Youth Climate Activists Are Finally Getting Their Day in Court

Yet Montana is on the front lines of climate change. Over the past decade, fiery summers have turned the state’s expansive blue skies gray and yellow with ash, scorched dense evergreen forests and rendered great tracts of ranchlands useless.  

Despite this, Montana lawmakers recently passed a bill curbing climate impact reviews for large fossil fuel projects. Opponents of the legislation say it was written as a reaction to a revoked permit for a NorthWestern Energy methane gas plant in Yellowstone County. It’s the latest in what policy experts consider a pattern of state policies that are friendlier toward energy interests than public interests. The plaintiffs argue that lawmakers have consciously prioritized the development of fossil fuels over the well-being of residents and the protection of public resources, including rivers, lakes, and wildlife.

The suit is “critically important at a time when our state government is actively undermining the things that make Montana unique,” said Hornbein. “We have a government that really seems bent on destroying it, frankly.”

The state has tried repeatedly to have the case dismissed. Legislators even attempted to change environmental protection laws to remove the legal basis of the complaint. The attorney general asked the state Supreme Court to take the case out of Seeley’s court and issue a stay blocking discovery just as the deposition of expert witnesses was to begin. It denied both requests. Seeley rejected yet another motion to dismiss late last month, though she did rule that the legislature’s recent repeal of the State Energy Policy, which the plaintiffs argue explicitly endorsed the development and use of fossil fuels, rendered that point moot and would not be considered at trial. 

Attorneys with Our Children’s Trust were too busy preparing to comment, but senior attorney Nate Bellinger told the Helena Independent-Record the case is “strong legally and factually.” The state constitution, he notes, clearly and specifically states that residents enjoy an inalienable right to a clean and healthful environment. “The courts over the years have given meaning to that constitutional language,” he said. 

Before that language was added to the constitution in 1972, the state was even friendlier toward extractive business interests, said Alex Skuntz, a University of Montana law student who has been researching and following the case closely. In that time, some likened Montana to a resource colony, one ruled by the “Copper Kings” who dominated state politics and culture and fought against pollution regulations while, say, insisting on the benefits of arsenic. “Things didn’t pass unless industry wanted them to pass,” said Skuntz, who was until this spring editor in chief of Public Land and Resources Review. As the copper industry grew, so did the environmental disasters associated with it, and the reign of the Copper Kings became the subject of massive grassroots opposition.  

In 1972, amid a national flurry of environmental laws and increased concern within Montana about the pace and impacts of environmental destruction, a bipartisan group of 100 delegates rewrote the state constitution in hopes of overturning the oligarchy of private interests that had historically run things. Montana followed Pennsylvania to become the second state in the union to assure its citizens the right to clean air and water (New York became the third in 2021).