Rep. Harriet Hageman (R., Wyo.) wants Congress to follow — and stop — the money that has been flowing to liberal states that are trying to sue American energy companies via what she described as “legal nonstarters.”
During an interview with the Washington Reporter, Hageman made the case for her Stop Climate Shakedowns Act of 2026, which she said is necessary because blue cities and municipalities have been trying to sue oil companies, like BP and Chevron, using an ex post facto punishment.
“Boulder, the City of New York, Massachusetts, and these other states, they’re looking around saying, ‘how do we generate more tax revenue when our legislatures won’t allow us to do this? I know. Let’s sue these companies on a theory of nuisance,’” she explained. “Well, you’re absolutely correct. These are not only legally suspect, but they’re absolutely legally bankrupt. These are ex post facto laws that violate Article I of the Constitution.”
Hageman, a lawyer herself, explained why these attempted lawsuits are both illegal and need to be stopped by legislation like what she is proposing. “Every one of these companies that has been producing oil and gas and coal and uranium and other rare constituents, every one of them is doing so pursuant to permits that they receive from the state and federal government. So, how do you then turn around and say, ‘you’re liable for doing what you’re entirely legally entitled to do’?”
“That’s the very foundation of why these cases are so illegal,” she added. “They are legal nonstarters, because if you are Chevron and you produced oil in the Gulf of America, you had a permit to do that, you had to meet the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, you had to meet certain requirements about building your pipelines and all of that, but once you meet those requirements, then you receive a little piece of paper that says ‘go have at it, go ahead and produce the oil, go ahead and produce the gas.’ That document, that process, is what essentially gives you immunity from these kinds of lawsuits. It’s saying ‘yes, you’re entitled to drive that car,’ then if you’re entitled to drive the car, and you’re given the permission by the state to do that, then another town down the road, or another state down the road, doesn’t get to come in and say, ‘no, we’re going to take away your right to drive that car.’ That’s really what this is about.”
The reason why Hageman thinks that blue cities and states are trying to extract millions of dollars via these lawsuits is because they need to offset failed policies by Democrats in their state legislatures — who know that they can’t pass outright taxes on oil companies.
“The case that is before the United States Supreme Court is the City of Boulder case, and the City of Boulder is a city that’s run by radical Democrats, and they’ve got this idea that in order to address climate change and global warming, they’re going to sue Chevron and BP and other fossil fuel companies for causing this situation that they claim is destroying the planet,” she said. “Well, first of all, their science is absolutely wrong. So, if this were ever to go to trial, I am very confident that the oil and gas companies, the energy companies, would prevail because much of the global warming and climate change hysteria is based upon cooking the books; that’s been established even in the last couple of weeks, when it was exposed that the UN has had a report since 2021 demonstrating that their dire predictions are absolutely unrealistic, that they are not going to happen, and that they need to dramatically pull back this idea that we’re going to lose all of our polar ice caps by 2040 and all the other nonsense that they’ve been spewing.”
But Boulder isn’t alone in trying to leverage these lawsuits. “The Colorado legislature is not going to pass a cap and trade, they’re not going to pass carbon taxes, because much of the revenue in their coffers is from Weld County, and it’s from oil and gas production,” she said. “Same with New Mexico; New Mexico is run by a pretty radical leftist governor, who is pretty anti-fossil fuel, but the number one source of revenue for the state of New Mexico is oil and gas, so they’re not going to impose a carbon tax or a cap and trade on their oil and gas industry, and we’re not going to do it in Congress.”
Hageman explained that for these jurisdictions, it is all about money. “What this really is, is that these are these are areas of the country that are run typically by Democrats and have been for a long time, and they’re running out of other people’s money,” she said. “They need to find another revenue source. That’s what this is really about, is trying to find a way to implement a tax through litigation that they cannot get through their state legislatures or through Congress.”
Hageman, who is the odds-on favorite to be Wyoming’s next U.S. Senator, has tackled American energy policy from a variety of different lenses during her time in Congress. Perhaps surprisingly, she said that she is “optimistic” that she won’t have to wait to be in the Senate for Congress to get permitting done.
“I actually am optimistic” about its odds, she said. “The SPEED Act has gone through the House; it came out of the Natural Resources Committee. It made it through the House, and it’s sitting in the Senate. It is a bipartisan bill. The SPEED Act and the reforms that we have done are project agnostic, meaning that if there is a wind farm or a solar farm or a hydrogen project that could go forward, then have at. This this reform would apply to you. You would be able to take advantage of the same reforms and modernization that we’re doing. As long as we will continue to focus on this being project agnostic, I think that we can get the Democrats that we need, because there are many Democrats who also understand that we need this permitting reform.”
But, she does not think that Democrats will join her in passing the Stop Climate Shakedowns Ac.
“They’re too beholden to the environmental activists,” she explained. “Global warming and climate change is their religion, and it’s going to take an awful lot to dislodge that from their psyches. I think it’s telling that the UN, for 25 years, has been screaming at the top of its lungs that we’re all going to die a horrible death by 2020, unless we stop all fossil fuels and return ourselves to the Dark Ages; that’s what they’ve been screaming. And then in 2021, they have a report that they issued. It says, ‘all that stuff that we’ve been saying, none of that’s true. We really have gotten a little bit out ahead of our skis. It’s not as bad as we thought it was.’”
Another bill that she introduced, the Protect USA Act, would push back against regulations that many in the Trump administration oppose, like the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD).
But, Hageman also wants to “expose[]” how American adversaries are exploiting America’s legal system and higher education system to creates wedges based on energy policy. Some foreigners, like Hansörg Wyss, and some adversarial nations, have been linked to extensive funding of anti-energy groups in America.
Hageman wants that “exposed.” What she wants, in the space, is to make sure that “more people understand that that is just another one of the tools that they have in their toolbox to attempt to undermine American sovereignty and our strength and power on the world stage, and it speaks volumes that these countries are using that kind of a wedge in order to cause damage to the United States of America.”
“If people take a step back and understand the significance of that, they can again realize and recognize how the climate agenda has been hijacked, number one, again to impose taxes through the court system, like we were talking about a few moments ago with the Boulder and Massachusetts lawsuits, but also how to undermine us strategically in terms of sowing a lot of internal unrest on our college campuses and elsewhere, as well as undermining our ability to remain strong by producing our own domestic energy,” she added.
While Hageman has major problems with American adversaries undermining American energy, she has been thrilled at what she’s seen from the Trump administration, starting at the top with President Donald Trump himself.
The Trump administration has been “huge” for American energy independence, she said.
“I was just reading an article today about how the entire coal industry has turned around as a result of the changes that he has made in the last 18 months,” she said, adding that Trump has also helped shore up America’s allies abroad. “It’s been absolutely critical not only for Wyoming but for the entire United States and our foreign allies….Wyoming is the largest coal producer in the nation. We have some of the cleanest coal on the planet. Many other countries want it. We’re using it here. We need to expand coal-fired power plants, because if we’re going to meet that demand, not only for domestic supply and industry and manufacturing, but in order to meet the data centers and the AI, we’re going to have to be producing a lot more electricity, and we need the infrastructure to do that.”
But the difference is not only Trump, she noted. Trump’s cabinet is also “night and day” compared with that of President Joe Biden, she said.
“Both Obama and Biden, not only [launched] a major war against coal, but even against oil and gas production and against the construction of pipelines.”
Now, with agency heads like Doug Burgum, Chris Wright, and Lee Zeldin, Trump has “people in who actually understand the science and how we manage and produce our resources that we need is critically important.”
“One of the problems that we have had since 2009 is the Endangerment Finding that was issued under the Obama administration, concluding that CO2, methane and two other constituents were damaging to human health, and that is what the foundation of all of this global warming and climate change nonsense is: it’s the Endangerment Finding that was not based on science, that was not based on reality, that was based upon the EPA coming up with its own idea of how it was going to reorder society, and that’s what the Endangerment Finding was all about,” Hageman said. That finding, she was, is “really the head of the snake for all of the challenges that we’ve had for the last 20 years in terms of developing and producing domestically our own energy resources.”
“The difference between the Biden administration and the Trump administration 2.0 couldn’t be more stark,” she continued, while adding a more global perspective as well. “It’s significant to look around the world and understand what that means. Those countries that were aligned with Biden in terms of energy policy, whether it’s England, Scotland, Germany, France, Belgium, the EU, those countries that were aligned with the net zero, no fossil fuels philosophy, their economies are not only stagnating, they’re going backwards. Canada is now in a recession, Germany is deindustrializing. Their folks over there are spending five and six times more for energy than we are here in the United States. So we have real world examples of what happens when you follow the Obama-Biden paradigm or business model versus what happens when you follow the Trump domestic energy America First paradigm or business model, and what you see is that we’re a lot better off in America than those other countries are.”
“The second largest city in Germany in November voted to deindustrialize,” Hageman added. “Well, do you think that that’s going to improve the life and conditions of their citizens there, or do you think it’s going to make it worse? And I think we know the answer to that. These countries that are going down the road of net zero, again at the encouragement and at the behest of the UN, even knowing that the numbers were bad, are suffering, and their citizens are suffering even more.”
One of the moves that Trump and his fellow Republicans advanced, via legislation like the One Big, Beautiful Bill, was a massive expansion of coal leases. But, Hageman said, work remains to be done.
“What happens when you’re going to be producing energy and opening up land for additional exploration, whether it is for oil and gas production or coal or other kind of mining, is there are many different moving parts,” she said. “So, the BLM may come out and say ‘we’re going to lease these 15 million acres,’ but then you have to go through NEPA, and you have to go through the coal bonus bid process. So, right now, one of the challenges that we have is that in Wyoming we have not issued a new coal lease since 2014; it has been 12 years. About six weeks or two months ago, we had a hearing in my Subcommittee on Water, Wildlife and Fisheries about the fact that we are running out of produced coal because it has been so long since we have done a new coal permit, and the reason is because both the Obama and the Biden administrations were hostile to coal production; they were not issuing permits, but in addition to that, if you are a coal company and you want to lease federal coal, you have to go through what’s called a bonus bid process that can take upwards of ten years, but you have to pay for that in the first five years that you’re in the permitting process. This can be tens of millions of dollars in cost.”
Below is a transcript of our interview with Rep. Harriet Hageman, lightly edited for clarity.
Washington Reporter:
Where are we at with Trump’s energy policy, and what has that meant for Wyoming?
Rep. Harriet Hageman:
It’s been huge. I was just reading an article today about how the entire coal industry has turned around as a result of the changes that he has made in the last 18 months. It’s been absolutely critical not only for Wyoming but for the entire United States and our foreign allies. I was just in a meeting where they were talking about the energy demand. The electricity demand that we have is that we have that the additional electricity demand that’s coming down the pike is the equivalent of six New York cities. Think about the magnitude of that, and there’s only one way to meet that demand, and that is through things such as oil and gas and coal and nuclear; that’s just the reality of it. Wyoming is the largest coal producer in the nation. We have some of the cleanest coal on the planet. Many other countries want it. We’re using it here. We need to expand coal-fired power plants, because if we’re going to meet that demand, not only for domestic supply and industry and manufacturing, but in order to meet the data centers and the AI, we’re going to have to be producing a lot more electricity, and we need the infrastructure to do that.
Washington Reporter:
We saw the Department of Interior, the EPA, and Department of Energy announce a couple of months ago plans to open up 13.1 million acres of federal land for coal leasing, which is triple the benchmark set in the One Big, Beautiful Bill. What is the latest on that?
Rep. Harriet Hageman:
What happens when you’re going to be producing energy and opening up land for additional exploration, whether it is for oil and gas production or coal or other kind of mining, is there are many different moving parts. So, the BLM may come out and say ‘we’re going to lease these 15 million acres,’ but then you have to go through NEPA, and you have to go through the coal bonus bid process. So, right now, one of the challenges that we have is that in Wyoming we have not issued a new coal lease since 2014; it has been 12 years. About six weeks or two months ago, we had a hearing in my Subcommittee on Water, Wildlife and Fisheries about the fact that we are running out of produced coal because it has been so long since we have done a new coal permit, and the reason is because both the Obama and the Biden administrations were hostile to coal production; they were not issuing permits, but in addition to that, if you are a coal company and you want to lease federal coal, you have to go through what’s called a bonus bid process that can take upwards of ten years, but you have to pay for that in the first five years that you’re in the permitting process. This can be tens of millions of dollars in cost. So, if I’m a line near Gillette, Wyoming, and I want to open up additional acreage, I might have to invest $40 to $50 million to the federal government before I’m ever even entitled to start producing coal. I have a bill that says that you still have to pay for that, but you pay for it over a ten year period, so that we can start matching revenue with outlay, so that you’re not upfronting all those costs with the risk that you’re going to have a hostile administration come in and either cancel your bonus bid lease or otherwise not allow you to produce and recoup those funds. I have a bill to address that, and it’s really becoming a very dire circumstance, because we are going to be running out of produced coal, or the coal that’s already under lease, by 2030, but it’s going to take up to ten years to get more permits online.
Washington Reporter:
Are you optimistic that this could be the Congress where they finally get permitting reform done, or is this going to be something you have to worry about once you’re in the Senate?
Rep. Harriet Hageman:
I actually am optimistic. The SPEED Act has gone through the House; it came out of the Natural Resources Committee. It made it through the House, and it’s sitting in the Senate. It is a bipartisan bill. The SPEED Act and the reforms that we have done are project agnostic, meaning that if there is a wind farm or a solar farm or a hydrogen project that could go forward, then have at. This this reform would apply to you. You would be able to take advantage of the same reforms and modernization that we’re doing. As long as we will continue to focus on this being project agnostic, I think that we can get the Democrats that we need, because there are many Democrats who also understand that we need this permitting reform.
Washington Reporter:
What the contrast specifically for Wyoming been with having Doug Burgum, Chris Wright, and Lee Zeldin in these roles compared to what their predecessors were doing when it comes to coal and other forms of energy for your state?
Rep. Harriet Hageman:
Night and day. Both Obama and Biden, not only a major war against coal, but even against oil and gas production and against the construction of pipelines. Having people in who actually understand the science and how we manage and produce our resources that we need is critically important. One of the problems that we have had since 2009 is the Endangerment Finding that was issued under the Obama administration, concluding that CO2, methane and two other constituents were damaging to human health, and that is what the foundation of all of this global warming and climate change nonsense is: it’s the Endangerment Finding that was not based on science, that was not based on reality, that was based upon the EPA coming up with its own idea of how it was going to reorder society, and that’s what the Endangerment Finding was all about. That’s really the head of the snake for all of the challenges that we’ve had for the last 20 years in terms of developing and producing domestically our own energy resources. The difference between the Biden administration and the Trump administration 2.0 couldn’t be more stark, but also I think it’s significant to look around the world and understand what that means. Those countries that were aligned with Biden in terms of energy policy, whether it’s England, Scotland, Germany, France, Belgium, the EU, those countries that were aligned with the net zero, no fossil fuels philosophy, their economies are not only stagnating, they’re going backwards. Canada is now in a recession, Germany is deindustrializing. Their folks over there are spending five and six times more for energy than we are here in the United States. So we have real world examples of what happens when you follow the Obama-Biden paradigm or business model versus what happens when you follow the Trump domestic energy America First paradigm or business model, and what you see is that we’re a lot better off in America than those other countries are.
Washington Reporter:
One of the obstacles to that has been these climate superfund lawsuits that you have legislation to be able to scale back. How these are currently legal? Your new legislation would stop states like Massachusetts and California from levying these lawsuits against energy companies.
Rep. Harriet Hageman:
Well, they have, they have not been successful yet, but they are trying to. The case that is before the United States Supreme Court is the City of Boulder case, and the City of Boulder is a city that’s run by radical Democrats, and they’ve got this idea that in order to address climate change and global warming, they’re going to sue Chevron and BP and other fossil fuel companies for causing this situation that they claim is destroying the planet. Well, first of all, their science is absolutely wrong. So, if this were ever to go to trial, I am very confident that the oil and gas companies, the energy companies, would prevail because much of the global warming and climate change hysteria is based upon cooking the books; that’s been established even in the last couple of weeks, when it was exposed that the UN has had a report since 2021 demonstrating that their dire predictions are absolutely unrealistic, that they are not going to happen, and that they need to dramatically pull back this idea that we’re going to lose all of our polar ice caps by 2040 and all the other nonsense that they’ve been spewing. The very science and foundation of what they’ve been putting forward is inaccurate and unscientific, but what this really is, is that these are these are areas of the country that are run typically by Democrats and have been for a long time, and they’re running out of other people’s money. They need to find another revenue source. That’s what this is really about, is trying to find a way to implement a tax through litigation that they cannot get through their state legislatures or through Congress. The Colorado legislature is not going to pass a cap and trade, they’re not going to pass carbon taxes, because much of the revenue in their coffers is from Weld County, and it’s from oil and gas production. Same with New Mexico; New Mexico is run by a pretty radical leftist governor, who is pretty anti-fossil fuel, but the number one source of revenue for the state of New Mexico is oil and gas, so they’re not going to impose a carbon tax or a cap and trade on their oil and gas industry, and we’re not going to do it in Congress. So Boulder, the City of New York, Massachusetts, and these other states, they’re looking around saying, ‘how do we generate more tax revenue when our legislatures won’t allow us to do this? I know. Let’s sue these companies on a theory of nuisance.’ Well, you’re absolutely correct. These are not only legally suspect, but they’re absolutely legally bankrupt. These are ex post facto laws that violate Article I of the Constitution. Every one of these companies that has been producing oil and gas and coal and uranium and other rare constituents, every one of them is doing so pursuant to permits that they receive from the state and federal government. So, how do you then turn around and say, ‘you’re liable for doing what you’re entirely legally entitled to do’? That’s the very foundation of why these cases are so illegal; they are legal nonstarters, because if you are Chevron and you produced oil in the Gulf of America, you had a permit to do that, you had to meet the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, you had to meet certain requirements about building your pipelines and all of that, but once you meet those requirements, then you receive a little piece of paper that says ‘go have at it, go ahead and produce the oil, go ahead and produce the gas.’ That document, that process, is what essentially gives you immunity from these kinds of lawsuits. It’s saying ‘yes, you’re entitled to drive that car,’ then if you’re entitled to drive the car, and you’re given the permission by the state to do that, then another town down the road, or another state down the road, doesn’t get to come in and say, ‘no, we’re going to take away your right to drive that car.’ That’s really what this is about. These are ex post facto laws. What they’re really about is that these states and communities are so poorly mismanaged because of the radicals who have run them for decades, and they’re just trying to find another source of revenue.
Washington Reporter:
Do you think that any of your Democratic colleagues will sign on to this with you, or are they so beholden to these climate activists that they’re willing to continue violating the law and allowing for these to happen?
Rep. Harriet Hageman:
They’re too beholden to the environmental activists. Global warming and climate change is their religion, and it’s going to take an awful lot to dislodge that from their psyches. I think it’s telling that the UN, for 25 years, has been screaming at the top of its lungs that we’re all going to die a horrible death by 2020, unless we stop all fossil fuels and return ourselves to the Dark Ages; that’s what they’ve been screaming. And then in 2021, they have a report that they issued. It says, ‘all that stuff that we’ve been saying, none of that’s true. We really have gotten a little bit out ahead of our skis. It’s not as bad as we thought it was.’ It’s taken five years for that report to even get out there, and in the meantime, the UN has continued to bang this drum of climate change and global warming, and the second largest city in Germany in November voted to deindustrialize. Well, do you think that that’s going to improve the life and conditions of their citizens there, or do you think it’s going to make it worse? And I think we know the answer to that. These countries that are going down the road of net zero, again at the encouragement and at the behest of the UN, even knowing that the numbers were bad, are suffering, and their citizens are suffering even more.
Washington Reporter:
A lot of these lawsuits are because the policies could not be advanced by the state legislature, and it seems like Tom Steyer will have spent $200 million in the California gubernatorial race to not advance to November. Is that an example of what you’re talking about? He ran for president, for governor, and yet in California he’s not even going to be the Democrats’ nominee.
Rep. Harriet Hageman:
Here’s the way that I put it. If you’re going to be a doomsdayer, don’t give a date certain, and that’s one of the mistakes that the Democrats and the UN and the radical environmentalists have made for the last 30 to 40 years: they have given a date certain. ‘By 2015 we’re no longer going to have a polar ice cap, by 2025 you will no longer see snow in North America.’ You know what Al Gore has said, you know what that kid from Sweden has said who’s nutty herself, you know what John Kerry has said, you know what the UN and these organizations have said, you know what James Hansen has said. And in order to get people to buy into this hysteria, they had to be hysterical in order to get people to buy into the idea that we should return to the Stone Ages. They had to become really radical, threatening us with a dire situation where our grandchildren will have to grow fins because it’s going to be Water World with Kevin Costner yet again. They had to further their agenda and their narrative with hysteria and dates by which we were all going to die or nobody was going to believe them. The problem was that their science was bad from the beginning, so all the predictions that they’ve made have never come true. I think people are getting really wise to it. They also recognize the scam associated with it. People who have been furthering the global warming agenda have made an awful lot of money off of this hysteria, and I think people realize that they’re charlatans.
Washington Reporter:
Recently, the Sunrise Movement, which is ostensibly an environmental movement, was celebrating some of its primary wins, and you’ll notice there’s nothing about the environment in their statement. ‘We’re electing a bold team in Congress that is unapologetically pro-Palestine, pro-working people, proudly anti-billionaire, and unafraid to challenge the establishment.’ You were just alluding to Greta Thunberg. There’s a clear intersection between the environmental left and the anti-Israel left. What do you make of that?
Rep. Harriet Hageman:
I think that it tells you everything that you need to know. They’re morally bankrupt human beings. The Sunrise Movement uses the kids to pull at the heartstrings. There was a woman at one of our committees who said it best. She’s a Democrat from one of the northwestern states, and she was talking during one of ours hearings about how her son has has suffered from climate anxiety since he was five years old, and my reaction was, ‘why did you do that to him? That’s child abuse,’ and the people who have been pushing this Sunrise agenda, I felt the same thing about them since they first came on the scene. They’re using kids, and they’re using their emotions to further a political agenda. You don’t put that kind of responsibility on kids; you don’t saddle kids with a problem, even if you believed in global warming, even if you believed in this climate change stuff, never tell a seven year old that they’re responsible or that they are going to die by the time they’re 23. That is a form of child abuse, and it’s one of the things that has exposed this industry and this movement to me for a long time: that they’re willing to basically destroy the emotional well-being of children in order to further a political agenda, and the fact that they’re tied up in the anti-Israeli situation speaks volumes.
Washington Reporter:
In addition to your latest bill, you also have the Protect USA Act, which is about the European Union’s CSDDD directives. To go a step further even than that, we see non-Americans, Hansjörg Wyss, a European billionaire, and adversarial countries, China, Russia, Qatar, funding climate groups in America, and then suing in American courts. Do you think at some point the State Department would need to get involved in that? Is that at some point an act of war in sabotaging American energy to a point where it can’t exist? What should come next on that front?
Rep. Harriet Hageman:
Well, it needs to be exposed. The important thing is we need to be making sure that more people understand that that is just another one of the tools that they have in their toolbox to attempt to undermine American sovereignty and our strength and power on the world stage, and it speaks volumes that these countries are using that kind of a wedge in order to cause damage to the United States of America. If people take a step back and understand the significance of that, they can again realize and recognize how the climate agenda has been hijacked, number one, again to impose taxes through the court system, like we were talking about a few moments ago with the Boulder and Massachusetts lawsuits, but also how to undermine us strategically in terms of sowing a lot of internal unrest on our college campuses and elsewhere, as well as undermining our ability to remain strong by producing our own domestic energy.
