On Tuesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at “protecting” American energy from “state overreach.” The move, some energy experts say, is a legally dubious federal overstep designed to undermine the rights of states and local authorities to combat climate change.
The order claims “many States have enacted, or are in the process of enacting, burdensome and ideologically motivated ‘climate change’ or energy policies that threaten American energy dominance and our economic and national security.”
It specifically points to Blue-state policies like Vermont’s Superfund rules, which require fossil fuel companies to pay for damage to the climate, and California’s cap-and-trade program as examples of efforts to “dictate national energy policy.” In Section 2 of the order, Trump directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to identify state laws or policies “burdening” access to “domestic energy resources that “are or may be…unconstitutional, preempted by Federal law, or otherwise unenforceable.”
What might some of those state laws be? According to the executive order, that could include any effort to address “climate change,” support “environmental justice,” or reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions, among others.
That’s not the end of it. The order also directs the attorney general to “expeditiously” take action to “stop the enforcement of State laws and continuation of civil actions” determined to be illegal.
It’s unclear whether this will stand up in court. Michael Gerrard, the faculty director of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, told E&E News that the executive order is “toothless” and that Trump “has no authority on his own to nullify state laws.” Journalist David Roberts, who runs the clean energy newsletter Volts called the order on Bluesky, “wildly, unambiguously unconstitutional” and “dictator shit.”
Others on social media noted the president’s contradiction of traditionally conservative values. As climate reporter and Drilled podcast host Amy Westervelt put it on Bluesky, “States rights! But only when the states agree with us[.]”Climate scientist and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) contributing author Zeke Hausfather posted, “So much for federalism…” And Tulane environmental studies professor Joshua Basseches wrote, “Federal overreach has historically been a crusade of the Right, but these times are wild and different.”
This new White House executive order says that the US Attorney General is going to prevent states from implementing democratically passed laws regarding climate change and clean energy. It scarcely needs stating at this point that this is wildly, unambiguously unconstitutional. Dictator shit.
A lot of these things that Elon Musk is ripping up, destroying the lives of ordinary people because the science funding or the economic program they depend on is going away, happened because of the legislative branch.
The broad strokes of what you’re saying I’ll agree with. The dominating force of money in politics has demolished most of congress’s ability to ever do anything that might give decent jobs or decent health care to the American people. But the problem is the money, not just the idea of having a congress in the first place.