DOJ Sues States Over Climate Laws, Lawsuits

Current conditions: A month out from the start of hurricane season, the North Atlantic Ocean is about 2 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than it was this time last year • Passenger ferry crossings between New Zealand’s North and South Island remain suspended through Friday afternoon due to a severe windstorm • Thunderstorms are expected to settle over Louisville, Kentucky, this afternoon, leading to a potentially wet Kentucky Derby on Saturday at Churchill Downs.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump admin sues states over attempts to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for climate damages

The Justice Department filed lawsuits this week against Hawaii, Michigan, New York, and Vermont to block the states’ climate-motivated lawsuits against fossil fuel companies. The government’s lawsuit against Hawaii and Michigan, filed on Wednesday, seeks to block the states from suing major oil and gas companies over alleged climate damages, which the DOJ argues obstructs the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. On Thursday, the DOJ also filed suit against New York and Vermont over their climate superfund laws, which would require fossil fuel companies to pay for damages caused by climate change, calling it a “transparent monetary-extraction scheme.” Attorney General Pamela Bondi argued all four laws are “burdensome and ideologically motivated” and “threaten American energy independence and our country’s economic and national security.”

2. House Natural Resources Committee releases reconciliation package, complete with NEPA revenue-sharing reform

The House Natural Resources Committee released its portion of Republicans’ budget package on Thursday evening. The proposal goes to markup next week, and is subject to change, but includes several significant measures across its 96 pages. Some include:

• One mandating quarterly onshore oil and gas lease sales and opening “at least four sales in the coastal plain of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge within the next 10 years, and [resuming] lease sales in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska,” per Bloomberg. It also reinstates mining leases next to Minnesota’s popular Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
• Another to bring “oil and gas royalties to pre-Inflation Reduction Act rates,” per E&E News.
• Significantly, the package also proposes a revenue-sharing approach to National Environmental Policy Act reviews, in which project sponsors can pay a fee of 125% of the cost of a review to receive an expedited permit — within a year for an environmental impact statement and within six months for an environmental assessment. Thomas Hochman estimated on Twitter that it would amount to about $3 to $5 million for an EIS and $200,000 or so for an EA. “For most major projects, that’s pocket change.”
• The Natural Resources Committee expects its entire package, including the new oil, gas, and coal leasing proposals, to generate $15 billion of the desired $2 trillion in deficit reductions across the government to offset Trump’s tax cuts.

In a statement slamming the bill, Lydia Weiss, the senior director of government relations at The Wilderness Society, said the proposals in sum will “fund tax cuts for the rich while doing nothing to help the average American taxpayer.” You can read the full contents of the bill here.

3. BLM advances solar permitting

The Bureau of Land Management has approved a new solar project in Yuma County, Arizona, after a temporary halt on permitting. The move “appears to be the first utility-scale solar facility on federal acreage approved by the Trump administration,” my colleague Jael Holzman writes in The Fight. The BLM additionally released a draft environmental review of a separate solar project, also in Arizona.

As Jael notes, “The fact BLM is willing to admit other solar projects could advance later on is significant after the sputtering seen in the earliest days of the Trump administration.” Her caveat, however, is that it’s unclear if this means solar permitting is a beneficiary of the president’s “energy dominance” agenda, or if “at any moment, a news cycle or disgruntled legislator could steal the president’s ear and make him angry at solar power.”

4. Swiss Re estimates there’s a 1-in-10 chance insured losses in the U.S. will pass $300 billion in 2025

A view of Punta Gorda, Florida, in 2024 after Hurricane Milton.Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The major reinsurance company Swiss Re has released a lengthy report about the upward trend of insured losses in the United States. Among its findings:

• Insured losses from natural catastrophes are expected to approach $145 billion in 2025, up from $137 billion in 2024.
• Swiss Re’s modeling also predicts that the U.S. faces a one in 10 chance of total insured losses reaching $300 billion or more this year.
• The U.S. accounted for nearly 80% of global insured losses caused by natural disasters last year (most of those were in Florida, Texas, California, Louisiana, and Colorado).
• If you’re looking for a place to live, Swiss Re observes a strong correlation between catastrophe losses per policy and homeowner insurance prices at the state level. Louisiana and Florida have the highest average insurance costs; “Utah, Oregon, Nevada, and Idaho have lowest insurance prices, partly because of lowest recorded natural catastrophe losses.”

Read more of Swiss Re’s findings in the report here.

5. National Science Foundation told to freeze grants indefinitely

The Trump administration has ordered the National Science Foundation to stop awarding new grants or supplying funds for existing grants “until further notice,” according to an email reviewed by Nature. Before the funding freeze, NSF leadership had recently directed its staffers to return grant proposals concerning “topics or activities” not “in alignment with agency priorities” to their applicants.

In the past two weeks, the NSF has terminated $739 million worth of grants, Nature adds. As one NSF staffer told the publication, the Trump administration is “butchering the gold standard merit review process that was established at NSF over decades.” Colin Carlson, who is researching pandemic-causing viruses at Yale University with a team of 50 funded by a $12.5 million NSF grant, said the freeze will “destroy people’s labs.” The NSF has also contributed enormously to climate science over the years, including funding the first major ice core drilling project in Greenland in 1980 to study historical carbon dioxide data, and more recently, using advanced climate modeling to predict extreme weather events better.

THE KICKER

“Saying that the U.S. is striving for energy dominance except in the clean energy sector is like opening a steakhouse and forgetting the meat.” —Former Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, writing for Heatmap about why real energy dominance requires preserving the IRA.