Wm Tong a g conn
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SEE PFAS TEAM BLUE
01/17/2025
Attorney General Tong Leads Amicus Brief Defending Nationwide PFAS Forever Chemical Drinking Water Standards
(Hartford, CT) – Attorney General William Tong today led a coalition of 18 attorneys general filing an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit defending a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency rule establishing nationwide drinking water standards for certain per- and polyfluoroalkyl “PFAS” forever chemicals under the Safe Drinking Water Act.
The federal rule expands nationwide drinking water protections for four new PFAS and sets enforceable standards for six PFAS chemicals found in drinking water across the country: PFOA, PFOS, PFHxS, GenX, PFNA, and PFBS. The rule sets regulations for each chemical individually, and as mixtures, recognizing appropriately that these threats cannot be addressed in isolation. Under the rule, public water systems across the United States are required to test and, if necessary, treat drinking water for these contaminants.
“Enforceable, federal drinking water standards for PFAS are a necessary measure to protect public health from the pervasive threat of forever-chemicals. EPA’s rules are fully lawful and backed by sound science, and should be upheld,” said Attorney General Tong.
:{:{The states have powerful interests in protecting the health of their residents from the harms of PFAS consumption through drinking water. These toxins were used for decades in myriad industrial and military settings, including airports and fire departments, and they continue to be used in countless consumer products, from car seats and strollers to non-stick cookware and food packaging. PFAS will remain as pollutants in the environment without degrading, earning them the nickname “forever chemicals.”}:
Decades of research shows that the presence of PFAS in drinking water threatens public health and safety. PFAS are highly toxic to humans and animals, with even minimal exposures over time associated with deleterious effects to human health, including various types of cancer, liver impacts, and ulcerative colitis. Dangerous and highly-mobile, PFAS wind their way from numerous sources into our drinking water systems, and then into our bodies—where they accumulate and persist.}:
In the amicus brief, the states argue that the rule would significantly improve public health and should be upheld. The brief supports EPA’s decision to regulate PFAS contaminants both individually and as mixtures using a well-established hazard index approach, as well as the economic analysis underpinning the regulations, and EPA’s compliance with all procedural requirements.
Several states, including Connecticut, have repeatedly urged Congress and EPA to take prompt and aggressive actions to respond to the national PFAS crisis. Testing has already revealed thousands of contaminated drinking water sources across every state and the District of Columbia. Resources are available for public water systems to install treatment for PFAS, including billions in congressional funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, but more work is needed to secure our public water supply.
Connecticut has taken its own actions to protect against PFAS contamination and to hold chemical manufacturers accountable for knowingly contaminating our waters and natural resources. Attorney General Tong brought two lawsuits on behalf of Connecticut against 28 chemical manufacturers in January 2024, seeking both injunctive and monetary relief—compelling the companies to dispose of their toxic chemical stocks, abate all pollution in Connecticut, disclose all research, and to compensate the state for past and future remediation and testing expenses. The complaints seek substantial penalties for widespread violations of numerous state laws dating back decades. In December 2024, a federal judge granted Connecticut’s motion to remand one of the lawsuits back to state court.
The attorneys general of Connecticut, California, New Jersey led the brief, joined by the attorneys general of Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin.
Assistant Attorney General Christopher Kelly and Deputy Associate Attorney General Matthew Levine, Head of the Environment Section, assisted the Attorney General in this matter.
Twitter: @AGWilliamTongFacebook: CT Attorney General
Media Contact:
Elizabeth Benton
elizabeth.benton@ct.gov
gmail cci 1225
connecticut-is-closer-than-ever-to-putting-exxon-on-tria
December 1, 2025
Connecticut’s climate accountability lawsuit is one step closer to trial after a state judge last week rejected ExxonMobil’s attempts to strike the case, delivering a major win for the state’s effort to hold the oil giant accountable for its decades of climate deception.
“ExxonMobil is throwing the kitchen sink at us, trying every angle to invalidate our case,” Connecticut Attorney General William Tong said in a statement. “Once again, they have failed on every count.”
The lawsuit, filed in 2020, argues that Exxon’s historic and ongoing “campaign of deception” about the climate harms of fossil fuels violated the state’s consumer protection law and has inflicted “decades of avoidable harm” and “catastrophic consequences” on Connecticut’s people, infrastructure, and ecosystems. The storms hitting Connecticut’s coastline and flooding communities’ homes have been supercharged by climate change that Exxon knew it was fueling decades ago. By one estimate, sea-level rise caused by climate change created an additional $8.1 billion in damages during Hurricane Sandy, which hit Connecticut in 2012.
In a ruling Wednesday, Connecticut Superior Court Judge John B. Farley rejected all of Exxon’s claims that the state’s case was preempted by federal law, barred by the First Amendment, and other unfounded legal arguments.
“[T]he fundamental objective of the lawsuit,” Judge Farley wrote, is “to remedy the defendant’s alleged unfair and deceptive marketing practices.”
Connecticut’s case — which aims to make Exxon stop deceiving the public, disclose internal climate change research, disgorge profits made while engaging in illegal activity, and fund a “corrective education campaign” about climate change — now enters the discovery phase of litigation.
“Our case is simple and strong — ExxonMobil amassed billions of dollars in profits off a decades-long campaign of lies, and they must be held accountable,” Attorney General Tong said. “We are in the midst of discovery and are aggressively prosecuting this case in Connecticut to uncover and expose ExxonMobil’s lies and to hold the company accountable for the harm their deception has caused.”
As climate accountability cases like Connecticut’s move closer to trial, the oil and gas industry is trying to find ways to block accountability outside the courthouse. Fossil fuel companies are lobbying Congress for a legal shield that would block communities from being able to access the courts and limit the ability of state lawmakers to demand accountability for the industry’s illegal actions. In June, more than a dozen Republican attorneys general proposed creating a “liability shield” for fossil fuel companies modeled on a 2005 law protecting gun manufacturers from lawsuits, and the New York Times later confirmed that securing similar legal protections is a priority for the fossil fuel industry this Congress.
“Exxon and other Big Oil companies are desperate to avoid facing the evidence of their climate lies, but as this ruling makes clear, the people of Connecticut deserve their day in court,” CCI President Richard Wiles said about the ruling. “As the fossil fuel industry lobbies Congress for a ‘get-out-jail-free’ card in cases like Connecticut’s, it’s critical for elected officials to stand up and protect communities’ access to the courts.”
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CLIMATEWIRE | In a win for local governments suing oil and gas majors over climate change, a federal appeals court Wednesday became the seventh to reject the industry’s bid to move a lawsuit to federal court.
In a unanimous ruling, three judges with the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the state of Connecticut, upholding a lower court decision that said the state’s lawsuit against Exxon Mobil should be heard in state court.
In a twist, the decision was written by Judge Richard Sullivan, who wrote a 2021 decision for the appeals court that found that New York City’s claims in a climate lawsuit were preempted by federal law.
The industry has relied on the 2021 ruling to argue that it represents a split among the courts. An industry attorney cited it as recently as Tuesday in an effort to get a similar case in Delaware dismissed.
But Sullivan, who called the Connecticut and New York lawsuits “very different” in oral arguments last September, noted in Wednesday’s opinion that the court was joining its sister circuits in rejecting the company’s request to move the cases.
Connecticut’s lawsuit is one of more than two dozen filed by municipalities that accuse the industry of lying to the public about the dangers of burning fossil fuels. The industry has sought to move the cases to federal court where producers believe they have a better chance to toss the cases under the Clean Air Act.
But Sullivan wrote that the Connecticut case presents a “total mismatch” between the business practices that Exxon Mobil argued were subject to federal control and the behavior that Connecticut is challenging.
Connecticut’s claims, Sullivan wrote, “ultimately concern neither extracting oil and gas nor burning them, but talking about what happens to the environment when they are burned.”
Connecticut Attorney General William Tong (D), who filed the case in 2020, welcomed the decision and said his office is ready to “aggressively prosecute” the lawsuit in state court.
“Our case is simple and strong — Exxon Mobil amassed billions of dollars in profits off a decadeslong campaign of lies, and they must be held accountable,” Tong said.
He called the case a “straightforward consumer deception case” and said it was built on the state’s Unfair Trade Practices Act, which was argued in cases involving the tobacco and opioid industries.
The industry said the decision “misses” the real issue.
“The nature of climate change, this whole litigation and the remedies that Connecticut and other jurisdictions seek are all beyond the scope of any state law,” said Phil Goldberg, special counsel to the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project, an initiative of the National Association of Manufacturers.
He argued that determining how best to address climate change is a “major national and international priority that cannot be decided piecemeal by state judges based on which companies each state or locality decides to sue.”
Sullivan, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, wrote that the Supreme Court has cautioned that judges should “be reluctant” to find the authority that “converts an ordinary state common law complaint into one stating a federal claim.”
And he added that the judges were “wholly unpersuaded by Exxon Mobil’s efforts to push the boundaries of the exceptions” it claimed.
He said the judges agreed with the lower court decision that found Connecticut accuses Exxon Mobil of lying to the state’s consumers and the “fact that the alleged lies were about the impacts of fossil fuels on the Earth’s climate is immaterial.”
He noted that the sides “vigorously dispute” whether federal pollution law is at play in the case. But he added the allegation that Exxon Mobil’s statements ran afoul of Connecticut’s “truth in advertising” laws, “have absolutely nothing to do with the federal common law of transboundary pollution.”
The company had argued the case should be heard in federal court because it leases oil drilling sites from the federal government and is subject to “myriad” federal regulations.
But the court was not convinced, with Sullivan writing that “Exxon Mobil has made this very argument to five of our sister circuits, all of which have squarely rejected it. We find their reasoning persuasive, and we now join them.”
Sullivan wrote that Exxon Mobil had argued the federal government had “significant control” over the means of oil and gas production during World War II.
“But World War II ended in 1945,” he wrote, adding that the conduct Connecticut cites dates to no earlier than the 1950s. “We are aware of no authority for the proposition that once a private company has acted under the close supervision of the federal government for some discrete period in its history, it may claim ‘acting-under’ status for the rest of time.”
He was joined in the case by Judge William Nardini, another Trump appointee, and Judge Myrna Pérez, an appointee of President Joe Biden.
The ruling comes as the Supreme Court earlier this year boosted a raft of similar cases by rejecting the oil industry’s latest efforts to derail them. Those rulings could pave the way for a flood of lawsuits against the industry to be heard in state courts from Maryland to Hawaii.
California earlier this month became the eighth and largest state to file a climate deception lawsuit.
The state of Delaware defended its lawsuit against the industry Tuesday in a three-hour hearing before Superior Court Judge Mary Miller Johnston.
Ted Boutrous, a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher who represents Chevron in a number of the climate liability cases, raised Sullivan’s 2021 opinion in the New York case, telling Johnston it “provides a road map” for her court and that federal law should govern the case.
He noted Delaware argues that the cases are different, but he insisted the cases contained “the very same allegations.”
Victor Sher of the law firm Sher Edling, who represented the state, said the New York lawsuit was based on a different liability standard.
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cadawaller esq
...When it comes to corporations, who are the most aggressive Attorneys General now?
“By far, Maura Healey in Massachusetts and Bob Ferguson in Washington state. In that grouping you would add Karl Racine in DC, Brian Frosh in Maryland, William Tong in Connecticut and Xavier Beccera in California.”
You didn’t mention the New York Attorney General. Why not?
“Because she’s new. She is going to be equally as aggressive as her three predecessors. She may have different priorities. But remember, the new folks just took office in January of this year. There are growing pains. No one is an Attorney General until they are. It’s an enormous office with enormous power. It’s the second most powerful position in state government. It takes a little bit of a runway to get up to speed, but also to get your own people in.”
“Maura Healey was in the office with her predecessor Martha Coakley. She has been in the office for a long time. This is her second term.”
“I represent companies that have issues with state Attorneys General. I know where my plane lands. And my plane lands in Boston and Seattle a lot more than it lands in some other states.”...
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