According to lawsuit, Trump’s orders will “irreparably harm our nation’s most important asset: our children”
||| FROM SIERRA CLUB |||
As the Trump administration moves to turbocharge fossil fuel production while undermining clean energy, young Americans have turned to the courts to fight back, arguing that these executive actions violate their constitutional right to life.
Last week, 22 youth activists ranging in age from seven to 25 launched a new climate lawsuit challenging the administration’s moves to boost fossil fuels and dismantle climate protections. The lawsuit, Lighthiser v. Trump, was filed in federal district court in Montana—a state where young people won a landmark constitutional climate case in 2023 that invalidated an anti-climate state policy. Ten of the plaintiffs from that case, Held v. Montana, are going back to court as plaintiffs in a new case arguing that Trump’s executive actions violate their constitutional rights to life and liberty.
The lawsuit aims to strike down several executive orders that explicitly promote fossil fuels while blocking clean energy like wind and solar. These orders include day-one directives to unleash American energy and declare an energy emergency as well as one signed on April 8 designed to try to revive the fading coal industry.
Plaintiffs also challenge actions by the administration to suppress climate science, such as by scrubbing climate change references from government websites and effectively ending the National Climate Assessment reports by firing all the scientists working on them. The Trump administration’s actions, the case asserts, amount to a “wholesale attack on clean renewable energy and climate science,” and they attempt to unlawfully override federal laws such as the Clean Air Act intended to protect public health and the environment.
Defendants include President Trump as well as multiple executive branch officials and agencies, such as the Office of Management and Budget and its director, Russell Vought (one of the architects of Project 2025); the EPA and its administrator, Lee Zeldin; the Departments of Interior, Energy, Transportation, and Commerce and their head officials; as well as NASA, NOAA, and the National Institutes of Health. The 100-plus-page complaint details how the defendant agencies are implementing Trump’s pro-fossil-fuel, anti-climate executive orders. Plaintiffs argue these orders are unconstitutional since they will exacerbate the climate emergency that threatens their health, safety, and quality of life.
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Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Happiness are rights of Americans bestowed in the United States Declaration of Independence.
The fossil fuel companies are actually not all that happy with the policies of the Trump administration. Economic and strategic chaos (TACO Trump Always Chickens Out) are undermining the demand for fossil fuels and depressing the price of oil to the point where new investments are not profitable in many cases.
Go kids!
The article’s lead says, “Trump’s orders will ‘irreparably harm our nation’s most important asset: our children”
Climate-heating fossil fuel pollution persists in the atmosphere for over 500 years.
When we deepen our climate actions by halting the burning of fossil fuels, we help the next 20+ generations–our children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children.
Not to mention the millions of plant and animal species at risk of extinction.
Remarkable a group of young and intelligent people are taking legal action on arguably what is the world’s most serious long term threat (over population being a close second) that our President and there majority of our duly elected body of legislators seem totally blind to.
Kudos to these young intellects. If they prevail, they should be considered as a group for the Times Magazine Person(s) of the Year.
Let’s hope some of these activists consider running for political offices in the future.