Trump's new energy order puts states' climate laws in the crosshairs of the Department of Justice

ENT

Trump's new energy order puts states' climate laws in the crosshairs of the Department of Justice

2025-04-10 22:11 Last Updated At：22:20

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — A new executive order from President Donald Trump that's part of his effort to invigorate energy production raises the possibility that his Department of Justice will go to court against state climate change laws aimed at slashing planet-warming greenhouse gas pollution from fossil fuels.

Trump’s order, signed Tuesday, comes as U.S. electricity demand ramps up to meet the growth of artificial intelligence and cloud computing applications, as well as federal efforts to expand high-tech manufacturing. It also coincides with “climate superfund” legislation gaining traction in various states.

Trump has declared a “ national energy emergency " and ordered his attorney general to take action against states that may be illegally overreaching their authority in how they regulate energy development.

“American energy dominance is threatened when State and local governments seek to regulate energy beyond their constitutional or statutory authorities,” Trump said in the order.

He said the attorney general should focus on state laws targeting climate change, a broad order that unmistakably puts liberal states in the crosshairs of Trump's Department of Justice.

Michael Gerrard, director of the Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, said it would be an “extraordinarily bold move” for the federal government to go to court to try to overturn a state climate law.

Gerrard said the quickest path for Trump's Department of Justice is to try to join ongoing lawsuits where courts are deciding whether states or cities are exceeding their authority by trying to force the fossil fuel industry to pay for the cost of damages from climate change.

Democratic governors vowed to keep fighting climate change.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom accused Trump of “turning back the clock” on the climate and said his state's efforts to reduce pollution “won’t be derailed by a glorified press release masquerading as an executive order.”

The group Climate Mayors, which includes the mayors of America's biggest cities, said in a statement from its chair, Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, that the federal government is overreaching its authority and ignoring the “enormous costs of continued environmental destruction and the political and social harm of retreating American leadership.”

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, cochairs of the U.S. Climate Alliance, which includes 22 governors, said they “will keep advancing solutions to the climate crisis."

Vermont and New York are currently fighting challenges in federal courts to climate superfund laws passed last year. Trump suggested the laws “extort” payments from energy companies and “threaten American energy dominance and our economic and national security.”

Both are modeled on the 45-year-old federal superfund law, which taxed petroleum and chemical companies to pay to clean up of sites polluted by toxic waste. In similar fashion, the state climate laws are designed to force major fossil fuel companies to pay into state-based funds based on their past greenhouse gas emissions.

Several other Democratic-controlled states, including New Jersey, Massachusetts, Oregon and California, are considering similar measures.

The American Petroleum Institute, which represents the oil and natural gas industries, applauded Trump’s order that it said would “protect American energy from so-called ‘climate superfunds.’”

“Directing the Department of Justice to address this state overreach will help restore the rule of law and ensure activist-driven campaigns do not stand in the way of ensuring the nation has access to an affordable and reliable energy supply," it said.

The American Petroleum Institute, along with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, filed the lawsuit against Vermont. The lawsuit against New York was filed by West Virginia, along with several coal, gas and oil interests and 21 other mostly Republican-led states, including Texas, Ohio and Georgia.

Make Polluters Pay, a coalition of consumer and anti-fossil fuel groups, vowed to fight Trump's order and accused fossil fuel billionaires of convincing Trump to launch an assault on states.

The order, it said, demonstrates the “corporate capture of government” and “weaponizes the Justice Department against states that dare to make polluters pay for climate damage.”

Separately, the Department of Justice could join lawsuits in defense of fossil fuel industries being sued, Gerrard said.

Those lawsuits include ones filed by Honolulu, Hawaii, and dozens of cities and states seeking billions of dollars in damages from things like wildfires, rising sea levels and severe storms.

In the last three months, the U.S. Supreme Court has declined to get involved in a couple climate-themed lawsuits.

One was brought by oil and gas companies asking it to block Honolulu's lawsuit. Another was brought by Alabama and Republican attorneys general in 18 other states aimed at blocking lawsuits against the oil and gas industry from Democratic-led states, including California, Connecticut, Minnesota, New Jersey and Rhode Island.

Trump’s order set off talk in state Capitols around the U.S.

That includes Pennsylvania, where Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro is contesting a court challenge to a regulation that would make it the first major fossil fuel-producing state to force power plant owners pay for greenhouse gas emissions.

John Quigley, a former Pennsylvania environmental protection secretary and a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, wondered if the Department of Justice would begin challenging all sorts of state water and air pollution laws.

“This kind of an order knows no bounds," Quigley said. "It's hard to say where this could end up.”

Associated Press reporter Sophie Austin in Sacramento, California, contributed to this report. Follow Marc Levy on X at: https://x.com/timelywriter

Retrial of Karen Read begins in killing of Boston police officer boyfriend

2025-04-22 22:15 Last Updated At：22:20

The second murder trial began Tuesday for Karen Read, who is accused of causing the death of her Boston police officer boyfriend but whose supporters contend is being framed for a murder she didn’t commit.

Prosecutors say Read backed her SUV into John O’Keefe after dropping him off at a party and returned hours later to find him dead. Defense attorneys say she was a victim of a conspiracy involving the police and they plan, as they did in the first trial, to offer evidence pointing to the real killer.

Nine men and nine women were chosen to serve as the 12 jurors and six alternates.

Read has been charged with second-degree murder, manslaughter and leaving the scene. A mistrial was declared last year after jurors said they were at an impasse. The second trial will look much like the first, with the same judge, many of the same witnesses and several of the prominent defense attorneys.

Read had worked as a financial analyst and a Bentley College adjunct professor before being charged in the death of O’Keefe, who was 46 when he died. The 16-year police veteran was found unresponsive outside the home of a fellow Boston police officer.

After a night out drinking, prosecutors say Read, who is 45, dropped O’Keefe at the house party just after midnight. As she made a three-point turn, prosecutors say, she struck O’Keefe before driving away. She returned hours later to find him in a snowbank.

As at the first trial, prosecutors will try to convince jurors that Read’s actions were intentional. They are expected to call witnesses who will describe how the couple's relationship had begun to sour before O'Keefe's death, including his brother and sister-in-law, who testified that Read told her the couple had argued in Aruba after she caught O’Keefe kissing another woman.

The defense is expected to portray the investigation into O’Keefe’s death as shoddy and undermined by the close relationship investigators had with the police officers and other law enforcement agents who were at the house party.

Among the key witnesses they will call is former State Trooper Michael Proctor, who led the investigation but has since been fired after a disciplinary board found he sent sexist and crude texts about Read to his family and colleagues. He is also on the prosecution's witness list.

Proctor’s testimony was a key moment during the first trial, when the defense suggested his texts about Read and the case showed he was biased and had singled her out early in the investigation, ignoring other potential suspects.

They also are expected to suggest Read was framed, saying O’Keefe was actually killed inside the home during a fight with another partygoer and then dragged outside. In the first trial, defense attorneys suggested investigators focused on Read because she was a “convenient outsider” who saved them from having to consider law enforcement officers as suspects.

Ahead of the second trial, the two sides sparred over whether Read's lawyers will be allowed to argue that someone else killed O'Keefe. Judge Beverly Cannone ruled Monday that attorneys can't mention potential third-party culprits in their opening statements but will be allowed to develop evidence against Brian Albert, a retired police officer who owned the Canton home, and his friend Brian Higgins. Lawyers cannot implicate Albert's nephew, Colin Albert, the judge said.

A town-commissioned audit of the Canton Police Department released March 30 found several mistakes with the investigation but no evidence of a cover-up. It suggested that first responders should have photographed O'Keefe where he was found before he was moved and that all interviews of “critical witnesses” should have been done at the department after O'Keefe was taken to a hospital.

Soon after the mistrial, Read's lawyers set out to get the main charges dropped.

They argued Judge Cannone declared a mistrial without polling the jurors to confirm their conclusions. Defense attorney Martin Weinberg said five jurors indicated after the trial that they were only deadlocked on the manslaughter count and had unanimously agreed that she wasn’t guilty of second-degree murder and leaving the scene, but that they hadn’t told the judge.

The defense said that because jurors had agreed Read wasn't guilty of murder and leaving the scene, retrying her on those counts would amount to double jeopardy. But Cannone rejected that argument, as did the state's highest court, a federal court judge, and an appeals court.

Prosecutors had urged Cannone to dismiss the double jeopardy claim, saying it amounted to "hearsay, conjecture and legally inappropriate reliance as to the substance of jury deliberations.” Assistant District Attorney Adam Lally argued that the jurors never indicated they had reached a verdict on any of the charges and that the defense had ample opportunity to object to the mistrial declaration.

The second trial will likely look similar to the first. It will be held in the same courthouse before the same judge, and dozens of Read's passionate supporters are again expected to rally outside. The charges, primary defense lawyers and many of the nearly 200 witnesses will also be the same.

The biggest difference will be the lead prosecutor, Hank Brennan. A former prosecutor and defense attorney who was brought in as a special prosecutor after the mistrial, Brennan has represented several prominent clients, including notorious Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger, and experts think he might be more forceful than Lally was in arguing the case.

Prosecutors are likely to rely on eyewitnesses from the scene in the early days of the trial, counting on testimony from police officers and firefighters who recalled Read making comments that implicated her in the killing.

They also are likely to introduce evidence of a broken taillight on Read’s SUV that prosecutors argue was damaged when she hit O’Keefe and possible DNA from O’Keefe found on her vehicle.

The defense’s goal is to raise doubts about the prosecution case and plant the seed that she was framed. They are expected to introduce evidence of a sloppy police investigation, including the failure to search the house and mistakes in the police log.

They also are expected to suggest that a hair found on the taillight was planted and the police investigation was marred by a conflict of interest.