Thom Bridge/Independent Record via AP
Judge Kathy Seeley listens to arguments during a status hearing in the case of Held v. Montana, in the Lewis and Clark County Courthouse, May 12, 2023, in Helena, Montana.
After multiple seasons of climate disasters marked by deadly wildfires in Hawaii, blistering heat waves in the South and Southwest, and atmospheric rivers inundating California, it is only fitting that young people are the ones to score a landmark legal victory in one of the country’s key fossil fuel–producing states.
On Monday in a Montana courtroom, 16 plaintiffs ages 5 to 22 won a lawsuit that sets up a framework to chip away at the fossil fuel industry’s chokehold on the environment. Montana District Court Judge Kathy Seeley ruled that a provision of the Montana Environmental Policy Act infringed on the state constitution’s grant of “inalienable rights” to a clean and healthful environment for Montanans.
The “MEPA limitation” prohibits environmental studies that unpack the effects of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions on climate change beyond the state’s borders. In finding the provision unconstitutional, the judge methodically outlined how the increases in Montana’s greenhouse gas emissions have unleashed a torrent of negative effects on young people and the environment within the state itself as well as contributing to regional, national, and global environmental damage.
Held v. Montana, the first constitutional climate law decision in the United States, would be extraordinary in American jurisprudence if all it did was provide an accessible breakdown of climate science and deconstruct the state constitutional questions and regulatory policies. But the decision did more than that. It catalogued the specific physical, psychological, cultural, and economic harms that young people have suffered, explained the threats to the state’s diverse ecosystems, and spotlighted renewable technologies.
Most importantly, it debunked the idea that climate change is too difficult for laymen to understand. The plaintiffs’ case was taken up by Our Children’s Trust, a public-interest law firm that has pursued climate litigation in all 50 states, the Montana-based McGarvey Law firm, and the Western Environmental Law Center.
“The harms that young people experience due to climate change are disproportionately damaging to them than just to the rest of us adults,” says Barbara Chillcott, a Western Environmental Law Center senior attorney who worked on the case. “For some naysayers to make the argument that accused the legal team of just using young people to advance some liberal agenda, it was very clear during the trial that these youths chose to take a stand and protect their rights.”
If “climate science” was “on trial,” as dozens of headlines proclaimed, then the plaintiffs’ team of climate scientists (including one Nobel Prize winner) who provided expert testimony won a convincing victory. It is certain to influence future fights against those Montana energy project siting decisions that show minimal interest in the human or environmental consequences.
Held v. Montana debunked the idea that climate change is too difficult for laymen to understand.
Montana is the country’s fifth-largest coal producer; the state also has significant oil and gas deposits. Judge Seeley provided an exhaustive list of the ways Montana injures its residents and the environment through its permitting of “fossil fuel energy projects, including oil and gas pipelines and associated compressor stations, coal mines and coal facilities, oil and gas facilities, oil and gas leases, oil and gas drilling, petroleum refineries, industrial facilities that burn fossil fuels, and fossil fuel power plants.”
“Every ton of fossil fuel emissions contributes to global warming and impacts to the climate and thus increases the exposure of Youth Plaintiffs to harms now and additional harms in the future,” she wrote.
“What we have is a definitive ruling from a judge accepting the core arguments of climate scientists—and that is something that has never happened before,” says Noah Sachs, director of the Merhige Center for Environmental Studies at the University of Richmond School of Law. He pointed to news media pundits who claimed that climate was so complex and unwieldy that it was “too big to have a judicial remedy for.” “What this case shows is that, no, this is an issue that can be managed in the courts,” he says.
In addition to exploring how events like wildfire smoke can exacerbate physical conditions such as asthma, and how extreme heat can lead to liver and kidney damage, the judge’s ruling also marked another significant milestone for the courts by introducing climate anxiety, a relatively new field of study, as evidence in a trial. “It’s really critical that it got so much airtime during the trial, and it’s equally critical that Judge Seeley didn’t hang her order on that,” says Melissa Hornbein, another Western Environmental Law Center senior attorney.
During the trial, the court heard testimony from Rikki Held, 22, the lead plaintiff, who pointed to the effects of wildfire smoke and flooding on her family’s cattle ranch and motel business. Sariel Sandoval, 20, a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes, explained her significant distress over climate change’s impacts on the plants that indigenous people rely on for traditional medicines and other cultural practices. Claire Vlases, 19, described the fear and loss she experienced for witnessing glaciers melting in Glacier National Park and the accompanying anxiety she has about whether it is safe to have children in the future under these conditions.
The judge determined that the court could in fact consider plaintiffs’ assertions that their mental health injuries—loss, despair, and anxiety—had been caused by climate change. “The threat of loss can be enough to cause mental health harms, especially when there are no signs the future will be any different,” Judge Seeley wrote. “Children born in 2020 will experience a two- to seven-fold increase in extreme events, particularly heatwaves, compared with people born in 1960.”
“In my view, she’s saying the baby boomers don’t get it,” Sachs says. (Sachs’s daughter, an environmental activist, is a youth plaintiff in another Our Children’s Trust climate case that is currently under appeal in Virginia.)
The plaintiffs’ encyclopedic overview stood in stark contrast to the thin defense offered by the state’s own attorneys, who wrapped up their case after just one day. The state argued that Montana was not at fault, that the state legislature rather than the courts was the proper venue for these issues. Their experts downplayed the severity of climate change and questioned whether it had anthropogenic origins. (In her ruling, Seeley discredited the testimony of one of the three expert witnesses as “not well-supported” and filled with “errors.”) The Montana attorney general plans to appeal the case to the state’s supreme court.
Hornbein suggests that there are a small number of states with similar constitutional language or provisions that establish environmental rights that are likely to build on the Held foundation. Last year, 14 young people represented by Our Children’s Trust and Earthjustice filed suit in Hawaii against the state department of transportation for its role in overseeing a greenhouse gas–producing system. (The transportation sector is the country’s largest producer of greenhouse emissions.) Hawaii’s constitution specifies that “each person has the right to a clean and healthful environment.”
Hornbein also notes that Held v. Montana may have broader applications beyond the right to a clean and healthful environment. Almost all state constitutions guarantee protections for dignity, liberty, and health and safety under the laws, areas that the plaintiffs’ attorneys incorporated into the Held case. These are claims that could be at issue in the federal case currently in play, Juliana v. United States. That case was dismissed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2021. However, the plaintiffs amended their complaint and are now proceeding to a new trial. Their argument: A fossil fuel–dependent energy system that threatens their rights to life, liberty, and property is unconstitutional.
