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OAN Guest Commentary – Joseph R. Pitts
Friday, March 7, 2025
Over 20 Republican-led states recently filed a federal lawsuit challenging New York’s recently enacted Climate Change Superfund Act. Signed into law by Governor Kathy Hochul in December 2024, the act seeks to collect approximately $75 billion from companies who have been bizarrely deemed responsible for “causing” climate change. This legal battle underscores the ongoing tension between radical state-level climate initiatives and the will of the public.
West Virginia Attorney General John B. McCuskey put it best. He said that the lawsuit he and his fellow Republican state attorneys general filed “is to ensure that these misguided policies, being forced from one state onto the entire nation, will not lead America into the doldrums of an energy crisis.”
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President Donald Trump’s resounding victory in November made one thing perfectly clear: Americans are tired of elite progressive energy politics.
Traditional Democratic voting blocs like minorities and union members shifted hard toward Trump because they realized that the party of workers had become the party of wokesters. DEI, CRT, open borders, climate alarmism, and every other variety of ivory tower progressive nonsense has been rejected at the ballot box.
By now, though, it should be clear that the clearly expressed will of the people won’t be enough to stop Democrats. They claim to care about democracy but were perfectly happy to anoint their 2024 nominee without a competitive primary while trying to remove Trump from Republican primary ballots. “Democracy” is just their code word for the progressive agenda. If voters don’t like that agenda, they’ll move it forward by other means.
As seen in New York, climate activists are already mobilizing to use lawfare and state legislative overreach to overturn the will of the electorate, bankrupt fossil fuel companies, and leave America less prosperous and more dependent on foreign energy.
Democrat-run states, cities, and counties across the country have filed lawsuits against energy producers, demanding that they pay for the damage allegedly caused by climate change. The extent of these “damages” is highly subjective, with plaintiffs blaming climate change for everything from wildfires and floods to heat waves and hurricanes. These lawsuits accuse fossil fuel companies of deceiving the public by refusing to accept the activists’ version of climate science. So, in addition to multibillion-dollar payouts, these lawsuits also want courts to suppress companies’ free speech rights and even compel them to parrot climate alarmist talking points.
Thankfully, these lawsuits have mostly failed. Even Biden’s solicitor general acknowledged these lawsuits violate the constitution, since state courts lack the power to impose penalties for out-of-state emissions. On February 5, a Democrat-appointed New Jersey judge threw out a climate lawsuit brought by the state’s Democratic attorney general for that exact reason. “Plaintiffs’ claims seeking damages for interstate and international emissions,” he wrote, “are preempted by federal law.” It was the fourth straight loss for this legal strategy.
The law is clear on this issue, but that won’t stop climate radicals in progressive jurisdictions from trying again and again until they find a judge who sees things their way. That’s where Congress should come in.
Congress can stop them by passing legislation to preempt or provide liability protection in state or local lawsuits that target energy producers for alleged climate damages. Lawmakers could also clarify venue rules to make sure that it’s federal courts, not state and local ones, deciding these cases.
Even if Congress does this, it won’t mark the end of the story. That is because, if their lawfare approach doesn’t work, climate-obsessed Democrats can just use their control of blue-state legislatures to enact their crackdowns on fossil fuel companies.
New York and Vermont have already enacted “climate superfund” legislation, and Oregon, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Maryland are considering similar bills. These laws would penalize energy producers for the alleged climate impacts of their historic carbon emissions. Not only would these penalties apply to emissions that took place outside the states’ borders, they would also be retroactive. This would mean potentially bankrupting these companies for decades-old actions that were legal at the time and (in many cases) are still legal today.
Even if Democrats weaponize blue-state legislatures against the energy freedom movement, though, the Republican-controlled Congress can still step in to end this dangerous and undemocratic end-run around the will of the people. All it would have to do is pass a bill overriding state-level legislation that imposes retroactive liability for so-called climate damages.
The stakes are high. Nothing drives up consumer prices faster than high energy costs. In December 2024, gas prices, utility bills, and transportation costs accounted for more than 40% of the rise in the Consumer Price Index. President Trump has promised to deliver a “Golden Age” of American “energy dominance.” Cheap, plentiful energy—much of it provided by fossil fuels—will bring down the cost of living, strengthen national security, and power AI innovations that will drive economic growth for decades to come. But none of that will happen if climate activists succeed in undermining the president’s agenda. If we want the future we were promised, then Congress needs to have Trump’s back.
(Views expressed by guest commentators may not reflect the views of OAN or its affiliates.)
Joseph R. Pitts, a former Republican member of Congress from Pennsylvania, is a former member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee
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