Judge Voids New York's $75B Climate Superfund

A federal judge has blocked New York from enforcing its climate "superfund" law, ruling that the Clean Air Act leaves greenhouse gas regulation to the federal government, not the states.

Chief U.S. District Judge Brenda Sannes, who sits in Syracuse, issued the ruling on Monday.

The 2024 law would have collected $75 billion from fossil fuel producers — about $3 billion a year for 25 years, starting in 2028.

The Legal Ground

Sannes found the law preempted by the Clean Air Act, which gives the Environmental Protection Agency — not individual states — authority over greenhouse gas emissions, and which the court said requires a uniform national policy that New York's law conflicts with.

She separately held that billing foreign fossil fuel producers for their emissions runs into the federal foreign affairs doctrine, making that piece of the law unconstitutional.

That is a broader holding than a narrow tax or procedural defect. It goes to whether any state can put a price on decades of global emissions — the same theory behind copycat laws elsewhere.