The U.S. Justice Department asked a judge last week to rule in its favor in an ongoing lawsuit over Vermont’s law that requires polluters to pay for their carbon emissions, called the Climate Superfund Act.
Attorneys from the department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division filed a motion for summary judgment on the lawsuit it first brought in May in U.S. District Court in Burlington.
In August, the state and a pair of intervening nonprofits, the Conservation Law Foundation and the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont, asked the judge to dismiss the lawsuit.
“The Court should deny the motions to dismiss, grant the United States’ motion for summary judgment, declare the Superfund Act unconstitutional and unenforceable, and permanently enjoin Defendants from taking any actions to implement or enforce it,” Riley Walters, counsel to an acting assistant attorney general, wrote in the motion.
Vermont’s Attorney General’s Office told VtDigger that it was reviewing the filings and would respond by Nov. 17.
“We disagree with the President’s assessment of the case, as Vermont’s climate superfund law complies with federal law and the Constitution,” Attorney General Charity Clark’s office said in an emailed statement. “We look forward to defending Vermont in Court.”
The Climate Superfund Act is a first-of-its-kind legislation that asks oil and gas corporations like British Petroleum, Chevron and Exxon Mobil, none of which have refineries or operations in the state, to pay for their greenhouse gas emissions between 1995 and 2024. Those emissions warmed the atmosphere and increased the frequency and severity of weather events like heat waves and floods. Such floods inundated Vermont in 2023 and 2024, and again in July 2025.
The Justice Department’s lawsuit called the climate action “unconstitutional.” Another lawsuit also targeted New York, which passed the nation’s second climate superfund law in December, and the Justice Department preemptively filed suit against Hawaii and Michigan to prevent those states from passing such laws. The lawsuits came after an executive order seeking to protect U.S. fossil energy companies from what President Donald Trump called state overreach.
“Vermont clearly has the right to raise funds and protect the well-being of its people,” said Grace Oedel, executive director of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont. “NOFA-VT remains committed to defending this law, which will fund key adaptations for our agricultural state as we face the climate crisis. We know what’s behind the worsening extreme weather affecting our farmers, and it’s fair for fossil fuel companies to bear some of the cost of climate adaptation in Vermont.”
The Justice Department stated in a news release that “Vermont is defying federal law… so it can punish disfavored businesses for ill-defined harms, without regard to the real harm to our federal system and the Nation’s energy needs.”
But research, called attribution science, increasingly shows the links between specific fossil fuel emitters and specific extreme weather events and the specific damages from that event. A new study recently published in the scientific journal Nature shows that climate change made more than 200 heat waves between 2000 and 2023 more likely and more intense, and that the emissions of 180 fossil fuel and cement producers substantially contributed to those heat waves.
The motion marks another swipe from the Trump administration at Vermont’s climate programs, following the loss of more than $62 million in federal solar funding the administration cut in August. The administration has also recently cut climate research funding, eliminated scientific studies from federal websites and rolled back federal support for the buildout of renewable energy and the sales of electric vehicles.
The motion argues that “the U.S. constitution and a century of precedent require that federal law govern interstate and global air pollution.” But the White House recently stopped following accepted climate science and public health protections that called for monitoring such pollution.
In July, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed rescinding the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which shows greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and should therefore be regulated under the Clean Air Act. Then on Friday, the White House proposed ending a requirement for industrial facilities like power plants and petrochemical companies to report their emissions under the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program.
This story was republished with permission from VtDigger, which offers its reporting at no cost to local news organizations through its Community News Sharing Project. To learn more, visit vtdigger.org/community-news-sharing-project.