Youth group asks Supreme Court to revive a landmark climate lawsuit

A group of young people who filed a landmark climate change lawsuit in 2015 against the federal government, only to have the suit thrown out, is turning to the Supreme Court in an attempt to revive the case and get its day in court.

This kind of request to the Supreme Court is unusual, but the plaintiffs supported their position by arguing that the federal government had stymied the process with similar courtroom maneuvers over the years.

“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 exacerbating the climate crisis with energy policies based on fossil fuels, despite voluminous evidence of their danger to the planet. 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. In May, the same appellate court also directed a lower court to dismiss an amended complaint.

On Thursday, the group filed a petition for what’s called a “writ of mandamus” with the Supreme Court asking it to vacate the May ruling and send the case 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 declined to comment.

The plaintiffs are represented by Our Children’s Trust, a nonprofit law firm based in Eugene, Oregon, 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 appealed, and numerous business groups have filed briefs supporting the state. A decision is expected later this year.

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 as well as a number of 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 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 9th 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,” Hurwitz wrote.

The plaintiffs argue that the amended complaint they filed last year is significantly different from the first one and should be evaluated on its own merits.

The suit was first filed a few days after Valentine’s 11th birthday. Now she is a student at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, majoring in environmental studies and Spanish.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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