Twenty-four Republican state attorneys general sued Vermont over the state’s first-in-the-nation law requiring fossil fuel companies to pay for adverse effects of climate change.
“Vermont’s law is a direct attack on Oklahoma’s energy producers and the thousands of hardworking Oklahomans employed in this critical industry,” Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond (R) said in a statement Tuesday.
“This unconstitutional overreach not only threatens our state’s economic foundation but also risks driving energy production to countries like China, India and Russia where environmental standards are far less stringent. I will always defend Oklahoma’s energy sector against harmful and misguided policies.”
Vermont enacted what’s known as a climate superfund law in May 2024. It requires compensatory payments from coal, oil and natural gas that the state determines is accountable for more than 1 billion metric tons of certain greenhouse gas emissions between 1995 and 2024.
The funds would be used to pay for climate adaptation projects. The state has sought out experts to help write regulations implementing the law and to help determine what companies should pay.
Filed in federal court on May 1 in Vermont, the suit seeks to block the law from being enforced and argues that federal law preempts the state’s law.
The states’ suit, which joins a pending lawsuit filed in December by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute, also argues that the companies targeted by the law cannot be retroactively punished because, at the time, they were in compliance with state and federal law.
The “self-described retroactive fines on traditional energy producers for their purported past contributions to greenhouse-gas emissions… were lawful operations endorsed and even promoted by both federal and State authorities,” the suit says.
Despite pushback from the federal government and the fossil fuel industry, Democratic-led states continue to consider superfund bills.
Measures have been introduced this year in California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon and Virginia. Legislation was also recently introduced in Maine.
The sponsors of the California Assembly and Senate versions of the bills pulled them from committee consideration last week, and their future remains unclear, according to E&E News.
The lawsuit’s lead plaintiff, West Virginia Attorney General John McCuskey (R), said the Vermont law could be more detrimental to the state’s coal industry — in decline as an energy source in recent years — than the climate superfund law New York enacted in December.
“The law will be devastating to traditional energy producers, including coal producers in West Virginia, leaving them with no other option than to cease operations, resulting in massive job losses,” McCuskey said in a statement. “It will also shift power production to countries like China, India and Russia, which operate under little to no environmental standards.”
The U.S. Department of Justice filed four lawsuits last week, including two against New York and Vermont over their climate superfund laws. Two other suits against Hawaii and Michigan seek to block the states from suing fossil fuel companies over damages from climate change.
The DOJ urged the courts to rule that the state climate laws and the rationale to sue fossil fuel companies are unconstitutional and do not trump federal laws.
“These burdensome and ideologically motivated laws and lawsuits threaten American energy independence and our country’s economic and national security,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement. “The Department of Justice is working to ‘Unleash American Energy’ by stopping these illegitimate impediments to the production of affordable, reliable energy that Americans deserve.”