Last December, Townhall reported how climate change activists, having failed to pass legislation, were looking to criminalize climate change and take the fight into the courts. And not just the criminal courts.
Rep. Harriet Hageman of Wyoming is sounding the alarm that these activists are also trying to sue their way into taxing Americans in the name of "fighting climate change." She's introduced a Stop Climate Shakedowns Act to prevent this activist grift.
Activists can't win in Congress, so they're suing their way to a tax hike on every American family. My Stop Climate Shakedowns Act ends this scheme. pic.twitter.com/o33TyPXkbp
— Rep. Harriet Hageman (@RepHageman) July 30, 2026
"It is the Stop the Climate Shakedowns Act, and what this has to do with is there are many communities and states around the country that have ... filed lawsuits against our energy companies claiming that they are responsible for climate change and the impacts of climate change, and this is an effort to try, really, it's another way of taxation, is really what these communities are doing," Hageman said.
"So they've either adopted superfund laws claiming that producing energy has caused climate change and so those energy producers should be responsible for paying billions upon billions upon billions of dollars in fines," she continued, "and then on the other hand, they're just flat-out suing."
"The city of Boulder, Colorado, has a lawsuit pending in front of the United States Supreme Court right now against Suncorp. So the purpose of my legislation, and I filed this in conjunction with Senator Ted Cruz, is to stop these lawsuits in their tracks," Hageman said.
"These Boulder and the radical Left and the radical environmentalists, the activists, they cannot get, Congress and their state legislatures are not adopting things such as cap and trade or carbon taxes or the things that they want," she added. "So this is their way of generating revenue. This is just another tax that they're attempting to impose. It's going to go against the oil and gas companies, the coal companies, the mineral producers, but in reality the consumers are the ones that ultimately are going to suffer dramatically because it's going to make the cost of everything absolutely skyrocket if they were ever successful in one of these cases.
If this passes you will be depriving the good people of Boulder Colorado the ability to single-handedly decide global energy policy. I won't stand for it. https://t.co/mwkzt2nzhk
— Jarvis (@jarvis_best) July 30, 2026
This is exactly what they're trying to do. They want to end reliable, affordable energy and reduce our quality of life. That is the goal of the climate activist crowd. They do not want clean and abundant energy. They want to control where we live, how we live, when and where we travel, and do it all in the name of climate change.