Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
On the day Greta Thunberg gave her emotion-filled speech at the United Nation’s (UN) Climate Summit, another historic event involving the Swedish activist and 15 other youthful climate hawks—representing 12 countries–took place. The filing of the first-ever legal complaint about climate change to the UN’s Committee on the Rights of the Child. The communication is titled Sacchi et al. vs. Argentina, et al.
Twenty-two states and seven cities sued the Trump administration on Tuesday over the Environmental Protection Agency’s new plan for power plants. The lawsuit alleges that the so-called Affordable Clean Energy rule would accelerate the impacts of the climate crisis and impose health and safety risks on Americans.
Political lobbying in the US that helped block the progress of proposed climate regulation a decade ago led to a social cost of $60 billion, according to a new study.
The 21 youth plaintiffs in Juliana v. United States allege that the government’s role in perpetuating a fossil fuel energy system despite knowledge of the climate consequences amounts to violations of their constitutional rights.
The question remains unanswered: Do we — including future generations — have a legal right to a climate in which we can pursue our rights to life, liberty, property and happiness?
I look at the land as being part of a sacred covenant with our children and the coming generations. If we live for ourselves only, our lives are bereft of true legacy. But when we live in the presence of our ancestors, we also live for our descendants. To feel concern for the future is to bring a piece of eternity into the present and let it guide us.
The chief judge of an Australian court of superior jurisdiction has, for the first time, found that a coalmine ought to be refused for its impact on climate change. And the decision comes just in time.
In lay terms, the plaintiffs are pushing back on the government’s continued efforts to prevent the case from going to trial. The Administration’s strategy these days is to go around trial and appellate court rulings by directly seeking relief from an increasingly conservative Supreme Court.
The Trump administration has once again filed a motion to dismiss Juliana v. United States before the trial even begins. Although rebuffed for the second time by the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) on November 2, 2018, government attorneys thought to go back to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit with the same hackneyed request to deny the youthful plaintiffs in the case their day in court—hoping for a different outcome.
Judge Brian Morris of the U.S. District Court in Montana ruled Thursday that the project cannot proceed until the Trump administration produces an environmental impact report that actually deals with the fact of climate change, The Huffington Post Reported.
Late this afternoon the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) released a brief 3-page order denying the Trump administration’s motion to dismiss the Juliana case in advance of trial. The allowance to proceed comes as something of a surprise as it follows Chief Justice Roberts’ stay of the trial just days before it was scheduled to begin in an Oregon federal district court.
Whatever the Supreme Court decides in the case of 21 young plaintiffs seeking to protect themselves and the nation from the worst ravages of Earth’s warming climate, they and their attorneys have created a record in which the Trump administration has admitted the truth about the causes and harms of global climate change.
