By Terry Lodge of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) on May 11, 2022.
Over the weekend of Earth Day, the documentary video “Youth v. Gov,” the story of the Juliana v U.S. climate lawsuit, was nationally released. Also known as the young people’s climate change lawsuit, the documentary covers the travails of twenty-one charismatic young people (the youngest was 7 when the suit was initially filed in 2015) who seek to have U.S. federal courts recognize that they have a constitutional right to a safe, healthy environment. The plaintiffs are represented in court by Our Children’s Trust (OCT), which calls itself the “world’s only non-profit public interest law firm dedicated exclusively to securing the legal rights of youth to a healthy atmosphere and safe climate, based on the best available science.” OCT “aims to ensure systemic and science-based climate recovery planning and remedies at federal, state, and global levels.”
“Youth v. Gov” tells a story that’s well-conceived for public relations purposes, featuring diverse, articulate, and charming child plaintiffs in a climate-rescue sojourn that has gone on for nearly seven years. Juliana v. U.S. was filed in federal court in Oregon and raises claims based on constitutional and public trust doctrines. The lead plaintiff, Kelsey Juliana, expressed at the outset that “maybe we don’t have Congress or the Presidency behind us, but we’ve always got the courts,” a perception that has visibly changed as time went by and the hijinks, dirty tricks and sheer manipulations perpetrated by the Department of Justice and corporate lobbying groups stalled any trial. By 2020, the plaintiffs seemed to be adjusting to the reality that their righteous cause had matured into a lifelong fight.
The documentary is overloaded with scenes of the plaintiffs triumphantly circulating among high-fiving throngs of young admirers outside federal courthouses, along with supporters’ standing ovations during closed-circuit broadcasts of oral arguments. Nonetheless, the Federal Government clearly maintains the upper hand. In early 2020, two of the three Obama-appointed judges of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling on the latest appeal held that the lawsuit was not “justiciable” – meaning that fixing climate chaos requires discretionary policymaking that is not the job of the courts – and sent the matter back to the trial court to be dismissed. The Juliana plaintiffs then filed a motion to amend the lawsuit in March 2021. At any rate, the lawsuit presently sits, again, at the starting gate, awaiting the trial judge’s ruling on the amendment request to move forward…
See the full CELDF blog post HERE.
Photo credit: “Juliana v U.S.” by vpickering is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.