"21 kids sued the government over climate change. A federal court dismissed the case," 17 Jan 2020

A three-judge panel in the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 to dismiss the Juliana v. US lawsuit on Friday, a seminal case involving 21 young people who sued the federal government for violating their right to a safe climate. The decision is a blow to climate activists and shows the limits of the courts’ willingness to assign legal responsibility to the government for the harms caused by greenhouse gases.

The judges all agreed that climate change is an urgent, threatening problem, but ruled that the plaintiffs, who were between the ages of 8 and 19 when the suit was filed, didn’t have standing to sue. They also said that climate policies must come from the legislative branch. “The panel reluctantly concluded that the plaintiffs’ case must be made to the political branches or to the electorate at large,” according to the ruling...

Despite proposing a novel legal theory — that a safe climate is a civil right and that the government has violated it through policies like leasing public lands for coal mining — the suit managed to get surprisingly far. It survived several motions to dismiss and intervention by the US Supreme Court.

But what the plaintiffs wanted — a government plan to phase out fossil fuels and pull greenhouse gases back out of the air — was not something the courts could provide. “Reluctantly, we conclude that such relief is beyond our constitutional power,” Hurwitz wrote...

However, District Court Judge Josephine Staton thought otherwise and did not mince words in her dissent. “It is as if an asteroid were barreling toward Earth and the government decided to shut down our only defenses,” she wrote. “Seeking to quash this suit, the government bluntly insists that it has the absolute and unreviewable power to destroy the Nation.”