Some of the same Democrats in New York state who are complaining about ‘President Trump’s high gas prices’ are trying their best to make the current price increases permanent. How? By essentially appropriating oil company profits for their own use. Thankfully, however, federal courts are stepping in and blocking this theft.
U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel entered final judgment this week against New York’s Climate Change Superfund Act, declared it unconstitutional, and permanently barred the state from enforcing it. Not a temporary injunction. Not a wait-and-see order. Done.
Consider what Albany actually enacted in 2024. The state wanted $75 billion for climate adaptation projects, and rather than ask its own taxpayers for the money — an awkward conversation in a state people are already leaving — it decided to invoice a list of oil and gas producers. The bill covers emissions dating back to 2000, for conduct that was lawful the entire time, under permits issued by the same governments now demanding payment. And the amount each company owes isn’t calculated on what it sold in New York, or even in the United States. It’s based on worldwide production and worldwide emissions attributable to its products.
Read that again. A state legislature in Albany assigned itself the authority to assess damages against companies for barrels pumped in Nigeria and burned in Guangdong.
New York’s lawyers tried to argue their way out of the obvious problem by insisting the law doesn’t regulate emissions at all — it merely requires compensation for damage from past emissions. Castel wasn’t buying. Leaning on the Second Circuit’s decision in City of New York v. Chevron, he pointed out what any first-year law student could see: imposing enormous monetary liability keyed to greenhouse gas output is regulation, whatever you call it, and interstate emissions are a subject Congress addressed with a uniform federal scheme rather than fifty competing ones.
He also rejected the cute argument that EPA’s recent rescission of the endangerment finding opens a lane for the states. The question isn’t whether Washington happens to be regulating aggressively this year. It’s whether federal law leaves New York free to build its own liability regime. It doesn’t.
Then the foreign-affairs holding, which is the one with teeth. Because the statute measures liability by global conduct, it reaches into an area the Constitution reserves entirely to the national government. Climate diplomacy is conducted through treaties and negotiations by the federal executive, and that remains true whether the policy is to join international agreements or to withdraw from them. Either way, the decision belongs to Washington, not to a state capitol looking for revenue.
This is also the second loss in a month. In late August, a different federal judge in the suit brought by West Virginia and other states reached essentially the same conclusions on both grounds. Two courts, two separate cases, same answer.
And who would actually have paid the $75 billion? Not executives. Refiners and producers don’t absorb retroactive assessments; they price them, and the price shows up at the pump and on the heating bill, in New York and in every state downstream of the same supply chain. Which is why Iowa and Missouri went to court over a New York statute in the first place.
The legislature knew all this. It passed the bill anyway, because the headline was the point. The check was always going to be someone else’s problem.
