Montana climate lawsuit claims a victory

Encouraging news, the judge ruled in favor of the young climate activists lawsuit against the state in failing to consider alternatives to fossil fuels, thus constitutionally not protecting Montanans from the devastation caused by climate change.

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/14/1193780700/montana-climate-change-trial-ruling

No doubt appeals to come from the FF industry, though this may be a model for changing the equation to fight climate change at the govt level.

 

So,

Just FYI the judge is a she, not sure who you are referring to? It's our democratic system of justice that is in your way here. Plaintiffs bring a lawsuit and Defendants need to justify their actions. The State did not consider alternative fuels in their projects and as was pointed out in trial are economically beneficial and technically feasible. The young will be the most impacted by climate change, and they made their case. Good for them.

 

And agree, they should be able to weigh options and that's the point of the lawsuit - the State was not allowed to consider alternatives to fossil fuels for projects. If there are better alternatives, from multiple perspectives, cost, environmental impact, health, infrastructure, the State is constitutionally required to consider those factors in their decisions.

 

Going after some windmills there, viruses don't exist and climate change is religion. Considering a name change to Don Quixote Dad?

I don't think she is trying to run govt, rather enforcing what the State is constitutionally required to do, and they weren't. The State could have given good rationale for why they would only consider FF, but from interviews of people who watched this trial closely, their arguments were not convincing. The ruling may not make a difference because it is still up to a climate change-denying majority legislature to revise the policy, and my guess is that they will continue to find loopholes.

 

Well, I'm not a lawyer, but this is the link to the section in the state constitution which deals with the case

the Montana Constitution, Article IX, Section 1. Protection and improvement., which goes on to describe the following:

Constitution of Montana -- Article IX -- ENVIRONMENT AND NATURAL RESOURCES
Section 1. Protection and improvement. (1) The state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations.
(2) The legislature shall provide for the administration and enforcement of this duty.
(3) The legislature shall provide adequate remedies for the protection of the environmental life support system from degradation and provide adequate remedies to prevent unreasonable depletion and degradation of natural resources.

I also agree on deforestation, we watching as the Amazon disappears along with many species we may never know exist. But to use the argument, which the State tried unsuccessfully, that a state can't make a difference in the bigger picture of climate change, would mean we just live in the land of self-defeat. Significant changes start with grass roots.

 

Thanks, not a thorough read, but consistently the environmental impacts of systems on air and water quality is required by law. The absence of environmental impact in the State policies was a key finding in the trial. I think anytime there is a super majority of one party, the risk of making short cuts for ideological positions creates potential abuse, as in this case.

 

Reviewing the list of signatories reveals a small number who are climate scientists and several with ties to the fossil fuel industry, from which the group may be funded.

OTOH, analyses of climate studies and scientists indicate that today, there is a near 99% consensus of studies that believe humans are responsible for climate change by burning FF. iopscience.iop.org

Abstract While controls over the Earth’s climate system have undergone rigorous hypothesis-testing since the 1800s, questions over the scientific consensus of the role of human activities in modern climate change continue to arise in public settings. We update previous efforts to quantify the scientific consensus on climate change by searching the recent literature for papers sceptical of anthropogenic-caused global warming. From a dataset of 88125 climate-related papers published since 2012, when this question was last addressed comprehensively, we examine a randomized subset of 3000 such publications. We also use a second sample-weighted approach that was specifically biased with keywords to help identify any sceptical peer-reviewed papers in the whole dataset. We identify four sceptical papers out of the sub-set of 3000, as evidenced by abstracts that were rated as implicitly or explicitly sceptical of human-caused global warming. In our sample utilizing pre-identified sceptical keywords we found 28 papers that were implicitly or explicitly sceptical. We conclude with high statistical confidence that the scientific consensus on human-caused contemporary climate change—expressed as a proportion of the total publications—exceeds 99% in the peer reviewed scientific literature.