Supreme Court Lets Youths’ Case Demanding Climate Action Proceed

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/02/us/politics/supreme-court-youth-climate-case.html

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WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday refused to halt the trial in a lawsuit brought by 21 young people seeking to force the federal government to take action to address climate change.

The court’s unsigned order said the Trump administration had raised substantial questions about the plaintiffs’ legal theories and the sweeping relief they sought. But the court said it would not intercede, instructing the plaintiffs to take the case back to an appeals court.

Julia Olson, the lead lawyer for the plaintiffs, said in a statement, “The youth of our nation won an important decision today from the Supreme Court that shows even the most powerful government in the world must follow the rules and process of litigation in our democracy.”

Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch said they would have granted the administration’s request to block the trial until the Supreme Court had an opportunity to consider the case.

In an earlier encounter with the case in July, the Supreme Court also expressed some skepticism about the legal theory in the case, which is based in part on what the plaintiffs say is their constitutional right to a “climate system capable of sustaining human life.”

In a brief, unsigned order in July, the Supreme Court said the breadth of that theory was striking. But the court let the case move forward, saying its intervention would be premature.

The federal government returned to the Supreme Court last month, again asking that the trial, which had been scheduled to start on Monday, be put off while the justices considered whether to hear the case. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. entered a temporary stay, blocking the trial. Friday’s order vacated that stay, meaning that the trial can proceed unless the appeals court acts.

The case was filed in 2015, when President Barack Obama was in office. It sought to hold the federal government accountable for its role in creating a “dangerous climate system,” and it asked a federal judge to order federal agencies to address the matter.

Judge Ann Aiken, of Federal District Court in Eugene, Ore., rejected the government’s attempts to dismiss the case. So far, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has declined to intervene. The first phase of the trial is to last 50 days.

In the government’s application seeking a stay from the Supreme Court, Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco said delaying the trial while the justices considered the case would not harm the plaintiffs.

“Their alleged injuries,” he wrote, “stem from the cumulative effects of CO2 emissions from every source in the world over decades; whatever additions to the global atmosphere that could somehow be attributed to the government over the time it takes to resolve the pending petition are plainly de minimis.”

In response, the plaintiffs said that “such a rationale is antithetical to our nation’s values and the purposes of government.” It would be like letting children stay in dangerous foster homes, the plaintiffs said, on the theory that they had lived there for years.

Mr. Francisco said the plaintiffs could not show the sort of direct and particular injury that would give them standing to sue. Their claimed injuries, he wrote, “all involve the diffuse effects of a generalized phenomenon on a global scale that are the same as those felt by any other person in their communities, in the United States, or throughout the world at large.”

The plaintiffs responded that the harms they would suffer are direct and grave.

“When a child suffers climate-induced flooding where the child sleeps, increased incidence of asthma attacks from climate-induced wildfire and smoke conditions in areas where the child exercises, dead coral reefs due to overly warm oceans where the child swims, and storm surges and rising seas perpetually attacking the barrier island where the child lives so that the child now routinely evacuates and experiences flooding in the child’s roads, home and school,” their brief said, “those injuries are hardly generalized grievances.”