The Trump admin is suing four states to stop them from holding fossil fuel giants accountable for climate damage
Burned cars and homes in a neighborhood were destroyed by a wildfire in August 2023 in Lahaina
By Hannah Rabinowitz, Ella Nilsen, Laura Paddison, CNN
(CNN) — The Trump administration filed lawsuits against four states Thursday in an effort to halt their plans to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for climate damage, marking the government’s latest attack on climate action and raising fears about states’ ability to act on climate change and hold polluters accountable.
The Department of Justice filed lawsuits against Hawaii and Michigan Wednesday, asking federal judges to preemptively block the states’ pending litigation against oil companies for their role in climate harm. Hawaii has since filed its lawsuit but Michigan has yet to do so.
On Thursday, the DOJ announced two additional lawsuits against New York and Vermont challenging their superfund climate laws, which require fossil fuel companies to pay fees into funds to address climate damage. The filing called the laws “a transparent monetary-extraction scheme” paid for by out-of-state businesses.
“These burdensome and ideologically motivated laws and lawsuits threaten American energy independence and our country’s economic and national security,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi in a statement Thursday.
The DOJ said the states’ actions constituted “unlawful overreach” that would violate the Constitution and are preempted by the Clean Air Act, which directs the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate hazardous pollutants from power plants. It also claimed they would result in increased energy prices for Americans.
Some legal experts expressed concern about the administration’s actions. Suing to prevent states from filing lawsuits is “highly unusual,” Michael Gerrard, founder and faculty director of the Columbia University Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, told the Associated Press. “It’s an aggressive move in support of the fossil fuel industry,” he added.
Hawaii’s Attorney General Anne Lopez condemned the DOJ lawsuit in a statement Thursday, calling it “direct attack on Hawaiʻi’s rights as a sovereign state” and an attempt to block it from “holding the fossil fuel industry responsible for deceptive conduct that caused climate change damage to Hawaiʻi.”
Lopez also announced Hawaii had filed a lawsuit Thursday against seven groups of fossil fuel companies and the American Petroleum Institute, accusing them of deceptive conduct and attempting to hold them responsible for climate damage including the 2023 Maui wildfires, which killed more than 100 people.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, accused Trump of being at the “beck and call” of big oil campaign donors. “This lawsuit is at best frivolous and arguably sanctionable. If the White House or Big Oil wish to challenge our claims, they can do so when our lawsuit is filed,” she said in a Thursday statement.
More than 30 states, cities and tribes have sued fossil fuel companies — in some cases asking courts to compel the companies to pay for abatement funds to help fund damages from climate-fueled disasters like floods, wildfires and extreme heat.
The fossil fuel industry has appealed several times to the Supreme Court in an attempt to move cases from state court to federal court, where it would likely be easier to dismiss the cases. But that argument has been rejected by dozens of federal judges.
The Supreme Court has declined multiple appeals from major fossil fuel companies to step in during these types of lawsuits. In January, the court specifically declined to weigh in on a separate Hawaii case filed by Honolulu against fossil fuel companies, allowing it to proceed in state court.
The DOJ’s efforts to block additional cases against fossil fuel companies stem from an executive order President Donald Trump signed his first day in office titled “Declaring a National Energy Emergency.” It claimed the previous administration’s policies caused “a precariously inadequate” energy supply and an “increasingly unreliable grid.” In response, the order directed agencies to bolster fossil fuel infrastructure.
While signing the executive order, Trump quipped that it is a “big one.”
“You know what that allows you to do? That means you can do whatever you have to do to get out of that problem,” he said. “And we do have that kind of an emergency.”
The-CNN-Wire
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