Good news to share!! — Molly
By Chris
Mooney
The Trump administration cannot short-circuit a federal
climate change lawsuit brought by a group of 21 children and teenagers, an
appellate court ruled on Wednesday, probably
sending the ambitious case back to a lower court in Oregon for trial.
The federal government’s request to halt the lawsuit “is
entirely premature,” wrote Judge Sidney Thomas, the chief judge of the U.S.
Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.
“We’re looking forward to putting the federal government on
trial on climate science and its dangerous fossil fuel policies,” said Julia
Olson, the lead attorney for the young plaintiffs and chief counsel of Our
Children’s Trust.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request
for comment on the court’s ruling.
In a suit originally brought against the Obama administration in
2015, the young plaintiffs assert that the government’s actions to
promote fossil fuel emissions violate the basic constitutional rights of
future generations. They were helped in the litigation by former NASA
climate scientist James Hansen, whose granddaughter Sophie Kivlehan is one of
the student plaintiffs.
The federal government had argued that the trial would entail
burdensome requests for discovery and that the remedy requested by the young
plaintiffs would violate the separation of powers since it effectively asks a
court to direct the executive and legislative branches to do something about climate
change. But in 2016 the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon declined to dismiss the case and
set it on a path toward a trial.
The Justice Department then sought a “writ of mandamus,” calling
on the appellate court to stop the case before it could proceed further. This
is generally considered an extraordinary remedy, and the 9th Circuit panel
decided 3-0 that a halt was not justified in this case, and hard to
justify in general.
“If appellate review could be invoked whenever a district court
denied a motion to dismiss, we would be quickly overwhelmed with such requests,
and the resolution of cases would be unnecessarily delayed,” the court said.
The case will probably proceed before the Oregon
federal court, where the case was originally filed. Olson said she wants
depositions from multiple representatives of top federal agencies, as well as
from leading climate scientists. She expects discovery to take six months and a
trial to begin after that. (It was originally set to begin last month.)
Olson said the case will attempt to show that the globe is
warming because of human activities and that the U.S. government
isn’t taking action, meaning Americans who are children today will see their
most basic rights violated, such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Please continue this article here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2018/03/07/the-trump-administration-just-failed-to-stop-a-climate-lawsuit-brought-by-21-kids/?utm_campaign=buffer&utm_content=bufferd4702&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_term=.e741ec948af8
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