New York tried to stick energy producers with a staggering $75 billion climate bill.
Now a second federal judge has ruled that the state crossed the line.
The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York granted summary judgment to the Trump administration and permanently blocked enforcement of New York’s so-called Climate Change Superfund Act. The Justice Department announced the victory Monday.
Here is the DOJ’s announcement:
The U.S. Department of Justice says the law sought to impose billions of dollars in liability on domestic and foreign companies that extract fossil fuels or refine crude oil. New York enacted the measure in 2024 and aimed to collect $75 billion over 25 years for infrastructure projects tied to climate impacts.
But U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel ruled that New York was trying to regulate conduct beyond its borders in an area governed by federal authority.
The court concluded that the Clean Air Act displaced the federal common law New York attempted to use and that the state measure also intruded on the federal government’s foreign-affairs power.
The ruling is the second federal-court defeat for the law in roughly a month. The Northern District of New York had already ruled against the state in a separate challenge, giving opponents two victories from two judges who examined the measure.
DOJ’s Energy and Natural Resources Division underscored that point:
New York’s scheme was designed to reach backward in time.
Rather than taxing current emissions through an ordinary prospective policy, the state assigned liability based on companies’ alleged share of fossil-fuel emissions from 2000 through 2024. Major producers could be billed for conduct that occurred long before the state created the program.
That retroactive structure is one reason critics called the law a shakedown. It attempted to make a limited group of companies finance decades of state spending while politicians who encouraged, taxed and benefited from the same energy use kept their own hands clean.
And those costs do not vanish inside a corporate accounting department. Energy producers facing tens of billions in new liabilities pass higher expenses through supply chains, investors pull back from projects, and families eventually see the consequences in utility bills, transportation costs and the price of nearly everything delivered by truck.
The $75 billion price tag quickly became the headline beyond the courtroom:
Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said the New York law threatened Americans’ access to affordable and reliable energy. He also tied the ruling directly to President Trump’s push for American energy dominance.
Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Adam Gustafson said both courts reached the same basic conclusion: national policy on global pollution belongs to the federal government, not individual states trying to impose their own worldwide penalty systems.
That federal-state distinction is crucial. Carbon emissions do not stop at New York’s border, and the companies targeted by the law operate in national and international markets.
A single state cannot appoint itself the world’s climate collector and send invoices for economic activity that happened across the globe.
The court found that the federal government had standing to defend its sovereign authority over interstate emissions and its foreign-policy interests. It also held that the state law was preempted on two independent grounds, giving the ruling more than one legal foundation.
New York can still pursue environmental policy within constitutional limits. It can debate spending, set lawful standards and answer to its own voters for the costs.
What it cannot do, according to two federal judges, is use a newly invented $75 billion penalty machine to regulate global emissions from Albany.
This is a major courtroom win for the Trump administration, American energy producers and consumers who would have been left paying the hidden bill.
Two courts have now looked at New York’s climate superfund law. Two courts have rejected it.
Even in a state famous for expensive experiments, $75 billion was apparently a bridge too far.
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