(The Center Square) — The Trump administration is taking New York, Vermont and several other states to court over "ideologically motivated" policies that seek to punish fossil fuel companies for their alleged role in climate change.

The U.S. Department of Justice filed a pair of lawsuits Thursday, arguing that recently adopted state laws requiring oil companies to contribute billions of dollars into funds to pay for damage caused by climate change were unconstitutional. The move came one day after the DOJ filed preemptive lawsuits against Hawaii and Michigan to block the states' lawsuits against major oil companies over climate change costs.

"Because of state restrictions and burdens on energy production, the American people are paying more for energy, and the United States is less able to defend itself from hostile foreign actors," the DOJ's lawyers wrote in the complaints.

The legal challenge against New York alleges that the state's "superfund" law is a "transparent monetary-extraction scheme" designed to fund the state's infrastructure projects with money from out-of-state businesses.

"The Superfund Act is a brazen attempt to grab power from the federal government and force citizens of other States and nations to foot the bill for its infrastructure wish list," the DOJ wrote in the 29-page complaint.

The DOJ's lawsuit against Vermont echoed similar claims, arguing that the state's yet-to-be-implemented Superfund Act will "usurp the power of the federal government by regulating national and global emissions of greenhouse gases, violating federal law in multiple ways."

"At a time when states should be contributing to a national effort to secure reliable sources of domestic energy, Vermont has chosen to stand in the way," the DOJ wrote in the complaint.

In the lawsuits, the Justice Department cited a Jan. 20 executive order signed by President Donald Trump declaring a national energy emergency to speed up permitting of energy projects, rolling back environmental protections and withdrawing from an international pact to fight climate change. DOJ lawyers allege that the state climate change laws imperil domestic energy production.

“These burdensome and ideologically motivated laws and lawsuits threaten American energy independence and our country’s economic and national security," Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement. "The Department of Justice is working to ‘Unleash American Energy’ by stopping these illegitimate impediments to the production of affordable, reliable energy that Americans deserve."

New York's Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, signed by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2019, requires New York to reduce its excess greenhouse gas emissions and authorizes it to seek up to $75 billion in damages from fossil fuel companies. Regulations for the new law have yet to be issued, which prompted a lawsuit from green groups seeking for the state to post them.

New York is also facing a lawsuit filed by 22 Republican attorneys general who argue that the law will do little to blunt the impact of climate change while passing on the costs to the state's consumers in the form of higher energy bills.

Green groups say New York and other states suffer from rising temperatures, more intense air pollution, health impacts, and more frequent and more severe extreme weather events such as storms, flooding, heat waves and wildfires. They argue that fossil fuel companies have contributed to the problem and should be required to pay some of those costs, and criticize the Trump administration for trying to halt those efforts.

"Having invoked a demonstrably false ‘energy emergency’ to override federal law unilaterally, President Trump is now using the same absurd pretext to attack the Constitutional powers of red and blue states alike to protect their citizens and provide just compensation when they suffer in-state harm from dangerous products," Brad Campbell, president of the New England-based The Conservation Law Foundation, said in a statement.