Tag: climategate

Another Federal Judge Strikes Down New York’s $75 Billion Climate Superfund Law as Unconstitutional — Second Court Torpedoes Hochul’s Climate Cash Grab

New York Democrats just lost again.

A second federal judge has now struck down Gov. Kathy Hochul’s Climate Change Superfund Act, the Albany scheme that tried to shake down American and foreign energy companies for $75 billion over alleged “local effects” of climate change.

According to a Department of Justice press release issued Monday, U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel of the Southern District of New York granted the United States’ motion for summary judgment last week, declared the statute unconstitutional, and permanently enjoined the state from enforcing it.

Castel, a George W. Bush appointee, found that New York’s law is preempted on two independent grounds: the federal Clean Air Act and the foreign affairs doctrine. The court also held that the United States has standing to defend its sovereign authority over interstate emissions and foreign policy.

That is the second knockout in a month.

As The Gateway Pundit reported earlier this month, Chief Judge Brenda K. Sannes, an Obama appointee in the Northern District of New York, already shredded the same statute, calling it an “unusual and sweeping” law that was “simply beyond the limits of state law.”

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ZERO hurricanes formed by peak 2026 season, and climate alarmists hope you don’t hear about it

A former climate reporter said she deliberately avoided covering positive weather developments because doing so would have complicated the narrative that climate change posed an existential threat.

“When I was a climate reporter, I never covered positive climate stories because it would ‘muddy the narrative’ that climate change was an existential threat,” Lucy Biggers wrote Tuesday on X. “No one told me to behave this way. I chose to do this of my own volition.”

Biggers, who now works for The Free Press, pointed to the historically quiet 2026 Atlantic hurricane season as an example of the type of story she believes climate reporters may be reluctant to highlight.

“I think this is why we rarely see events like this year’s historically quiet eastern hurricane season covered widely by the news,” Biggers wrote. “Many reporters believe covering it will ‘give fodder to climate change deniers.'”

Just five tropical storms have formed, none reaching hurricane strength, The Weather Channel reported. The season also set a record Saturday for the latest start without a hurricane in the satellite era, which dates back to 1966, CBS News reported.

“[I]t was mostly soft self-censorship. I knew what the accepted beliefs of the climate movement were, and I wasn’t going to stick my neck out and challenge them. That would have been so much work and threatened my standing within the group,” Biggers, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“So I ignored anything that challenged the mainstream understanding of climate change anything positive about plastics, fossil fuels, or capitalism. I stayed away from those topics because I was protecting my own neck and wanted to fit in with the group,” Biggers said.

Biggers previously described herself as a former climate activist and said she spent years accepting the arguments of the climate movement without seriously questioning them while working at left-wing outlet NowThis News.

“I would say it is still common today. You can see it with the quiet east coast hurricane season we’re experiencing right now. Nobody is covering it in the same way they would if we were having a very active hurricane season on the East Coast,” Biggers told DCNF.

“If that were happening, we would never hear the end of it. But because the story doesn’t confirm a dangerous climate catastrophe, newsrooms are less inclined to cover it.”

Meteorologists have largely blamed the unusually quiet season on a powerful El Niño, a climate pattern marked by an unusual warming of the Pacific Ocean’s surface temperatures. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said El Niño increases vertical wind shear over the tropical Atlantic, making it harder for hurricanes to form and organize.

The Atlantic hurricane season is far from over, however, with the National Hurricane Center listing Nov. 30 as its official end point.

“I basically spent half my twenties, kind of just buying everything as it was sold to me. Never really investigating,” Biggers said during a May appearance on TRIGGERnometry.

The former climate reporter said she had become convinced climate change represented an existential threat despite lacking what she now describes as a deep understanding of climate science.

“That was how turned off my critical thinking was, because I was getting so much support from being part of this movement that I just pushed it,” Biggers said.

While Biggers argued the quiet season has received limited coverage, several major news outlets have reported on the absence of hurricanes. The Associated Press, CBS News, The Washington Post and The New York Times have all covered the unusual lull in recent days.

“Climate reporters now frequently cover studies that project a frightening future without looking at the empirical evidence we already have,” Biggers said.

“Thank you, President Trump!” the White House’s Rapid Response 47 account wrote on X Sunday in response to a post from meteorologist Chris Martz, describing the hurricane season as historic.

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25 State AGs Urge Defunding Of National Academies Of Sciences, Allege Bias On Climate Lawsuits

A coalition of 25 state attorneys general called on federal agencies and Congress to defund the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), charging that the organization had used taxpayer dollars to produce reports that supported plaintiffs in climate lawsuits against energy companies.

In an Aug. 27 letter, the state attorneys general urged the federal government to “end grants to an organization [NASEM] that uses taxpayer money to prop up litigation theories that have been rejected by courts from Maryland to Mississippi to California.”

Much of the conflict stems from a chapter on climate science in the Federal Judicial Center’s Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence for federal judges that was written by NASEM, together with the Federal Judicial Center (FJC).

This manual provides essential background and technical information for judges who are presiding over thousands of lawsuits in which states and cities across the United States are seeking billions of dollars in damages from energy companies as compensation for alleged harm from global warming.

Allegations of Bias

Critics allege that information NASEM produced for the manual supports the plaintiffs’ claims while ignoring contrary views that favor the defense.

President Donald Trump stated in a July 19 Truth Social post that NASEM had “published fraudulent, biased, and misleading Manuals on Climate Change” and that “taxpayers should not be funding Climate Fraud, and Judges should never have relied upon it.”

In January, Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet, told the FJC in a letter that the manual appeared to include “biased programming” with the “underlying goal of predisposing federal judges in favor of plaintiffs who allege injuries from the manufacturing, marketing, use, or sale of fossil-fuel products.”

In response, the FJC removed the chapter from its manual. Initially, NASEM kept the chapter on its website but removed it on Aug. 7, pending an internal review.

“That chapter has received considerable scrutiny,” NASEM stated. “[NASEM] has determined that questions about the processes used to develop the chapter warrant an independent review, and the chapter will not appear on our website while that review is underway.”

However, attorneys general from the group of 25 states, led by Montana, Nebraska, Tennessee, and West Virginia, say they have concerns regarding that review process.

“Now, over five months later, after presidential criticism and increasing public scrutiny, NASEM has temporarily removed the chapter from its website for an ‘independent review’ of the ‘processes used to develop the chapter,'” the attorneys general wrote in their letter. “This review appears to be a sham, as demonstrated by NASEM’s secrecy around all aspects of the review process.”

The attorneys general charged that the chapter in the reference manual that NASEM helped write “materially misquotes the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], directly contradicts the manual’s statistics chapter, was apparently substantially ghost-written by climate plaintiffs’ attorney Michael Burger, and had funders, authors, and reviewers that included climate funders, activists, and litigation participants.”

One of the co-authors of the Reference Manual’s climate chapter, Columbia Law School professor Jessica Wentz, defended the work in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, stating that it had undergone a rigorous review process, that Michael Burger had not contributed to it, and that it was “objective and rooted in settled science.”

In addition to the chapter in the reference manual for judges, NASEM produced a report in July titled “Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate Events and Their Impacts 2026,” which critics say bolstered plaintiffs’ arguments that harm from extreme weather events could be attributed to energy companies’ production of fossil fuels.

That NASEM report supported “extreme event attribution” (EEA), the legal theory underpinning climate lawsuits, which claims that damage from extreme weather can be attributed to fossil fuel emissions, as plaintiffs assert. NASEM stated in a summary of the report that “the scientific tools, observational datasets, and methods developed and used for EEA have advanced considerably over the past decade and increased the confidence in EEA results for some types of weather events.”

“[NASEM says] that these attribution studies have more prominence in the press and in legal proceeding and they say attribution methodology is getting better, but saying something is getting better is nowhere near the same as saying it’s any good,” Steven Koonin, physicist at Stanford University and former undersecretary for science under President Barack Obama, told The Epoch Times. “You would expect to see graphs throughout the report comparing the results of attribution with what the actual data is, and there is virtually none of that in the report.”

The NASEM report also provides a methodology and causal link between greenhouse gas emissions, changes in climate, extreme weather, physical impacts on communities, and societal and economic harm.

Among the climate lawsuit cases currently moving through the courts is a pending Supreme Court case, Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, which could set a precedent for many other similar cases.

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HUGE BLOW TO HOCHUL: Obama-Appointed Federal Judge Strikes Down New York’s $75B “Superfund” Climate Law Fining Fossil Fuel Companies

New York Democrats’ scheme to extract a staggering $75 billion from energy producers has been struck down by a federal judge.

Chief U.S. District Judge Brenda K. Sannes, an Obama appointee, ruled that New York’s so-called Climate Change Superfund Act was preempted by federal law and could not be enforced.

The sweeping law, signed by Democrat Governor Kathy Hochul in December 2024, sought to force oil, natural gas, and coal companies to pay $3 billion annually for 25 years into a state-controlled climate fund.

“With nearly every record rainfall, heatwave, and coastal storm, New Yorkers are increasingly burdened with billions of dollars in health, safety, and environmental consequences due to polluters that have historically harmed our environment,” Governor Hochul said.

“Establishing the Climate Superfund is the latest example of my administration taking action to hold polluters responsible for the damage done to our environment and requiring major investments in infrastructure and other projects critical to protecting our communities and economy,” she added.

Under the law, companies determined by New York regulators to be responsible for more than one billion tons of greenhouse-gas emissions between 2000 and 2024 would have faced strict liability, regardless of whether they violated any law.

The scheme was not limited to activity inside New York. It attempted to calculate emissions connected to fossil-fuel extraction and refining around the world and then send massive “cost recovery demands” to the targeted companies.

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Greenland’s Icecap Grew This Year

Greenland’s icecap is melting away thanks to global warming, at least that is what we are told. According to the EU’s European State of the Climate 2025 Report, the ice sheet lost 139 Gt last year. They say that is equivalent to about 1.5 times the amount of ice stored in all the glaciers in the European Alps, and raised global mean sea level by 0.4 mm. (A gigatonne is one billion tonnes.) Since 1972, losses have amounted to 5,747 Gt. The rate of ice loss has increased by around five times since the 1980s and is expected to continue increasing beyond the end of the century.

These amounts sound terrifying, which is of course the object of the exercise – at least until you realise that at present rates it would take Greenland 27,000 years to melt away.

I am always suspicious when ‘scientists’ present trends since the 1970s, a time when the Earth had gone through three decades of cooling and there were genuine fears among both scientists and world leaders about the return of the Little Ice Age. I am even more suspicious when I discover that official data about the Greenland ice sheet is publicly available back to 1840.

In 2021, a peer-reviewed study calculated the annual changes in the ice sheet mass balance since 1840. (The heavy black line represents the net changes, which is of relevance to this discussion):

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Norway Rejects Climate Orthodoxy’s False Choice, Builds Wealth

Norway’s Minister of Energy Terje Aasland told Reuters that his country will keep developing oil and gas in the Barents Sea irrespective of a European Union (EU) ban on Arctic drilling.

“In today’s geopolitical and security environment… I believe continued activity in the Barents Sea serves both Norwegian and European interests,” said Aasland.

Although not an EU member, Norway is a close ally and Europe’s largest gas supplier, meeting about 30% of the demand across the European Union and Britain. Last year Norwegian gas output ran near record levels, and oil production hit its highest mark since 2009. 

Without new fields, however, official projections show output dropping sharply after 2030. But Aasland intends to hold production and exports near current levels until at least 2035, and he has said that the Arctic is important to Norway remaining a long-term supplier.

The EU currently backs a ban on new Arctic drilling on environmental grounds, while buying the gas that keeps its factories running. Anders Opedal, CEO of Norwegian multinational energy company Equinor, has said that producers of Barents oil and natural gas will find buyers somewhere else if Europe refuses to buy. 

Even Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency (IEA) and a promoter of transitioning away from fossil fuels, has urged the EU to reconsider its opposition to Arctic development for the sake of energy security.

Europe has already suffered economic damage from its “green” pretense. The IEA reports that EU electricity prices for energy-intensive industry averaged more than double American levels in 2025 and were nearly 50% above China’s. A 2024 report on European competitiveness warned that such costs are hollowing out manufacturing.

Here is where the story stops being about the Arctic and becomes about everyone else.

Norway is not a struggling petro-state rationalizing a bad habit. It is among the richest societies ever built, with per capita gross domestic product above $105,000 and a sovereign wealth fund that crossed $2.39 trillion in June. Five and a half million people have converted seabed hydrocarbons into universal healthcare, free universities, and pensions for grandchildren not yet born.

If Norway considers oil and gas indispensable to its economic position, it is unreasonable to demand that poorer countries abandon their own resources. This matters enormously for Africa, South Asia, and other rapidly developing regions. For many African households, unreliable energy can be catastrophic.

Delay of fossil fuel projects costs in ways spreadsheets miss. A gas project blocked by climate posturing means that engineering teams disband, drilling rigs go elsewhere, borrowing costs rise, and the fertilizer plant that would have used the hydrocarbon feedstock never gets built. A decade of compounding benefits is lost to a national balance sheet.

Western proponents of climate orthodoxy declare immoral the ladder their societies climbed to unprecedented prosperity. Every advanced economy industrialized with coal, oil, and gas. Norway is still doing it with a $2 trillion cushion. Norwegian leaders recognize oil and gas are critical to their nation’s future, unlike their counterparts in the EU, Canada, and Australia.

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Federal Judge Blocks New York From Enforcing $75 Billion Climate Superfund Law

A federal judge ruled on Monday that New York cannot enforce a 2024 state law that sought to impose an estimated $75 billion in charges on carbon-emitting companies for allegedly causing climate damage between 2000 and 2018.

Chief U.S. District Judge Brenda Sannes in Syracuse, New York, sided with 22 Republican state attorneys general, as well as industry groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in finding the state measure preempted by federal law. The judge said the Clean Air Act, which gave the federal Environmental Protection Agency authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, did not authorize states to adopt emissions compensation schemes.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the Climate Change Superfund Act into law in December 2024. It required about three dozen covered fossil-fuel companies to pay a combined $3 billion annually for 25 years, or $75 billion in total. The funds would have been earmarked for infrastructure work, including coastal wetlands, stormwater systems, roads, bridges, and responses to extreme weather.

Sannes said enforcing the law risked upsetting the balance of protecting the environment, “a project that necessarily requires national standards and global participation,” and promoting economic growth, energy production, foreign policy interests, and national security.

West Virginia Attorney General John McCuskey led the coalition of states challenging the legislation in a February 2025 lawsuit. The attorneys general said at the time that New York’s law was politically motivated “overreach” that punished traditional energy companies, including West Virginia-based coal and natural gas companies, that now comply with applicable laws. They said payouts from coal, oil, and natural gas producers could wipe out thousands of jobs if the producers were forced to shut down.

“We were the first to challenge this law because we saw it for what it was – a money grab by the elites in New York, who want to punish West Virginians for doing the jobs that enable them to heat their homes and build their cities,” McCuskey said in an Aug. 31 statement.

Hochul’s office is reviewing the decision to determine possible next steps, spokesperson Ken Lovett said.

“Taxpayers shouldn’t have to foot the bill for damages caused by polluters,” he said.

New York was the second U.S. state to establish a superfund requiring major fossil-fuel companies to help finance infrastructure projects such as flood mitigation and coastal protection.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute sued Vermont on Dec. 30 to block that state’s superfund. That case remains pending.

Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Adam Gustafson from the Justice Department’s Energy and Natural Resources Division welcomed Monday’s decision.

“New York’s law would have expropriated $75 billion from energy companies around the world during an energy emergency and in direct defiance of American foreign policy and federal law,” Gustafson said. “We will continue to fight for affordable, reliable energy for all Americans.”

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Rise And Fall Of “Climate Crisis” Info War As Dems Urge Politicians To Avoid Global Warming Talk

The “climate crisis” headlines forced down the throats of the American people only began to emerge when socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and unhinged leftist Sen. Ed Markey introduced the Green New Deal in early 2019. That was the moment when global-warming headlines spiked and the NGO complex ramped up activist networks through protests and an informational war in the press, tricking the public into supporting climate bills intended to solve a made-up crisis.

By March 2019, those climate-crisis headlines had intensified as Democrats desperately tried but failed to pass the Green New Deal.

Then, in 2022, those same headlines spiked again as Sen. Joe Manchin and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer unexpectedly announced the Inflation Reduction Act, reviving much of the climate agenda.

It was all a lie. 

By August 2022, the IRA had passed and President Biden had signed it into law, flooding the Democratic Party’s pet projects with $369 billion.

But those headlines subsequently peaked in late 2022. Democrats moved on after securing their massive funding package, and climate was no longer the party’s main focus. This suggests that the earlier propaganda push was merely an informational war against taxpayers designed to hustle them.

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The Stunning Collapse of the Climate Scam, Documented

For those who have been paying attention, the stunning collapse of the climate scam over the past year has been something to behold.

First there was the COP Flop.

Then the US withdrew from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Then Judith Curry retired her blog, opining that “It’s time to declare victory against climate stupidity and move on.”

Then The Guardian published an article lamenting that less than 5% of UK media outlets have used the recent European heat wave as an excuse to promote Net Zero propaganda.

And now even The New York Times is waving the white flag on the climate Armageddon story…well, kind of.

So, what on earth is happening? How did we go from a world where the climate apocalypse was touted as an existential threat to life on earth and trumpeted on the news every single day to a world where climate change isn’t even on the radar anymore?

Let’s find out.

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MASSIVE VICTORY AGAINST THE CLIMATE CULT! Fifth Circuit SHUTS DOWN Illegal Biden-Era Energy Efficiency Standards for Stoves and Cooktops – Slams DOE for Trying to Bypass the Law!

ANOTHER MAJOR BLOW TO THE RADICAL GREEN AGENDA!

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday delivered another stinging rebuke to the Biden-era Department of Energy’s war on American appliances, setting aside energy efficiency standards for stoves and cooktops.

The court ruled on Tuesday that the Department of Energy (DOE) acted completely illegally when it refused to withdraw a controversial “Direct Final Rule” after multiple red states raised damning objections.

The radical green zealots in Washington have been waging a non-stop war on everyday household appliances. From dishwashers to ceiling fans, bureaucrats inside the Biden regime spent years pushing stringent rules designed to make basic home appliances more expensive, less efficient, and far less reliable.

When CPSC Commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. let the cat out of the bag in 2023 by suggesting a total federal ban on gas stoves, the public pushback was immediate and fierce.

Unable to pass their radical climate tyranny through normal transparent channels, DOE bureaucrats tried an illegal end-run around the American public.

Rather than facing the public in standard notice-and-comment rulemaking, the DOE tried to quietly lock in new efficiency standards using a backdoor mechanism known as a “Direct Final Rule” (DFR).

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