350 Montana’s leadership team drove to Helena on July 10 to witness the lawyer for 16 Montana kids argue with two lawyers for the State of Montana in front of the Montana Supreme. At issue was whether the increasing climate damage we’re experiencing endangers Montana children.
Montana’s constitution guarantees an inalienable, constitutional right to a “clean and healthful environment” and guarantees protecting that environment for future generations.
These Montana kids took the state up on its promise.
Last summer, during a week-long trial in Judge Katherine Seeley’s district court, the state declined to contest the findings of nationally known experts who testified that our climate is degrading the quality of Montana kids’ lives. The experts also said there were readily available and affordable alternatives to burning fossil fuels. Judge Seeley then rendered a 103-page ruling, Held v Montana, that Montana is harming children and must change its policies.
The decision is good reading because its findings of fact represent the best overall summary of what’s happening to Montana’s climate and what we can do about it.
At the Supreme Court hearing it was clear the state’s lawyers, Dale Schowengerdt and Mark Stermitz, didn’t dispute the facts of climate change or offer any defense for Montana’s annual combustion of 83 million tons of contributing greenhouse gases.
They wanted the Supreme Court to overrule the lower court’s decision on procedural grounds. Climate change was too big, too abstract. It’s too complex for courts to decide. If opponents want to address the damage to the climate, they should get involved in the state’s permitting process, opposing permit-by-permit the state’s authorization of fossil fuel projects.
The Montana kids’ lawyer, Roger Sullivan, countered that every ton of greenhouse gas “matters” and is making life more hazardous. It’s unseasonable warm outside the courtroom today, and it will continue to get hotter and more dangerous when the kids are grown. If our constitution means anything, he said, then the Supreme Court must rule in favor of Montana’s kids.