Judges Keep Striking Down Climate Laws. Some States Are Fighting Back.

Mother Jones; Michael M. Santiago/Getty Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. On Wednesday—the fourth day New York’s annual Climate Week—a federal judge handed the Trump administration a major victory by striking down New York’s landmark Climate Change Superfund Act. Judge P. Kevin Castel ruled that the law, which sought to hold fossil fuel companies financially responsible for climate change-related damages, overstepped the state’s authority because it was preempted by the national Clean Air Act and interfered with the federal government’s ability to conduct foreign affairs. Castel’s ruling comes just a few weeks after a similar decision by Judge Brenda Sannes in a parallel case brought by a coalition of Republican-led states, business groups, and fossil fuel companies. “So is it taxpayers who are going to pay for it? Or is it billionaires?” Enacted in 2024, the New York law was part of a major push in Democratic-leaning states to crack down on carbon pollution in a way the federal government has so far failed to do. It employed a familiar strategy from the 1980s: Make polluters pay. Modeled after the federal Superfund statute for toxic waste dumps, New York’s climate superfund law would have charged fossil fuel companies $75 billion over 25 years to fund climate adaptation and infrastructure projects. Since the measure’s introduction in 2023, lawmakers in other states have pursued similar legislation. As of now, the back-to-back court decisions directly apply only within New York state. But these rulings could offer the fossil fuel industry a roadmap for challenging similar laws, and the judges’ reasoning could ultimately be adopted by other courts, including the Supreme Court. Now, state lawmakers considering their own climate superfund legislation face a difficult choice: Change course in response to the New York rulings, or push ahead and try to defend their bills in court. I spoke to lawmakers and advocates from Minnesota, Washington, Connecticut, and Vermont, all of whom have either drafted legislation, are considering legislation, or, in the case of Vermont, have successfully passed their own climate superfund law. While slightly different in their state-specific parameters, the legislators and activists behind these bills share the same goal: With climate-related damage already costing states and residents considerable amounts of money, the companies responsible for a significant share of historical emissions should help cover the bill. In Minnesota, a superfund bill has already been introduced, and legislators in Washington and Connecticut are planning to propose bills for their upcoming legislative sessions. Bloomberg recently reported that lawmakers in California, Illinois, and Massachusetts are all continuing to move forward with superfund legislation. After the first New York ruling, I asked Minnesota State Rep. Athena Hollins, a deputy floor leader for the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, what she thought of the decision. “I find it personally disappointing,” she replied, “because the reality is these costs are coming.” According to NOAA’s archived Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database—which is now run by Climate Central after being shuttered by the Trump administration—Minnesota has experienced 62 confirmed weather or climate disaster events exceeding $1 billion between 1980 and 2024. Climate change has contributed to higher temperatures and more intense rainfall in the state, leading to major challenges for its agricultural sector and outdoor adventure industry. Hollins, who introduced and co-sponsored Minnesota’s superfund bill earlier this year, told me that Minnesotans could face $20 billion or more in climate-related costs by 2040. “That’s roughly a third of our state’s current budget,” she said. Her state’s superfund legislation would charge major polluters for damages to bridges, roads, and buildings caused by greenhouse gas emissions. That money would pay for natural disaster recovery, infrastructure projects, and public health efforts linked to pollution. Infrastructures costs, Hollins notes, are inevitably going to rise. “So is it taxpayers who are going to pay for it?” she asks. “Or is it billionaires?” For Hollins, the New York rulings “has literally no bearing on what we’re doing in the State of Minnesota.” She also notes the “shaky” appellate court precedent on which the rulings are based aren’t necessarily relevant to federal courts in Minnesota. Washington State Rep. Shaun Scott, a Democratic Socialist representing part of Seattle, actually sees the New York ruling as a “silver lining” for his own state—a roadmap for avoiding legal vulnerabilities in crafting his own legislation. “We have watched with great interest the way the federal government has dealt with New York State because we understand there’s the potential that we will experience similar roadblocks,” Scott said. “It gives us the opportunity to see where any landmines might be and legally sidestep some of them.” “It gives us the opportunity to see where any landmines might be and legally sidestep some of them.” In Scott’s view, Washington State is uniquely positioned to successfully pass a climate superfund law, given its passage of the Climate Commitment Act in 2022 requiring greenhouse gas emitters to buy pollution credits. Last year, he spearheaded the passage of the Wildfire Alleviation Support Act, which charges major financial and tech firms that rely heavily on data centers and uses the funds for the state’s wildfire resilience efforts. The state is particularly vulnerable to wildfires given its large, lush forests and decreasing snowfall earlier in the season, and, according to Scott, overuse of energy-intensive data centers has contributed to that risk. Scott hopes to use these existing laws as models for a future climate superfund bill, which he plans to introduce in the upcoming legislative session in January. To help draft the bill, Scott’s office has been working with 350Seattle, a climate justice organization that advocates for communities most impacted by climate change. Akiksha Chatterji, 350Seattle’s campaign director, said the group began organizing around superfund legislation after seeing Vermont and New York move forward with their laws in 2024. Chatterji says the New York litigation won’t deter 350Seattle’s plans. “We are very clear that no matter what the outcome is in other states, we are moving full steam ahead because rulings in those circuits don’t impact us.” In Connecticut—which is subject to the same appellate court precedents as New York—State Rep. Josh Elliott expressed more concern about the implications of the Empire State’s legal battle. Connecticut’s bill, a cost-recovery program, would calculate what share of emissions since 1995 is attributable to the largest fossil fuel producers. Then the state would issue payment demands. It would put the proceeds toward adaptation work on stormwater upgrades, flood mitigation, coastal protection, and grid resiliency. The bill received a public hearing in February and is expected to reach the floor in January 2027 when the legislature is back in session. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy damaged approximately 3,000 homes across Connecticut, and over the last few years, the state has faced increasing rainfall, coastal flooding, and infrastructure injuries and deaths due to extreme weather events. “People pay for it through their property taxes,” Elliott said. “But the costs of externalities should be borne by the companies that pollute.” Across the border from New York, Vermont is also facing a legal challenge—brought by the US Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute—over its own “polluters pay” climate law. Vermont State Sen. Anne Watson, a co-sponsor of the bill, is hopeful that it won’t suffer the same fate as the New York law. “We feel very good about our legal standing moving forward with the law,” Watson said, “and what happens in Vermont can be wholly different.” A decision is expected sometime this fall. In the summer of 2023, Vermont experienced catastrophic flash flooding, with devastating road and bridge washouts and landslides. In Montpelier, where Watson lived at the time, she said the conversation quickly shifted from if extreme flooding would happen again to when it would happen again. Shortly after the bill was passed in May 2024, Vermont experienced another summer of major flooding. “It was so painfully apparent that the costs of climate change were falling on residents, on business owners, and on municipalities that all just simply could not afford it,” Watson said. “And [we were] also recognizing that this was going to keep happening.” “The costs of externalities should be borne by the companies that pollute.” A recent Brown University study reported high support for climate superfund laws across nearly all surveyed states, finding a 3-to-1 ratio of support to opposition for these bills during public hearings. In Vermont, for example, Ben Edgerly Walsh, a climate and energy program director for the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, which helped support Vermont’s law, told me that his organization received 12,000 petition signatures in favor of the legislation during the summer of 2023 before it was introduced. “For a state like Vermont, where you’re talking about 650,000 people total,” he said, ”that is really significant grassroots support.” But what the Brown report also showed is that, behind the scenes, lobbying groups opposing climate superfund bills outnumbered supporters. “Those lobbying interactions are probably the most influential in terms of swaying legislators,” said Trevor Culhane, a research associate at Brown’s Climate and Development Lab and one of the co-authors of the report. Apart from oil and gas companies, the Justice Department’s Energy and Natural Resources Division has also joined the fight against climate superfund legislation. In 2025, the DOJ filed two motions for summary judgment challenging both New York’s and Vermont’s climate superfund acts. After Judge Castel issued his ruling, DOJ official Adam Gustafson said in a statement, “Both [New York federal judges] hold that the federal government is responsible for setting national policy on global pollution, not states.” Of course, the Trump administration has little interest in actually doing that. In February, the Environmental Protection Agency rescinded its own authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. The administration has also weighed in on various climate liability lawsuits in which plaintiffs, including state governments, are seeking damages from fossil fuel companies under various state and federal laws. Celebrating the dismissal of one such lawsuit, brought by the state of Michigan, Gustafson said in a statement last week, “We are pleased that the district court has rejected another aggressively anti-energy lawsuit, and we are committed to protecting American energy from this sort of state overreach.” The most anticipated climate liability case will be before the Supreme Court next week, with the justices scheduled to hear arguments over whether Boulder, Colorado, can sue Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil. The underlying legal questions of the case are distinct from climate superfund litigation, but a broad ruling in Suncor’s favor could be used to inform legal analysis on future climate litigation, said Alejandro Camacho on a recent webinar sponsored by Covering Climate Now and Point Source. “Climate superfund statutes could start to borrow from the analysis of the court pretty immediately,” he said. When I asked Anne Watson, the Vermont lawmaker, about challenges coming from private industry and the federal government, she smiled. “This isn’t going to make us back down. Maybe it’s a little intimidating in certain ways, but we’re not giving up,” she said. “I think it’s just a matter of time before the fossil fuel industry is held accountable.”