A group of young people who filed a landmark climate change lawsuit in 2015 against the federal government, only to have their suit thrown out, are turning to the Supreme Court in an attempt to revive the case and get their day in court.
This kind of request to the Supreme Court is unusual, but the plaintiffs argue that the federal government had stymied the process with similar courtroom maneuvers over the years, justifying their request.
“The Department of Justice has entirely blocked our path to trial,” one of the plaintiffs, Sahara Valentine, 20, said in an interview. “It’s really important to us that we get a fair say in court.”
The case, Juliana v. U.S., accused the federal government of violating the constitutional rights of the plaintiffs by failing to curb the use of fossil fuels despite voluminous evidence of the dangers of climate change. It was first filed in federal court in Oregon, and almost went to trial. But the Justice Department during the Obama administration began a push to get the case thrown out, and succeeded at an appellate court in 2020. An amended complaint filed by the plaintiffs was also dismissed.
On Thursday, the group filed a petition with the Supreme Court asking it to vacate the ruling of the appellate court and send it back to the district court to stand trial. The filing argued that the government had bogged down the case in procedural issues rather than letting it be decided on its merits.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The plaintiffs are represented by Our Children’s Trust, a nonprofit law firm based in Eugene, Ore., that has filed similar lawsuits and legal actions based on constitutional claims across the country. Their strategy scored a big win in Hawaii in June, when Gov. Josh Green announced a settlement with the plaintiffs, who had sued the state’s Department of Transportation over its use of fossil fuels. As part of the agreement, the state said it would decarbonize its transportation system within 20 years, expand bicycle lanes and increase spending on electric-vehicle chargers.
The settlement followed an earlier victory for the group last year in Montana, when a judge ruled that the state violated its Constitution by not considering climate change when approving fossil fuel projects. The attorney general there has vowed to appeal, and numerous business groups have filed briefs supporting the state.
Over the summer, Julia Olson, the founder of Our Children’s Trust, called on the Biden administration to start settlement talks in the Juliana case. She pointed to legal filings supporting the case endorsed by 43 members of Congress, professors and climate experts.
Lawyers for the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division had argued that the court was not the right venue to address climate change.
In a filing earlier this year, they wrote that it would be “a multiweek trial on issues of significant public import that will require enormous expenditures of government time and resources — all in a case where this Court already has held that the district court lacks jurisdiction because even at the end of such a trial, there would be no workable remedy that could be ordered or enforced.”
That mirrored the arguments the judges made when they first dismissed the case in 2020. In a split decision, a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that the plaintiffs had shown that they were harmed by carbon emissions enabled by government policies. The decision, written by Circuit Judge Andrew D. Hurwitz, acknowledged the risks posed by climate change, but was “skeptical” that court was the right venue to stop it.
“The panel reluctantly concluded that the plaintiffs’ case must be made to the political branches or to the electorate at large,” Judge Hurwitz wrote.
The suit was first filed a few days after Ms. Valentine’s 11th birthday. Now she is 19 and a student at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash., majoring in environmental studies and Spanish.
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