By Nate Raymond
(Reuters) -The Montana Supreme Court appeared open on Wednesday to upholding a landmark ruling that found the state violated young people’s rights to a healthy environment by banning regulators from considering how new Fossil fuel projects can influence climate change.
Several justices on the seven-member Montana Supreme Court appeared skeptical of the Republican-led state’s contention that the 16 youths in the case had no legal standing to challenge a restriction on agencies’ ability to intervene in the case. issuing permits to take greenhouse gas emissions into account.
While urging the justices to overturn Judge Kathy Seeley’s 2023 ruling, Mark Stermitz, an attorney for the state, said that even if human factors have contributed to climate change, “that doesn’t mean we feel that this global problem can be influenced in any way by a state district court judge in Montana.”
However, Montana Supreme Court Justice Laurie McKinnon said the plaintiffs who filed the case in 2020 wanted to ensure that the agencies could at least consider the impact of emissions, a possible “first step” in appealing potential permits.
“With that restriction, they can’t even get there now,” she said.
Roger Sullivan, an attorney for the plaintiffs, urged the justices to uphold Seeley’s ruling, which blocked the restriction. He said it “closes the eyes of Montana’s environmental agencies to the most serious environmental crisis Montana has ever experienced, the climate crisis.”
In her ruling, Seeley found that the youth had a fundamental right to a clean and healthy environment under a 1972 amendment to the Montana Constitution that required the state to protect and improve the environment.
The closely watched case was the first challenge from young environmental activists to appear in court in the US. These lawsuits challenge state and federal policies that they say encourage or permit the extraction and burning of fossil fuels and violate their rights under U.S. or state constitutions.
While some of these cases have failed, youth activists scored a major victory last month when Hawaii, as part of a first-in-the-nation scheme, agreed to take action to decarbonize its transportation system by 2045.
