Vermont’s Big Oil shakedown should meet a similar fate.
Another (BIG) one bites the dust. New York, like Vermont, passed a Climate Superfund law back in 2024 in hopes of making “Big Oil pay” for damage these doom-and-gloomers allege is caused by our burning fossil fuels to survive winter, do our jobs, transport ourselves from place to place, have a modern economy, etcetera. Well, in what’s not a shocker to anyone paying attention. A federal judge – and this part is a bit of a shocker – appointed by Barack Obama shot down New York’s claim, ruling the state – any state – does not have jurisdiction in this arena. It is the federal government’s purview under the Clean Air Act. End of story.
Why is this not a shocker? Because, as we have reported here before at BTL, similar lawsuits brought by states and municipalities around the country have pretty much all met the same fate. New Jersey tried it; failed. New York City and San Francisco jumped in as one would expect; zip. Baltimore and Annapolis in Maryland tried it; nope. Charleston, South Carolina; nuh uh. You see the pattern here.
Ergo, only an idiot (or, perhaps, a supermajority of idiots) would bet millions of dollars – your tax dollars in this case — in the forlorn hope that this legal shakedown pays off. As such, on the first day of the 2027 legislative session, the new legislature (with hopefully a bunch of new legislators) should repeal Act 122, because spending more and more money on this “green” going-nowhere vanity project is the fiscal equivalent of dumping it all down the big round hole in the outhouse. [Related: Vermont’s Dumb (and Unconstitutional) Bill to Fine Big Oil for “Emissions”]
The original appropriation in Act 122, passed in 2024, gave $300,000 to the Agency of Natural Resources to hire an employee fully dedicated to this nonsense and, “costs associated with providing administrative, technical, and legal support in carrying out the requirements of this act and the Program; hiring consultants and experts; and for other necessary costs and expenses.” In other words, what Tammany Hall would call spreading around a little “honest graft.”
Another $300,000 was tossed the Treasurer’s way for “the purposes of hiring consultants or third-party services to assist in the completion of the assessment.” The “assessment” in this case means coming up with a creative goulash of phony numbers and fake science that results in an equation equaling the desired level of ransom to be presented in the note to Big Oil. New York’s was a cool $75 billion over 25 years. Pretty round number for a “scientific” conclusion. Have you heard the joke about the guy interviewing accountants who asks one question: what’s two plus two? The correct answer: what do you want it to be? That’s what this is, but not funny.
But it turns out that concocting a loaf of baloney this big – I’m going to steal a line from NFIB’s brief on this, “…mak[ing] complex determinations based on untested theories about how to attribute the amount of GHG emissions and related damage to each assessable company” – is a level of imaginative mathematics that doesn’t come so cheap. In 2025, ANR and the Treasurer’s office came back with hats in hand and a sob story that they would need another $1.5 million of your hard-earned tax dollars to pay off these consultants. They only got another $350,000, but you know where this is going….
And this is just the tip of the iceberg because, as New York was sued, so is Vermont being sued, and, yes, you, dear taxpayer, are paying for the legal defense of this indefensible law through the office of the Vermont Attorney General. The case is United States v. Vermont, and it is costing you… unknown. Because this is where any semblance of transparency ends. Some undisclosed chunk of the AG’s roughly $17 million annual budget is being wasted on this boondoggle, but we don’t know how much, and AG Charity Clark (D-VT) ain’t sayin’. But best guesstimates put it in the millions, especially if the legal fight ends up being dragged out over many years through endless, useless appeals.
Back in March, the federal court in Rutland heard a motion to dismiss Vermont’s case. The presiding Judge, Mary Kay Lanthier, said she would issue a ruling “as quickly as we can.” Which, five months later, does not seem particularly quick. Hopefully the New York ruling, along with all the others mentioned here, will spark some action, and Judge Lanthier will do us all a favor and kill this thing before it costs Vermonters any more money. Barring that, repeal Act 122. Just like blowing millions on electric buses that don’t work (and explode), this is another ideologically driven, tilting-at-windmills (figuratively and literally) waste of our money that neither we as taxpayers nor our unaffordable state government can afford.
