Trump Loses Again In His Fight To End New York Congestion Pricing

A court judge once again ruled against the Trump
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Donald Trump lost yet another battle in his fight against New York City's congestion pricing.  

Trump's Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy sent a letter to New York authorities last February demanding the city stop charging tolls to motorists driving into Manhattan. Previous rulings allowed the practice to continue while the courts deliberated. 

On Tuesday, Manhattan U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Liman said Duffy had no authority to revoke federal approval for the program.  Congestion pricing can continue. 

Congestion pricing started up in January, 2025. Drivers pay a $9 daytime base fee if they enter Manhattan south of 60th Street. The money uses the revenue to pay for mass transit improvements. New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority has collected $562 million from the fees in 2025. 

The congestion pricing is mainly designed to reduce congestion in Manhattan and pay for costs and upgrades to public transit. It also has a climate change component, which is why I'm mentioning it in this here blog thingy. 

The theory is that fewer cars means less carbon going up into the atmosphere.  That would ever so slightly blunt New York's contribution to climate change. Every little bit helps, right? The theory is that fewer cars means less carbon going up into the atmosphere.  That would ever so slightly blunt New York's contribution to climate change. Every little bit helps, right?

Trump is strangely fixated on Manhattan's congestion pricing. You'd think he would be bigger fish to fry. 

First off, as New Republic notes, this is was an effort by Trump to please his MAGA base and maintain the fiction where they mentally live. As New Republic notes:

"Trump knows he has many fans among conservative suburbanites who love car culture and - with equal passion - hate an fear the subway, seeing it as a symbol of the chaos and danger in urban live, devouring every scary subway story and raging at the idea that their driving should fund this cesspool of crime. It is a culture war, for sure, a not a particularly new one the provincial and cosmopolitan strains of American lie have always been at odds?."

But worse for Trump,  the congestion pricing battle was a test of his authoritarian aims. It was a test, to make an example out of New York and its governor Kathy Hochul, who kept supporting the congestion pricing. 

As New Republic concluded, to Trump the King must not be defied. 

In this case, he was. By Hochul and he judge, and others. This means other city mayors and state governors might not be so ready to be cowed by Trump after this. 

New York's congestion pricing seems to be working. The New York Metropolitan Transit Authority collected $562 million in fees from congestion pricing in 2025. 

By one estimation, congestion pricing reduced traffic flow by 7.5 percent on certain bridges and tunnels and on FDR and West Side highways

And, although correlation isn't causation, retail sales in lower Manhattan were $900 million higher this January compared to last, a restaurant reservations were up 7 percent. 

Congestion pricing is by no means universally loved. When it started there was a ton of backlash, especially among commuters from New Jersey. 

Advocates of congestion pricing have won this battle, but this thing is far from over. The Trump administration has vowed to appeal the court ruling. 

To The Trump Team, Climate Change Is "Benefitting" Mankind

Under the Trump administration, the Environmental
Protection Agency isn't protecting anything, 
except maybe the fossil fuel industry. 

 In the Trump world, up is down, down is up and everything is half ass backwards. 

E&E News By Politico has the deets:

"President Trump has long rejected climate science.

Now, his administration is grappling with how to assemble a body of federal climate research to show a warming world is benefitting humanity. The claims would be highly misleading and ignore decades of scientific research that shows climate change will have increasingly dire effects."

As I previously reported, the Trump administration has scrubbed climate information from a variety of web sites and fired numerous climate scientists. 

Also, as I have noted before, the Trumpers want to remove something called an endangerment finding from the EPA.  That document requires the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

As E&E News reports, legal experts think the federal courts would frown on getting rid of that endangerment finding. The Supreme Court has rejected three challenges to the endangerment finding. 

To get around that, Trump and the EPA would just come up with a new document, one that falsely says that climate change is a bunch of hooey,  

They could do that by finding "experts" who falsely claim that climate change is not a biggie.  Or they can pick apart existing U.S. and international climate reports, offering dubious counter arguments to those reports.  

And they could produce a new National Climate Assessment written by unqualified Trump minions and fossil fuel industry hacks. 

Of course, these morons would be up against a continued onslaught of new reports and findings describing why climate change is bad. I mean, every time I turn around, there's some new study that says climate change will worsen X, Y and Z.  

I never hear any serious person say climate change is going to create more joy, happiness, rainbows and puppy dogs.  But, that doesn't matter. All the climate deniers have to do is go before a Trump-appointed "judge" who's a total suck up to Dear Leader. From there, all bets are off. Such a "judge" could well go along with the Trump fantasy narrative. 

That fantasy narrative has already taken shape. 

David Legates, who was briefly a NOAA mucky muck during the first Trump administration, has these revisionist thoughts on greenhouse gases. 

"I'm pretty certain that what we're going to conclude from what we know now is that carbon dioxide is not an evil gas......Rather, it's a gas beneficial to life on Earth. It'll increase temperatures slightly, and warmer temperatures are certainly better than colder temperatures."

Spoken like a dude who's sick of winter where he lives but has no idea how science works.  

So let's do Science 101 for this guy. 

Fine, it's true, we need carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, since as those of you who went through Grade School science know, plants need CO2 to survive. Since us humans need plants to survive, a certain amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is truly a good thing.

Also, it's basic physics that if you increase CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere, you're going to increase the temperature of said atmosphere. 

Teasing apart Legate's words, it appears he also thinks climate change is good because fewer people would die of cold weather. Which might actually be true. But what about all the extra people that keep dying of heat related causes because heat waves keep getting hotter?

I guess they don't count. 

As you'd expect, serious climate scientists are appalled by all this.  E&E News got this quote from the ever-reliable (and smart and relatable) climate scientist Michael Mann:

"What the Trump administration is trying to do amounts to nothing more than trying to pollute the process with ideologically-motivated antiscoience.,....It means the U.S. federal government is now at war with humanity."

We know, of course, despite any criticism, the Trump gang will soldier on. 

While climate change keeps biting us "little people" in the ass, our billionaire overlords can rest easy, protecting in their little cocoons as they keep raking in blood money from the fossil fuel industry.  

Fossil Fuel Giants Lose Bid To Dismiss Lawsuit Against Them

It's beginning to look like the fossil fuel industry is 
not have an easy time in courts and with lawsuits
as they had hoped. 

 The U.S. Supreme Court earlier this month shut down an attempt by fossil fuel companies to avoid a climate change lawsuit against them. 

Per Courthouse News, the lawsuit is seeking "to hold companies liable over claims of deceptive marketing about the effect of greenhouse gases.

Companies such as Sunoco, Exxon Mobile, Chevron and BP said they are facing dozens of lawsuits, leaving a vital industry at risk of owing billions of dollars over accusations it causes climate change.

The justices denied the oil and gas companies' petition without further explanation in Monday's orders list."

Frankly, I was a little surprised the seriously right leaning Supreme Court would make a decision like this, but there you go. 

This all started in 2017, when Honolulu filed suit and against the oil giants. The claim was the companies misled consumers about fossil fuel impacts on climate change. This, said Honolulu's lawsuit, led to increased fossil fuel consumption and worsened the impacts of climate change in Hawaii. 

Honolulu cited state laws in its suit but the companies wanted it all transferred to federal court. Three courts denied that wish. 

Continues Courthouse News: 

"Once the case was kicked back to state court, the companies tried to get the lawsuit dismissed. Exxon and others argue that the state courts do not have jurisdiction to hear the dispute because the case involves the impact of interstate and international climate change."

That Exxon failed with this argument might have an impact on Vermont's "climate superfund" law and a similar statute just recently signed into law in New York State.

In a lawsuit recently filed against Vermont and its "Climate Superfund" law, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and oil companies contend that the law violated domestic and foreign commerce clauses by discriminating "against the important interest of other states by targeting large energy companies outside of Vermont."

I don't know whether the Hawaii case will have an influence here given there's other aspects of the lawsuit  against Vermont. Those include the contention it violates the U.S. Constitution and is pre-empted by the federal Clean Air Act. 

Maybe I'm being a bit of a Pollyanna here, but it's beginning to look like it's at least possible that the fossil fuel industry won't get as much sympathy from the courts as they'd hoped. 

 

After A Decade, A Climate Scientist's Defamation Suit Goes To Trial.

After 12 years, a defamation  lawsuit against provocateurs by
noted climatologist Michael Mann has finally gone
to trial.  Mann's detractors saying he's attacking free
speech, but bloggers being sued compared Mann to
 criminals and even child molesters.  

 Talk about a slow court proceeding!

Michael Mann, one of the world's most prominent climate scientist, is finally getting his day in court. This more than a decade after he filed suit against climate deniers he says defamed him. 

According to Scripps News Service:

"A renowned climate scientist filed a lawsuit against a right-wing blogger and an analyst for defamation, and after more than a decade, the trial begin on Thursday. 

Michael Mann, an earth and environmental scientist from the University of Pennsylvania, filed the 2012 court case, claiming that online attacks on his work constituted defamation."

The long running case is important because it could set parameters as to how far people and activists can go in attempting to take down a perceived enemy.  I'm very nearly a First Amendment absolutist, but I still think there needs to be limits on how badly one can lie about and attack someone.

Mann is suing Rand Simberg, an analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute mainly because he published a blog post comparing Man to a convicted child molester. Mann is also suing Mark Steyn, who fawningly quoted Simberg and said Mann's research was, quote, "fraudulent."

It's interesting that if you look up that blog post now, there's a disclaimer at the bottom saying "Two inappropriate sentences that originally appeared in this post have been removed by the editor."

Hmmm. 

I worry if Mann loses, the type of baseless attacks you see on social media all the time will get even worse. There's already death threats galore out there, mostly by hard right winters who wilt when somebody says something, um, factual. 

Mann's suit might have a chilling effect on those that stalk, harass, threaten and all that. But unlike critics of his legal moves, I seriously doubt it will chill real journalism in the process. 

I regard Mann as Mr. Hockey Stick for his clear, relatable explanation of world temperature trends and how climate change influenced those trends.

Way back in 1998, Mann famously plotted in a graph that showed that global temperatures remained essentially flat for the past millennium before spiking upward dramatically after 1900. His graph looks like a hockey stick with its blade upturned. 

This easy to understand graph was featured prominently in widely read and watched publications, and thus he greatly helped galvanize the public's understanding of climate change. 

Right wing climate deniers were having none of this.They screeched and yelled that global warming is a hoax and they accused Mann of illicitly manipulating data to support his conclusions.  In short, they said Mann's hockey stick was one great big fake. 

Those allegations prompted an investigation of Mann and his science by the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation and seven other organizations.

When you have that many powerful groups investigating you, that could leave the public wondering if you're on the up and up. 

All the organizations that investigated Mann found that his science was solid, all of his research was properly conducted, and the facts he presented in his work were indeed facts. The hockey stick was proven to be a real thing. 

While all this was going on, groups widely believed to be backed by billionaire Charles Koch repeatedly bombarded Mann with freedom on information demands, probably in an effort to interfere with his work and/or discourage him from publishing more papers. 

The deniers were also probably pretty mad that in 2007, Mann, and with Al Gore and people with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, won the Nobel Peace Prize for establishing a consensus on the link between what us humans do and global warming. 

With the braying climate deniers still besmirching his reputation, it was Mann's turn to get pissed. As Scripps describes it:

"After his investigation included, Mann filed a lawsuit against the two organizations and two authors for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress."

The Competitive Enterprise Institute and the National Review publishes the right wing bloggers' attacks. But in 2021 courts ruled the CEI and National Review would be dropped from Mann's lawsuit because the bloggers were not employees of the two organizations.  

Still the people over at the National Review are still really peeved at Mann, apparently. 

The National Review had a pretty, um, rich take on the whole mess earlier this month. They're calling it "Michael Mann vs. Journalism" as if the people constantly harassing the scientists and repeatedly making false accusations were intrepid journalists from the New York Times or something. 

This quote from the National Review piece criticizing Mann's lawsuit really got my blood boiling:

"Are Americans able to disagree about hotly contested political topics without being harassed, dragged into court on the most specious of pretexts and subjected to ruinous legal fees?"

Why, yes! Yes they are! Or at leas they should be. I hardly think thousands of frivolous Freedom of Information Requests, demonstrably false accusations .... are Americans high-mindedly "disagreeing about hotly contested political topics."

After all, with all the peer reviews and such, the people Mann is suing knew, or should have known, that Mann did not falsify his research. So there's one of Mann's plausible arguments that he was defamed. Not to mention that comparison to a serial child molester. 

Funny how the extreme right wing, whenever they encounter someone politically they don't like, get the vapors and start accusing people of sexual assault and deviance.  

Sure, I'd be annoyed with Mann to say the least if he sued journalists or others for merely asking challenging questions about his work.  That comes with the territory. 

The National Review is correct in stating that First Amendment case law allows people to make vehement and caustic statements and arguments without fear of a successful lawsuit against them. But does the First Amendment allow making knowingly false statements about somebody, especially if those false statements are designed to wreck a person's reputation?

I'm not sure why it's taken so long for Mann's suit to go to trial. I mean, 12 years is a long time, even by the standards of an often slow justice system we have these days. 

I do hope Mann wins. Sure, we have the right to criticize whoever we want. Simberg could have made his case against Mann vehemently and aggressively even though he was wrong. But he took the schoolyard bully approach by resorting to false accusation of heinous crimes.   .

That's definitely a bridge too far.