Many young people feel they have too much at stake to wait for our leaders to get their act together and take meaningful action on climate change. It’s being termed the ‘Children’s Climate Crusade.’
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High-school student Alec Loorz is one of them. He’s suing the federal government for breach of the public trust. In all 50 states.
The Public Trust Doctrine had never been used to protect something as intangible as the air we breathe and the atmosphere we live in– and never by a plaintiff who was too young to vote. With his activism seeded when he saw An Inconvenient Truth, Loorz started speaking out about climate change at the tender age of 13, writing a Declaration of Independence from Fossil Fuel.
As a founder of the iMatter March and Kids vs. Global Warming, Loorz has spoken to nearly 200,000 people in over 200 presentations, keynotes and panels. He believes that the revolution to protect the planet and work toward a sustainable and just world needs to be led by youth: “It’s our future we are fighting for,” Loorz advocates.
A young climate activist, Loorz says we need to demand our political leaders “govern as if our future matters.” With their future at stake, many youth have taken their case to the courts in the hopes that the judiciary will require the legislature to take action.
“We are all in imminent danger,” Loorz told Outside Magazine. “Scientists have said we have 10 years to make changes if we want to stabilize the climate by 2100—and that was back in 2005. We care more about money and power than we do about future generations. The judicial system is the only branch of government left not bought out by corporate interests.”
What exactly are these young people asking for?
“Every suit and every administrative petition filed in every state in the country and against the federal government asks for the same relief,” Mary Christina Wood, law professor at the University of Oregon and author of Nature’s Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age, says. “And that is for the government… to bring down carbon emissions in compliance with what scientists say is necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change.”
The young plaintiffs simply want the courts to require “the legislatures and the agencies to do their job in figuring out how to lower carbon emissions,” says Wood.
Do these litigants have any legal grounds to stand on, though?
Turns out that yes, they do. “You find it in case law going back to the beginning years of this country,” says Wood. “The U.S. Supreme Court has announced the Public Trust Doctrine in multiple cases over the years and it’s in every state jurisprudence as well.”
The Public Trust Doctrine says “the government is a trustee of the resources that support our public welfare and survival,” according to Woods. The doctrine “requires our government to protect and maintain survival resources for future generations.” Relying on this long-standing legal principle, young plaintiffs have filed cases at the state and federal level.
At the federal level, five teenagers, and two non-profit organizations—Kids vs. Global Warming and WildEarth Guardians—partnered with Our Children’s Trust to file a federal lawsuit. Their petition for their case to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court was denied in December, but the plaintiffs vow “to advance their climate claims in lower federal courts until the federal government is ordered to take immediate action on human-made climate change.”
Youth plaintiffs supported by Our Children’s Trust have filed administrative rule-making petitions in every state in the country.
At the state level, there are cases pending in Oregon, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Washington and Colorado. Courts in Alaska, Texas, Arizona, Kansas, Montana and Pennsylvania have issued “developmental decisions on which the pending cases are in part based.”
(An excerpt, you can read the full article in EcoWatch, here)
TRUST 350 from Our Children’s Trust on Vimeo.
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by Skippy Massey
This post originally appeared at the Humboldt Sentinel. Reprinted with permission.