Plaintiffs in federal lawsuit allege harms to places like Glacier National Park due to climate change. Pictured is Glenns Lake in Glacier National Park (Photo by Jeff Pang via Glacier National Park and Flickr | CC-BY-SA 2.0).
MISSOULA — For the second time in two years a youth-led lawsuit challenging the government’s role in climate change is seeing the inside of a Montana courtroom — this time with more plaintiffs and Democratic political consultant John Podesta as a key witness.
Twenty-two youth are suing the Trump administration over the president’s executive orders aimed at supporting the fossil fuel industry, curbing renewable energy and suppressing climate science.
“This case asks a fundamental question: Does the United States Constitution guard against abuses of power by executive order that deprive children and youths of their fundamental rights to life and liberty?” Julia Olsen, founder of the law firm Our Children’s Trust and lead attorney for the plaintiffs said in her opening remarks. “The three executive orders the plaintiffs challenge prioritize pollution over protections for the most vulnerable Americans.”
Tuesday in federal district court in Missoula, Olsen argued that Judge Dana Christensen should temporarily halt the Trump administration’s executive orders.
The Justice Department argued Christensen should dismiss the case for a lack of standing, on similar grounds as another federal climate-related lawsuit, Juliana v. United States, which was dismissed by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals after nearly a decade of litigation.
In a brief opening statement, federal attorney Michael Sawyer said the case lacks standing and the plaintiffs are asking for the court to take policy-setting power away from the executive and legislative branches.
The real matter, Sawyer said, is not an issue of constitutionality, but that the plaintiffs have policy differences with the president’s administration, which they are “entitled to” and can advocate for.
“What they’re not entitled to is to ask the court to step in and resolve this energy policy dispute by interpreting the Constitution to require a certain energy policy,” Sawyer said.
‘Stop the climate from getting worse’
The lead plaintiff, 19-year-old Eva Lighthiser of Livingston, is one of several Montana plaintiffs who were also plaintiffs in the landmark Held v. Montana case, in which a district court and, in late 2024, the Montana Supreme Court, found the youth have a right to a stable climate system under Montana’s constitutional right to a “clean and healthful environment.”
In the current suit, Lighthiser is joined by Rikki Held, Lander and Badge Busse — sons of former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ryan Busse — and six others from the Montana lawsuit, as well as young people from Hawai‘i, Oregon, California and Florida, ages 7 to 25.
Plaintiffs from Hawai’i were also involved in a successful youth-led climate lawsuit against the state’s Department of Transportation, while other plaintiffs took part in Juliana, a federal suit that sought a nationwide plan to address climate change.
President Donald Trump is a named defendant in the Lighthiser suit, along with 11 federal agencies and their respective agency heads, including the Department of Energy, Department of Transportation, Environmental Protection Agency and NASA.
At its heart are Trump Executive Orders 14154, “Unleashing American Energy,” 14156, “Declaring a National Energy Emergency,” and 14261, “Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry.” To carry out the orders, federal agencies have rolled back funding from climate-related initiatives and worked to streamline regulatory processes for the extractive industries.
Olsen said that while the science of climate change and its impacts on the plaintiffs are complex, she believes the lawsuit also carries a simple throughline.
“The uncontested purpose of these executive orders is to expand fossil fuel use and suppress its biggest competitors,” Olsen said. “Defendants want us to buy more fossil fuels and less renewable energy, more combustion vehicles and fewer electric vehicles. The whole point of the trio of these EOs is to unleash fossil fuels.”
And such an unleashing, she said, would exacerbate the cascade of harms experienced by the young people sitting in the federal courtroom.
In a similar strategy to the Held trial, attorneys for the youth — Our Children’s Trust, an Oregon-based law firm, along with Gregory Law Group, McGarvey Law in Kalispell, and Public Justice — are using a mixture of plaintiff testimony and expert witnesses to make their arguments.
Joseph Lee, 19, a sophomore at UC San Diego, among four young people who took the witness stand to share experiences with increased environmental disasters, said on Tuesday that the outdoors “runs in my blood.”
“My connection to nature is a deeply healing one,” Lee said. “I honestly don’t know where I’d be without it.”
Growing up in California, Lee said he dealt with severe asthma, made worse in extreme heat and smoky conditions from wildlifes. He shared a story of going for a walk during a heat wave, passing out due to heat stroke, and waking up in the hospital with his lungs “on the verge of collapse.”
“I’m terrified to go outdoors,” Lee said. “Everytime I receive a notification on my phone, it’s a trigger, a reminder of the days two years ago I could have been on my deathbed because of an outdoor climate I can’t control.”
Lee also spoke about his desire to pursue a career in environmental and climate science and selected his university based on its reputation for housing internationally renowned research centers.
However, Lee said he had recently had to change his major — which was “devastating” — after seeing job opportunities at his school removed and federal grants funding environmental science internships revoked. He said continued funding threats and proposed policy changes left him feeling hopeless about his future in the field.
“Climate change is a big problem, but what (stopping) these executive orders will do, is they’re going to stop the climate from getting worse, and that’s all I’m asking for,” Lee said.
Lawyers for Trump challenged a few aspects of the youths’ testimony, including whether any of their grievances could be specifically tied to one of the Executive Orders such as the elimination of climate internship programs or a delay in a high school receiving an EPA grant for electric buses, which another plaintiff testified about.
They also asked two plaintiffs who own or work with horses if they should be prevented from raising horses to slow climate change.
‘Every tonne matters’
“Have the Executive Orders caused climate change?” attorney Miranda Jensen asked plaintiffs’ expert witness Steven Running.
“They haven’t yet,” said Running, a former NASA scientist and contributor to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for its work.
But continuing to focus on the fossil fuel industry will contribute to climate change and exacerbate harms to the plaintiffs, Running stated.
Running shared the basics of climate science and showed how coal mined in Montana ends up as atmospheric CO2.
Some mined coal is shipped by rail to port cities on the coast, then shipped on barges overseas where it is burned to generate electricity.
“The carbon dioxide comes back to Montana in the atmosphere faster than the empty barges get back here,” Running said.
In his testimony, Running distilled several decades of climate research for the court: “Every additional tonne (of carbon dioxide) matters to the whole world and definitely matters to these plaintiffs. The sooner we slow down emissions, the sooner we stabilize the climate. It’s really pretty straight forward.”
Attorneys for the youth also called John Podesta to testify as a witness focusing on a president’s power to utilize executive orders.
Podesta served in three Democratic administrations — as President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, a counselor to President Barack Obama and as a senior adviser for clean energy and climate policy for President Joe Biden.
His testimony also focused on the far-reaching impacts of the executive orders – including rolling back funding from climate resiliency initiatives, renewable energy programs and scientific research.
The Trump administration dismissed hundreds of scientists tasked with authoring the next edition of the Naitonal Climate Assessment, and climate-related terminology has been removed from many agency websites.
Such actions are effectively blindfolding not just the federal government, but state and local governments working to create resilient communities Podesta said.
“If you have those facts in front of you … the decision to ignore it and rush to unleash more fossil fuels and more pollution is going to be challenged as arbitrary and capricious, not well-taken, and certainly going to harm these plaintiffs,” Podesta said.
The lack of access to knowledge will lead to “more pollution, more extreme weather, more heat waves, more asthma, more trauma, stronger hurricanes, and we’ll be dealing with that and dealing with trying to build resilient communities with a blindfold on.”
“These kids are being harmed by these actions,” he told the judge. “And the court can do something about that.”
A final expert witness who testified on Tuesday was Mark Jacobson, director of Stanford University’s Atmosphere/Energy Program.
Jacobson shared his work crafting conceptual plans for all 50 states, and D.C. to transition 100% to renewable energy by building more wind, solar and battery projects and using existing hydropower generation.
The benefits, Jacobson said, would be far-reaching, including decreasing national energy use and residential energy costs, reducing land use and preventing nearly 100,000 annual deaths due to air pollution.
It’s a transition he said is already underway in China, which at current rates could be fully renewable by 2045, while it would take America 100 more years if the government continues to prioritize fossil fuels.
The forthcoming case for dismissal
The government’s side will take up a larger portion of Wednesday’s hearing as Christiansen focuses on its motion to dismiss the suit.
Tuesday in his opening statement, Sawyer stated that Trump’s executive order on unleashing American energy includes bolstering some forms of renewable energy including geothermal, biofuels and nuclear energy.
“Why are plaintiffs, who claim to suffer climate change injuries, asking the court to make it harder to deploy renewables or nuclear energy by halting these executive orders?” Sawyer asked the court.
While the executive order on unleashing energy mentions some renewable sources, it specifically excludes wind, solar and battery storage from its definition of “energy,” which Podesta had said “hobbles” those sectors.
Sawyer said challenging broad, sweeping executive orders ordering agencies to consider their regulatory actions was not the correct avenue.
“… When agencies issue final decisions, they will be subject to judicial review in the courts of appeal. That’s the correct forum for disputes, not a lawsuit where plaintiffs seek wholesale change of national energy policy,” Sawyer said.
Sawyer said the American people had elected a new administration less than a year ago, and the lawsuit amounted to a request for the court to step in and “overrule the results of that election.”
“At its core, this is an anti-democratic lawsuit,” he said.
The state of Montana is leading a coalition of 18 other Republican states, and the Territory in Guam, as additional defendants in the lawsuit.
Montana solicitor general Christian Corrigan and an attorney from Attorney General Austin Knudsen’s office were in court Tuesday, but did not take part in any cross examination.
This story was originally produced by Daily Montanan, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Utah News Dispatch, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
