Labrador Letter – Idaho Families Won’t Pay for New York’s Climate Change Agenda
Dear Friends,
In 2024, New York passed the Climate Change Superfund Act, claiming that the companies producing America’s oil, natural gas, and coal owed the state $75 billion for fuel they produced between 2000 and 2024, and it passed a law to collect. Idaho joined 21 other states to challenge that law, and a federal court has now struck it down.
Under New York’s Climate Change Superfund Act, any company that extracted fossil fuels or refined oil anywhere in the world during those 25 years – and that New York decided had accounted for more than a billion tons of emissions – was strictly liable for a share of a $75 billion fund. Fault did not matter. Where the fuel was produced did not matter. The fact that the fuel production being fined was legal, permitted, and regulated by the EPA did not matter.
New York benefitted from that fuel production like everyone else. New York residents drove their cars with it, heated their homes with it, and ran their businesses. That fuel production pushed economic growth across all sectors and powered job-creating industries for 25 years.
Companies do not just absorb a $75 billion demand. It gets built into the price of gasoline, diesel, heating fuel, and every product that moves by truck, and none of that stops at New York’s border. An Idaho family filling up in Nampa or paying a January heating bill in Idaho Falls would have been paying into New York’s climate fund without ever having a vote on it. That is why Idaho joined the coalition. The Trump Administration backed our position in court, and the coal, oil, and natural gas industries filed their own challenge.
The legal problem with the law is simple. Air pollution that crosses state lines has been a question of federal jurisdiction for over a century. The alternative is 50 states writing 50 different rules for the same emissions. Congress wrote the rules in the Clean Air Act and put the EPA in charge, working with the states. New York can regulate what happens inside New York and only New York. It cannot bill the rest of the country.
New York’s response was that it wasn’t regulating anything, only collecting for past harm. Chief Judge Brenda Sannes rejected that argument. She reasoned that when you make a company pay for its emissions, you are regulating those emissions. Calling it cost recovery does not change what it is. She wrote that the law was “simply beyond the limits of state law.” Because the law also reached producers outside the United States, the court found it stepped into foreign policy, which belongs to the federal government.
This was the first court ruling on a climate superfund law. Vermont has passed one, and our coalition is challenging it too. Other states have bills pending, and each is built on the same idea, that a state can send its bills to people who live somewhere else.
My office regularly fights against federal overreach, and keeping Washington, D.C. out of our statutes, wallets, and resources. This fight isn’t any different. We’ll do the same when a state like New York tries to push their radical environmental agenda on Idaho families and force Idahoans to pay a bill they had no part in.
Best regards,
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