Children Can Now Sue The US Government Over Climate Change (vice.com)

"America's children have officially won the right to sue their government over global warming," reports Motherboard. An anonymous reader quotes their article: Thursday, a lawsuit filed by 21 youth plaintiffs was ruled valid by U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken in Eugene, Oregon. A group of citizens, whose ages range from nine to twenty, charged President Obama, the fossil fuel industry, and other federal agencies with violating their constitutional rights by declining to take action against climate change. "Federal courts too often have been cautious and overly deferential in the arena of environmental law, and the world has suffered for it," wrote Judge Aiken in her ruling. [PDF]
Several groups -- including the U.S. government and the American Petroleum Institute -- had asked the judge to throw out the case, but the judge ruled instead that climate change would "threaten plaintiffs' fundamental constitutional rights to life and liberty," calling man-made climate change an "undisputed" fact. In a related story, Slashdot reader devinp shares a new study which suggests "Global changes in temperature due to human-induced climate change have already impacted every aspect of life on Earth from genes to entire ecosystems, with increasingly unpredictable consequences for humans."

Comments

have to prove damage

[phantomfive]

I would think it would be hard for anyone to prove that they've been damaged by global warming.

Also, there is the legal principle of sovereign immunity: The King Can do No Wrong. If memory serves, victims of radiation from nuclear tests in Nevada sued the government, and lost based on that principle. If victims of nuclear fallout can't win the case, I can't imagine these people will.

But anyway the case should be an entertainment. Bring out the popcorn!

Re:have to prove damage

[Orgasmatron]

Sadly, the government can waive immunity. And then there is the sue&settle technique where an agency partners up with an activist group and together they come up with a plan where the activist group sues the agency, then the agency settles. The settlement then becomes a court order to do or not do something that Congress never would have agreed to.

Re:have to prove damage

[JaredOfEuropa]

It's an interesting case. Moreso because the government isn't really "declining to take action against climate change", is it? At least the current administration acknowledges hat AGW is a problem, and they have some policies to address it. The real question is: what should they be doing, and are they doing enough? There was a similar case here in the Netherlands, where an environmental group sued the government and won. In that case the judges simply said: "government must abide by the treaties they signed, including the Kyoto one", noting that the country wasn't meeting the agreed emission goals. But in this case, I don't think a judge could have ordered the government to sign and ratify the treaty in the first place, merely to uphold the agreements therein.

In this case, what could a judge order the government to do? Reduce emissions by X? Build N wind farms? Sign some treaties? I imagine that a settlement would boil down to whatever gets negotiated between gov't and environmentalists, but... wouldn't it be a funny-as-hell joke on the plaintiffs if a judge ordered the government to fund 20 new nuclear power plants to help meet CO2 reduction goals?

The Dutch ruling has similar interesting side effects: it turns out there are many other treaties and agreements not being kept, and apparently we can now have the court force the government to respect those treaties. For example, the rule ("recommendation") in the NATO treaty about military spending, and the subsequent 2014 agreement of the "freeloading countries" to increase spending and at least approach the minimum agreed amount. Not quite what those environmentalists were after...

Re:have to prove damage

[CrimsonAvenger]

The real question is: what should they be doing, and are they doing enough?

They should be mass-producing a standardized nuclear reactor design to replace every coal-fired plant (and then every gas-fired plant). And no, they're not doing enough.

National Debt

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

Do children get to sue over the accumulating National Debt they will be saddled with.

WWon't survive 5the new SCOTUS

Re:National Debt

[penguinoid]

Well, it would certainly be interesting if they passed a law saying that the generation that voted for a bill gets to pay the resulting taxes.

Re:Cure now, Gym later

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, how about acknowledging that China is already ahead of the USA in investment in renewable energy sources?

So, no the problem isn't actually developing nations, it's the USA. The USA is being left behind and the economy is likely to suffer long term.

This is the really big thing. Renewables are a technology / capital problem. The better your wind farm, the more energy it can collect for less materials and less cost. Once it's running the actual energy supply is completely free. Solar panels have little inherent cost (just sand) but a huge manufacturing (purification, fab, ....) / technology cost. The more efficiently you can make them the cheaper your energy. The better your storage system, the more energy you can store during the night and low wind periods, the more you can use all of your available renewable energy. What's really interesting is that there are now several technologies for methane (or even sometimes liquid fuel) from electricity and atmospheric carbon dioxide. If these become practical then soon variability problems in renewable energy supplies will be almost irrelevant and only cost will matter.

Now there's a huge race on; the very best of renewable energy is now becoming competitive on overall energy cost with coal. At the same time, with better weather forecasting, wider distribution and more variety of systems, the match of renewable energy availability to demand is getting to be better than other solutions like nuclear (days required to change output) and coal. At this stage, only the insane would be investing in developing old technology like coal and oil.

When previous energy technologies such a nuclear, or electricity grids were adopted, there were huge government subsidies (nuclear / hydro) or heavy government support (full scale electricity grids) which allowed them to break through from economically. Right now, the subsidies, in terms of providing security for Saudi Arabia and support, in terms of making regulations which make it difficult to connect renewable energy to grids, are going in the other direction and actively blocking renewable. If the USA took leadership now, then ideas like Musk's rooftop solar could put the country back into the lead in energy.

If the USA fossil fuel lobby, allied with with the Chinese solar industry, continue to be able to block renewable development, even, for example managing to kill off Tesla as they seem to have killed off earlier US solar companies like Solyndra then within a few years China, which lacks a big corporate oil/fossil fuel lobby will have an unassailable technological lead. First that will be seen in sales however cheaper energy, in particular energy that comes without needing complex delivery and politics like oil and coal, will have much more of an effect. It will be impossible for the US to threaten to blockade China because their economy will be able to run largely without oil and gas and around internal consumption. That will allow the Chinese to take on much larger political risks than they do already. In the long run, China will likely be able to provide cheaper liquid fuel than US allies like Saudi Arabia. At which point it will be game over.

There is an alternative vision, where the USA would actively invest in renewables and protect or subsidise it's companies just enough to compensate for Chinese dumping. It would still be possible to recapture at least an important position in renewables and with it long term energy independence. In this case the USA could stop subsidising the Saudis and interfering in the (now largely irrelevant) middle east. You can consider this a test for your new government.

Re:Cure now, Gym later

[thegarbz]

And furthermore, the problem stems mostly with developing nations [wordpress.com] and not the industrialized ones.

I notice you linked to a graph that stops at 2010 which conveniently ignores the fact that China has stemmed the rise in emissions in 2011 and actually started reducing their emissions.

So while being dishonest enough to ignore that China has a massively larger population and the emissions per capita are far lower than that of the USA, you additionally cherry pick your data to suit your agenda. You also ignore that China and India are building more clean energy sources than the USA and have signed on to more climate accords faster than the USA has.

All of this leads to your dishonest post being what citizen scientists commonly refer to as a "dick move".

Re:Constitutional rights

[thegarbz]

That's an extremely broad interpretation of rights to life and liberty. What's next? Americans suing the US government for not having done enough research to find a cure for cancer?

Indeed I would hope that if the US government put as little effort into cancer as they did into climate change that they would also get sued for this.

It sounds ridiculous, but this is not the first government to be sued by it's citizens for not doing enough about climate change https://www.theguardian.com/en...

But really I consider climate change secondary now. Climate change hasn't affected me and likely won't directly affect me. However fighting climate change has directly resulted in initiatives that have already made my life better. The air smells cleaner, there's less smog, driving behind cars no longer fills my cabin with horrid smelling fumes, the oil refinery near where I work doesn't smell anywhere near as bad as it used to, there's less diesel dust settling on everything... even to climate deniers I don't see any good reason why we shouldn't continue down this road of stemming pollution.