A federal judge in New York faced a case in which the state tried to sue fossil-fuel companies for alleged damages caused by CO2 emissions from the oil and gas they produce. The judge correctly tossed New York’s $75 billion climate “superfund” scheme that sought to force those companies to pay reparations. Good. States have no business inventing their own nationwide emissions taxes or reparations rackets. But the real discussion is still missing two fatal points that should kill every one of these lawsuits on sight.
First, there is simply no way to prove a direct causal line from any individual company’s production of oil or gas to specific “damages” in New York or anywhere else. We still cannot reliably separate man-made emissions from the natural warming that has been underway for centuries. Assigning precise liability percentages based on estimated global emissions since 2000 is pure political accounting, not science or law.
Second—and this is the show-stopper—are these states seriously claiming that fossil-fuel companies should not exist and that we should stop using oil and gas? Of course not. They know full well that without these fuels the modern economy collapses. Yet they still demand the companies pay massive penalties for producing the very energy the states cannot live without. That is having it both ways: demanding the product while treating its lawful production as a tort. It is economic illiteracy dressed up as moral virtue, and it turns every such lawsuit into an exercise in extortion rather than justice. Even if such a scheme were accepted, since everyone will still demand fossil fuels, the penalties and the accompanying legal fees would simply be built into the price of oil and gasoline, making energy far more expensive for no actual benefit.
Property rights and basic causation still matter. Until plaintiffs can show direct, measurable harm from a specific actor—and stop pretending they can ban the product while relying on it—these climate damage suits remain non-starters.
The core problem is lack of accountability for filing such bogus lawsuits. My little fantasy system would call these lawsuits perjury and rebound on the filer for whatever they were trying to collect, $75 billion in this case, with appropriate consequences for not paying it. It's pure fantasy and never going to happen, but there needs to be some way to hold these idiots accountable for filing such bogus nonsense.