Labrador Letter – Idaho Families Won’t Pay for New York’s Climate Change Agenda

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.