Montana’s Constitutional Climate Trial: Protecting the Future of Young Plaintiffs

2023-06-14 18:51:18

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The first constitutional trial on the climate in the history of the United States opened this Monday, June 12, where sixteen plaintiffs, aged 5 to 22, accuse the State of Montana of jeopardizing their future by supporting the energies fossils.

Can support for the fossil fuel industry be unconstitutional? This is what the historic trial which opened on June 12 in Montana will have to answer. In this state in the northwestern United States, a group of sixteen young people, aged 5 to 22, say that their government, addicted to fossil fuels, is destroying their environment and jeopardizing their future. For them, Montana is therefore not respecting its constitutional obligation to “maintaining and improving a clean and healthy environment for present and future generations”. This is the first constitutional climate trial in US history.

At 22, Rikki Held gave her name to the case: Held v. State of Montana. The only major plaintiff to file a lawsuit in 2020 once morest multiple Montana government agencies and its governor, she accuses the state of implementing an energy policy that violates her constitutional right to a safe environment. Worse, in early 2023, Republican lawmakers approved a law that prohibits state regulators from calculating the climate effects of major projects, such as building new power plants or factories.

“Farmers see things differently”

Environmental science student Rikki Held grew up

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