Cheer this latest strike against NY pols climate posturing

Judicial rulings against New York’s bogus Climate Superfund law marks yet another well-deserved blow to politicians’ global-warming posturing.The 2024 legislation sought to swipe a whopping $75 billion from fossil-fuel companies it deemed responsible for more than a billion tons of greenhouse-gas emission since 2000.Or as Robert S.Smith, a former top state judge, put it, lawmakers “needed some money — $75 billion, to be exact — for ‘comprehensive adaptation to the effects of climate change in New York’” and thought they had “a good way” to get it: Just take it.That was patently unconstitutional for numerous reasons, starting with the fact that the federal government oversees environmental regulation under the Clean Air Act, not states.And the public would’ve paid in the end, as those companies passed the new costs on to consumers.

But passing the Superfund law let Democratic lawmakers pander to climate extremists by slapping Big Bad Oil, so they saw it as a win-win.Note that Judge P.Kevin Castel struck down that law just days after another federal jurist, Obama appointee Brenda Sannes, declared the “unusual and sweeping statute” wholly unenforceable.Their rulings add to climate crazies’ mounting courtroom losses: In 2021, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals struck down New York City’s wild bid to collect damages for climate change.And on Tuesday, a federal judge dismissed still another nutty lawsuit, filed by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, claiming oil companies created a cartel that slowed the development of renewable energy.How fitting that such crazy laws, and lawsuits, grow out of a movement that’s itself based on insanity: the idea, essentially, that man-made global warming will destroy the world in just a few years unless we trash the economy and live like cavemen.In New York, that’s produced a climate agenda that’s done nothing to mitigate climate change but only driven energy costs through the roof and boosted th...