prospect of a de facto slush fund to pay for pork-barrel projects like “coastal wetlands restoration or stormwater drainage system projects,” the Wall Street Journal reported, with “a third of the revenue” set aside “for initiatives in disadvantaged communities.”A bloc of trade organizations and energy-producing states filed suits against the law. New York, the business groups claimed, was trying to tax “global, lawful greenhouse gas emissions based on completely unsubstantiated ‘attribution science.’” The plaintiffs argued that federal law, like the Clean Air Act, preempted state regulations. They pointed, too, to a Second Circuit ruling barring New York City’s effort to tax energy companies over greenhouse gases.An Obama nominee to the bench, Judge Brenda Sannes of New York’s Northern District, on Monday skewered in her ruling what she called the state’s “unusual and sweeping statute.” Yet she found that the Albany lawmakers’ scheme to charge energy companies for their past fossil fuel emissions was “not distinguishable” from New York City’s similar tax, which had deemed carbon emissions a “nuisance” and ran afoul of the riders of the Second Circuit. Viewed more broadly, Judge Sannes’s ruling could suggest tough sledding ahead for other states and cities trying to blame energy companies for changes in the climate. Vermont enacted a law akin to New York’s and it is being challenged in federal court. The Supreme Court will soon hear arguments over Boulder, Colorado’s attempt to sue energy companies on this head. Several dozen similar cases are pending in the courts, Stateline reports.These disputes all appear likely to come a cropper for reasons similar to those identified this week by Judge Sannes, and earlier by the Second Circuit. West Virginia’s attorney general, John McCuskey, who led the bloc of states that sued to block the climate fund, hails Judge Sannes’s ruling as “a major victory in the fight against liberal states, trying to balance their budgets on the backs of our hard-working men and women in the coal, oil and gas industries.”

Ruling Clouds Liberal Push To Tax Energy Companies for Changing Weather

Ruling Clouds Liberal Push To Tax Energy Companies for Changing Weather

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