President Trump orders DOJ to assist Attorneys General in fight against interstate climate laws

President Donald J. Trump last week ordered the DOJ to work with Attorneys General in their ongoing fight against New York's "superfund law" which fines out-of-state coal companies billions for violating climate protection policies.

WASHINGTON, D.C. An Executive Order from the Trump administration directs the Department of Justice to work with Attorneys General fighting against state laws which target other states for their greenhouse gas emissions.

President Trump signed the order on Tuesday last week, under which his Attorney General is to take legal action against states which his administration alleges may be overreaching their authority to regulate energy production and development.

This comes shortly after Trump declared a “national energy emergency” as domestic energy demand is rapidly growing across the nation. In West Virginia, recent legislation pushed for by Governor Patrick Morrisey would establish certified microgrid districts, independent from the states broader electric grid, with the expressed purpose of generating enough energy to power new data centers. The ability to process and store tremendous amounts of data is becoming increasingly necessary in the rising age of artificial intelligence, but those data centers require an equally tremendous amount of energy to operate. The “microgrids bill,” or House Bill 2014, received its final approval by lawmakers on Saturday and goes now to Governor Morrisey’s desk.

The President’s recent Executive Order is part of a collection of four (so far) which West Virginia Attorney General J.B. McCuskey says are all an effort to pull back on what he described as “federal overreach” by previous administrations. On “What’s Your Opinion” Thursday, the Attorney General described a recent visit to Washington D.C., in which he met with the President and received an overwhelming amount of support for the Mountain State’s coal-based energy market.

“His initial Executive Order is designed to dis-enable the federal government from discriminating against coal as a power source, which is a really, really powerful way to undo an enormous amount of federal overreach,” he said.

“Because that is truly the problem, is that the federal government has said, ‘we need electricity, but we’re not going to allow the market to necessarily determine what’s the best fuel source,’ and they did that by discriminating in favor of other energy sources and at the expense of the coal industry. The second thing that was really interesting is – you know we’ve talked about – I’m leading a coalition of, I think, 26 other states against New York’s ‘superfund law,’ which fines our coal companies here somewhere in the neighborhood of $750 billion, and the President specifically mentioned our lawsuit, and his fourth executive order is directing the Department of Justice to work with us to ensure that we win this lawsuit.”

McCuskey is spearheading a coalition of 22 other states, as well as different trade associations and fossil fuel industry groups, in a lawsuit against New York for its Climate Change Superfund Act, claiming the Act violates the Commerce Clause as well as other constitutional provisions. The “superfund law” imposes penalties on fossil fuel companies across state borders, with the collected funds being allocated to climate adaptation projects like carbon capture technology and net carbon neutrality efforts.

West Virginia and the rest of the nearly two dozen coal-producing states all argue that the law not only violates due process and equal protection but also negatively impacts local economies. That impact would be felt particularly hard in West Virginia, with coal accounting for 86% of the state’s total energy net generation and over half of the state’s total export product.

McCuskey says the nation needs to be generating more than twice the amount of energy as it currently is. He says coal is the “fastest, easiest and least expensive way” to meet that massive demand, and to receive the direct backing of the President, he says, was an invigorating moment.

“To go to the White House and have the President of the United States, for the first time in a very long time, look the coal community in the eye and say, ‘I respect you, I respect what you do and I understand the amount of pride that you take in this enormously important industry; and I’m going to do everything I can to make sure that coal is part of, if not the largest part of America’s energy grid,’ it gives you the motivation to come back home and keep fighting for this stuff, if that makes sense,” he said.

He says the Executive Orders rescind years of harmful policies that stifled the coal industry and left our country’s energy grid vulnerable. The orders will allow for a large-scale re-opening of coal-fired power plants, McCuskey saying the federal support clears the way for coal to be mined and used in this country.

PHOTO | C-SPAN