Is there a right to a viable future climate? Young Americans are trying on Trump administration on Tuesday on Tuesday, which they accuse of flouting their fundamental rights by promoting oil and gas.
“It worries me a lot of thinking about my future,” Eva Lighthisiser, a principal complainant, had to move for climatic reasons for AFP.
For this 19 -year -old woman, “it’s very difficult to accept for someone who just enters adulthood”.
She will testify Tuesday and Wednesday alongside 21 other young people, including several minors, as part of this action brought before a federal court in Missoula, Montana, rural state in the northwest of the United States.
Their complaint illustrates the growing displacement of climate combat on the judicial field, often on the initiative of young people of the same age. This summer, it was students of the Vanuatu archipelago who obtained a resounding victory before the International Court of Justice, the highest court of the UN.
Citing repercussions on their health, the group of young Americans attacks Donald Trump decrees to facilitate the production of oil and gas, hinder that of renewable energy and obscure monitoring of the effects of climate change.
Climatologists, a pediatrician or former democratic climate emissary John Podesta will testify to support their approach.
It will be “the first time” that the complainants will be able to testify directly to the new republican government on how its policy “provokes the crisis and prejudice to young people”, explains to AFP Andrea Rogers, lawyer for the association Our Children’s Trust, who represents them.
Supreme conservative courtyard
The action is currently at the procedural stadium: it aims to obtain from the judge that he orders the holding of a trial. The federal government, joined by 19 conservative states and the territory of Guam, requires a classification without follow -up.
Although the judge, Dana Christensen, is known for decisions in favor of the environment, observers are not optimistic. Even in the event of a trial, the procedure may end up to the Supreme Court, dominated by the conservatives.
And the absence of strong federal case law on a “constitutional right to a clean environment” does not play in favor of the movement, said to AFP Michael Gerrard, professor of environmental law at Columbia University.
“This Supreme Court is rather inclined to withdraw rights than granting it, unless you have a firearm,” he says.
The legal team nevertheless keeps hope, after recent victories won at States.
In 2023, a Montana judge agreed with young complainants who challenged the non-imprisonment of the climate in the issuance of petroleum and gas permit, saying that this violated their constitutional right to a healthy environment.
A year later, young Hawaiian activists obtained an agreement forcing their state to accelerate the decarbonation of the transport sector.
But at the federal level, the scale does not lean on the side of the activists. The best known affair, dating back to 2015, was closed in 2023 … by the Supreme Court.
The Trump government could argue that the climate issue is a matter of politics and not the courts.
But, notes lawyer Andrea Rogers, “the question of whether the executive power violates the constitutional rights of young people is precisely the kind of question that the courts have decided for decades”.
