PORTLAND, Ore. —
The long-running case of Juliana vs. U.S. suffered a setback recently.
The landmark climate lawsuit, filed by 21 young people in Oregon in 2015, was ordered dismissed by a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals last week.
Julia Olson, chief legal counsel at Our Children’s Trust, the nonprofit representing the plaintiffs, said the ruling was unwelcome news.
“It was disappointing to get the opinion ordering dismissal of the Juliana case again,” she said, adding that she will be working to have the ruling overturned. “The decision is flat wrong.”
Just a few months ago, the case appeared to be finally headed to trial.
The case was ordered dismissed after the Department of Justice filed an emergency petition, which argued the government would be “irreparably harmed” if it were forced to continue litigating the case.
The crux of the case hinges on the plaintiff's allegation that the federal government has failed to protect their right to a stable environment. The plaintiffs also argue that the government has helped to worsen climate change, both through inaction and through subsidies and incentives to the fossil fuel industry.
“Our government has knowingly, willfully, made choices and pushed forward an energy system that is dependent on fossil fuels and that is helping to contribute to climate chaos,” lead plaintiff Kelsey Juliana told KGW in 2019.
The Department of Justice has argued that climate change is too large and complex a problem to be decided by the courts. Instead, the government has said, the plaintiffs should be seeking solutions through the legislature.
Olson said history shows that argument doesn’t hold water.
“If we had left things like segregation or women's rights or same sex marriage to legislatures, people would have been discriminated against for decades, centuries, longer than they have been,” Olson said.
Beyond that, the plaintiffs were all minors when the case was filed, giving them little legislative recourse.
“To tell a group of people who were under the age of 18 that they don't have any rights and they need to go to the political branches when they have no ability to vote and no economic power to lobby is really a further injustice,” Olson said.
Olson also noted that the emergency petition was especially disappointing coming from the Department of Justice under President Joe Biden, who has been seen by many as a solid ally for those working on climate change.
“I think it really goes against what the Biden administration claims to stand for, which is working hard on climate, working hard to protect young people, working hard to protect the rule of law,” she said. “On all three of those points, they have done the opposite, and they're harming each of those three things by their position in the Juliana case.”
The plaintiffs have 45 days to respond with their own petition and Olson said they plan to ask the full Ninth Circuit to review their argument to have the case go to trial.
“We do plan to now petition for en banc review, which means that the panel of 11 judges on the Ninth Circuit would hopefully take up the case and review that decision and correct it,” she said. “These plaintiffs, they've proven injury, they've proven that the government is causing their injury and they're just asking for the court to say that that the conduct of the government is unconstitutional.”