The Montana Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected an 11th-hour attempt by Attorney General Austin Knudsen to cancel a high-profile climate change trial set to begin in Helena next week.
The lawsuit was filed in 2020 by a group of young Montanans represented by the environmental group Our Children’s Trust. It alleges that the state’s policies in support of fossil fuels, and the resulting impacts of climate change in Montana, violate the plaintiffs’ right to a “clean and healthful environment” outlined in the state Constitution.
In a 6-1 decision, the high court rejected Knudsen’s argument that a state law being challenged in the lawsuit, the Montana Environmental Policy Act (MEPA), had been changed so much by the Legislature during its most recent session that the plaintiffs need to advance a fresh set of legal arguments. Knudsen asked the justices on Monday for a writ of supervisory control that would have overridden a district court judge’s prior order to go ahead with the trial next week.
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“In this case, the state has provided no reason why the district court’s ruling cannot be reviewed on appeal, if necessary,” the justices wrote in their order. “… Moreover, trial, with preparation literally years in the making, is set to commence less than a week from now. We are not inclined to disturb the district court’s schedule at this juncture.”
MEPA lays out the environmental review process for the state’s permitting agencies. The lawsuit argues that a carve-out in the law, which allowed the state to ignore environmental impacts that were “global in nature,” fails to live up to the Montana Constitution, including a provision tasking the Legislature with protecting “the environmental life support system from degradation.”
Knudsen is named alongside the governor and several state agencies as a defendant in the lawsuit. In the petition he filed with the Supreme Court on Monday, he argued that House Bill 971, signed into law last month, changed MEPA enough that the trial should be vacated and the plaintiffs should have to rebuild their legal arguments based on the law’s new language.
HB 971 effectively strengthened the carve-out, explicitly denying the state the ability to make regulatory decisions based on the effects of “greenhouse gas emissions and corresponding impacts to the climate in the state or beyond its borders.”
The justices wrote that Knudsen failed to show how that new language changes the case.
“Since the complaint was filed, the theory of this claim has been that prohibiting consideration of the impacts of climate change in environmental review violates the Montana Constitution,” they wrote. “The state does not explain how HB 971 changes that issue for trial.”
Justice Jim Rice was the lone dissenting voice in the court’s order. He would have ordered a response and postponed the trial, the order states.
District Court Judge Kathy Seeley has previously narrowed the scope of the case, and last month tossed out a portion of the complaint that challenged a law that was repealed by the Legislature earlier this year.