Big Montana Supreme Court decision on a case brought by young people concerned about the impacts of climate change.
Whoa—the Montana Supreme Court holds that its state constitution protects the right to “a stable climate system,” and strikes down a law that barred consideration of greenhouse gas emissions when permitting new fossil fuel projects.
The Montana constitution includes the right to a “clean and healthful environment.” Today the court holds that residents have standing to challenge laws that threaten this right by accelerating climate change and invalidates one such statute. A big decision.
The Montana Supreme Court says the framers who enacted the state’s constitution refused to “grant the State a free pass to pollute the Montana environment just because the rest of the world insisted on doing so.” A lot here about climate change in Montana.
This decision is eminently reasonable under the state constitution’s unusually strong protections for the environment. It’s a very different beast from federal climate lawsuits, rooted squarely in the text of Montana law and precedent.
BTW the Montana government retaliated against the young people who brought this lawsuit by attempting to subject them to wildly unnecessary and intrusive psychiatric examinations. The court emphatically blocked that move in today’s decision, too.
Some background on this case:
As the smoke from a nearby wildfire billowed over the town of Helena a few weeks ago, 16 young people walked into the Montana Supreme Court — to listen as attorneys representing their state argued against them.
Last summer, the 16 plaintiffs, all under the age of 22, had won a surprising and significant victory in state court, for their argument that Montana’s prioritizing of fossil fuels extraction was violating their rights, through its contribution to climate change. Montana has a significant coal industry; but it also has a unique state constitution that enshrines a right to “a clean and healthful environment,” allowing the youth plaintiffs and their lawyers to creatively utilize the legal system to fight for the change they felt had been frustratingly hard to obtain through traditional advocacy and protests.
On July 10th, the Montana Supreme Court heard the state’s appeal of last summer’s decision. The stakes are high, with the fate of at least one major new project, a gas plant near Billings, tied to the outcome of the youth plantiffs’ case.
As Richard Haass tells us in his book, “The Bill of Obligations: Ten Habits of Good Citizens,” “Getting Involved” with our democracy can take many forms: from volunteering for a local campaign, to attending a community board meeting, or advocating for a specific cause — as the Montana plaintiffs are doing, in the case of global climate change. The goal is to become a true stakeholder in your community.
But suing one’s state government in court takes particular courage, Nate Bellinger, the plaintiffs’ attorney at Our Children’s Trust, says. “To walk into court, take the stand while the lawyers for your state are looking at you, preparing to cross-examine you, and tell your story before a packed courtroom, that is something most adults will never do, let alone teenagers.”
18-year old plaintiff Kian Tanner made the three hour drive to return to Helena for the Supreme Court hearing, to show his face to the judges to remind them of whose future was at stake; he says he welcomes the pressure, on behalf of his generation.