The Wayne Lyman Morse United States Courthouse is located on East 8th Ave. in Eugene, Ore. (Molly McPherson/Emerald)
Eugene, Ore., appears to be the cradle of the emerging climate litigation movement.
Our Children’s Trust — a nonprofit law firm based in Eugene, Ore. — represents youth plaintiffs who have filed lawsuits in a strategy to rule the United States’ reliance on fossil fuels unconstitutional. Most notably, the law firm filed the successful Held v. State of Montana case and the upcoming Juliana v. United States federal case.
The firm was founded in 2010 by lawyer and activist Julia Olson, and attorneys from across the United States joined the firm in order to combat the fossil fuel energy system via the judicial system.
The effort has had real success –– in Montana, a case sought to rule that the state had violated the plaintiff’s constitutional rights through its reliance on a fossil-fuel based energy system. It succeeded, and Held v. Montana became the first successful constitutional climate case in U.S. history.
Our Children’s Trust’s legal strategists are using “Atmospheric Trust Litigation,” a legal approach developed by UO Environmental Law Center Professor Mary Christina Wood. The method is an evolution of public trust doctrine and states that the Earth’s atmosphere is a common resource that governments bear the responsibility to regulate.
“By analogy, imagine you’re on a ship, and there are 100 different rooms on the ship, and every person separately controls a different room,” Wood said. “If you allow one unit to leak, it’s going to ultimately bring down the whole ship. So the trust approach holds everybody accountable for their jurisdiction, and it recognizes that everybody is a co-trustee.”
The most ambitious case brought by Our Children’s Trust may be Juliana v. United States. The case was brought by 21 youth plaintiffs in 2015 and has been featured in countless national media publications, a 60 Minutes special and even a Netflix documentary. The case’s lead plaintiff, Kelsey Juliana, was a University of Oregon student.
The Juliana case succeeded in the Oregon U.S. District Court, where the federal judge’s opinion stated that “the right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life is fundamental to a free and ordered society.” But during the Trump presidency, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals did not allow the case to go to trial, inspiring protests.
However, on June 1, 2023, Judge Ann Aiken ruled that the case would finally go to trial with an amended complaint that addressed the Ninth Circuit’s complaints.Juliana v. United States now seeks a declaratory judgment that the United States’ reliance on fossil fuels is unconstitutional based on the evidence that for over 50 years the government knowingly accelerated climate change while increasing fossil fuel reliance.
The Juliana case will go to trial in the Oregon U.S. District Court in 2024 at the Wayne Morse Federal Courthouse in Eugene. If the case succeeds there, it will proceed to the Ninth Circuit in Los Angeles, and if the plaintiffs win there as well, it will finally be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Mirroring the Civil Rights Movement’s legal phase in the mid-1950s, the judicial system has become the next battleground of the climate movement; another lawsuit was filed by the state of California against five major oil companies on Sept. 16. Much like Brown v. Board of Education’s massive victory in school desegregation, Juliana v. United States –– if successful –– would declare a constitutional right to a livable climate.
“There’s a great similarity with the Juliana case with cases such as Brown, because what the Supreme Court found was that the system of segregation in schools was harming young children,” Phil Gregory, counsel and trial lawyer for both cases, said.
“Separate-but-equal schools were harming children, and it’s that psychological harm to children that was the evidence the Supreme Court used to invalidate segregation in schools. And so, what we are doing with Our Children’s Trust is saying that the systemic human activities causing greenhouse gas emissions are greatly damaging young people, particularly our youth plaintiffs,” Gregory said.
The similarities between Brown and Juliana don’t end there, though. Part of Brown’s evidence that segregated schools were inherently unequal was the use of segregation’s psychological impact on Black children. Like Brown, the Juliana case will seek to establish the climate crisis’ physical and psychological impact on all young people.
As for Held v. Montana, it specifically ruled that the state’s actions to preserve a fossil-fuel-based energy system were unconstitutional, and that a recent ban on considering fossil fuel emissions in environmental evaluations violated the Montana state constitution, which uniquely provides a “right to a clean and healthful environment.”
However, according to Gregory, the Held verdict will have impacts on states without such constitutional protections. The decision will be read and influence other judges in other states. It also shows that climate cases can successfully go to trial in an expedited fashion, which is necessary given the imminent nature of climate change, and that judges and attorneys can successfully frame a decision around fossil fuel-based energy systems. State and federal agencies will also be able to cite the case when evaluating environmental reviews based on the effects of their potential greenhouse gas emissions.
Finally, in the face of increasing fear and frustration, the climate cases have the opportunity to give young people hope. Nathan Baring, 23 –– a plaintiff in the Juliana case from Fairbanks, Alaska –– was a member of a climate activist group, Alaska Youth for Environmental Action, in high school when Our Children’s Trust founder Julia Olson contacted the group looking for plaintiffs. He was hesitant at first, due to him being part of the Quaker community.
“It’s not that the Quakers are against lawsuits on principle. It’s just that they don’t tend to be the way we do business because we don’t usually see them as effective in the long run. But at that point, the way that I viewed it was, essentially, you have no direct voice in our government until you’re 18,” he said. “I saw the lawsuit as an important way to give young people, the recipients of our planet’s future, a voice at the table, when energy decisions were being made that didn’t consider them because they weren’t voting.”
Another climate trial filed by Our Children’s Trust in Hawaii is scheduled to begin in summer 2024.
“Sometimes courts can write the kinds of opinions that motivate and inspire,” said Wood. “Yeah, they implement the law, but they can also declare rights and inspire people, and that can take off and be contagious, and that can surmount the apathy out there.”
Are you curious about how this article was written? Check out this week’s “How It’s Reported” with Ian Proctor.
The Wayne Lyman Morse United States Courthouse is located on East 8th Ave. in Eugene, Ore. (Molly McPherson/Emerald)
