New York’s Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said on Monday that the state is suing the Department of Energy (DOE) for delaying the date on which rules about ceiling-fan efficiency are supposed to take effect. The AG said he would sue the department again if it failed to publish a separate set of previously approved efficiency rules promulgated by the DOE during the final days of the Obama administration.

The New York attorney general is joined in these legal actions by the attorneys general from California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington, as well as the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and the city of New York. The lawsuit against the DOE is one of the first taken by a coalition of states against the Trump administration's energy policies , which have been environmentally regressive

The energy-efficiency rules for ceiling fans were published on January 19, 2017 and were set to take effect March 20, 2017. However, the DOE under Trump has twice delayed the date on which the rules are supposed to take effect. Currently, the rules won’t take effect until September 30, 2017. The state officials suing the DOE filed a petition with the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit asking the court to intervene; the states say that federal law compels the DOE (PDF) to offer a public comment period if rules are changed substantively after final publication, including if the “effective date” of the rule is delayed.

Besides the ceiling-fan rules, the previous administration’s DOE finalized efficiency standards for products like “compressors, walk-in coolers and freezers, power supply equipment, portable air conditioners, and commercial boilers” just before the Trump administration took office, according to a press release from the New York attorney general’s office. Schneiderman’s office wrote on Monday that Rick Perry, Trump’s newly appointed DOE secretary, has 60 days to publish those energy-efficiency rules in the Federal Register, or Schneiderman will file a second lawsuit (PDF) against the department for “illegal obstruction” of finalized rules. (Fun bar trivia: former Texas Governor Rick Perry’s first name is actually James.)

The Obama administration's DOE notified the public that it had agreed on final efficiency rules for compressors, freezers, and the like in December. As is custom, the rules were held for a period so the public could “identify any typographical or numbering errors for correction by the Department.” Once that waiting period was over, the efficiency rules for compressors were supposed to be published on February 21, 2017, and rules for the other items were supposed to be published March 15, 2017. So far, the DOE hasn’t published the final standards in the Federal Register.

When Ars contacted the DOE, a spokesperson said the department declined to comment on pending litigation.

The Office of the New York Attorney General wrote that, combined, the ceiling-fan efficiency rules, as well as the efficiency rules for the other six products, would eliminate 292 million tons of carbon dioxide, 1.2 million tons of methane, and over 1,000 pounds of mercury over 30 years. They would also “save over 443 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity” over 30 years and “provide net savings to consumers and businesses of approximately $23.8 billion.”