Today, Explained - Kids sue Montana over climate change

Episode Date: June 14, 2023

Held v. Montana, a first-of-its-kind climate lawsuit, pits young people — and their constitutionally enshrined right to a clean environment — against a state with pro-fossil fuel policies. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Michael Raphael, and hosted by Noel King. Today’s episode was also produced in partnership with the team who make Vox’s The Weeds podcast, Sofi LaLonde, Cristian Ayala, Anouck Dussaud, A.M. Hall, and Jonquilyn Hill. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I was pretty young, but I remember just being on the ranch in the house and the wildfires burned like 70 miles of pylons. That's 22-year-old Rikki Held testifying in court in Helena, Montana earlier this week. She's talking about the 2012 Ash Creek wildfire that put her family's ranch in a very precarious position. Rikki and 15 other young people are suing Montana, claiming their home state prioritized its pro-fossil fuel policies over ensuring a clean environment,

which is certainly a thing that's done in many states. But Montana's constitution, written in 1972, enshrines the right to a healthy environment for residents. And so, a trial will unfold over the next two weeks. Coming up on Today Explained, we're going to hear from a plaintiff and ask, could the first trial of its kind in history lead to many more? The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves?

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And of course, that made us wonder what the youths involved are thinking exactly. So we're starting today with an interview that my colleague Jonklin Hill conducted. Jonklin, or JQ, is the host of the Vox podcast, The Weeds. And The Weeds has been in the weeds of this trial. Yeah, so 16 young people are suing the state of Montana. In this case, that's known as Held v. Montana. Ricky Held is one of the 16 plaintiffs. And, you know, it's a wide age range. It's people that are from elementary school age

all the way up to their 20s. And they're suing the state based on this clause in the state constitution that says that Montanans have the constitutional right to a clean and healthy environment. OK, so the kids are like, the Constitution guarantees us this thing, but the state has pursued policies that hurt the climate. Tell me about the plaintiff you interviewed, Grace Gibson Snyder. So Grace is 19 years old. She's from Missoula, Montana.

And when you talk to her, it is so obvious how in love she is with her home state. I'm sure a lot of people think their states are special, but I'm very partial to my own. She'll tell you that her favorite things are, you know, floating on the river, hanging out with friends, going on hikes. What I always say about Montana is

you can always get to a hike no matter where you are within 10 minutes driving, usually way less. And so the state and its natural beauty is something that's really, really important to her. Underlying everyone's life in Montana is an appreciation for, and maybe even more importantly, a dependence upon the natural environment. So many people subsist upon agriculture and ranching. And so there is this super deep generational cultural connection to the outdoors, to a depth and an intensity that I haven't yet found anywhere else. She's been involved in climate change activism since she was in high school. She tells this really fascinating story about when she first realized climate change was a thing.

And it was back when she was a high school student. I remember my freshman year of high school, I was on the soccer team. We have summer practices and so it was August and the wildfire smoke from the fires across Montana and across the West settles into the Missoula Valley. The smoke was so dense that certainly the kids on the team with asthma could not play at all and then for the rest of us it was uncomfortable. It feels like scratching your throat and your lungs. We're all in agreement this summer's fire smoke was among the worst in decades,

with Missoula County surrounded by fires burning hundreds of thousands of acres. And now the first results of a report by the Montana Department of Health and Human Services is confirming the smoke was making a lot of people sick enough to send them to the hospital. And so we would move our practices inside, into the gym, but then the gyms would fill with smoke if we opened the doors to let the heat out. You know, I was aware because of school, because of news, etc., of the ties between increasing wildfires and the severity of the wildfires and climate change. And so that was the first time I was like super aware of the impacts of climate change on my own life. And then the last little anecdote where I really realized the intensity of climate change on my own life. And then the last little anecdote where I really

realized the intensity of climate change was during Greta Thunberg's speech to the UN. This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school. And at this point, I'd already been involved with climate work for a couple years. But it was all pretty local. And her phrase, the how dare you, how dare you, encapsulated the emotional piece of climate change in a way that I'd never felt before. The rage and the fear and the loss that comes with that, in addition to just the injustice. And that word, injustice, is so central to what I feel about climate change. It becomes so unfair that we are now the ones who have to do the work to protect our own lives. So you're a plaintiff in the case held v. Montana. And in your words, what is that case about?

The case is to ensure that the Montana state government's actions do not violate our right to a clean and healthful environment. So we have an explicit right in our constitution to a clean and healthful environment in Montana. And the state's actions of promoting fossil fuels, both explicitly in policy as well as implicitly with all the ways that they have developed the industry and through permitting, etc., have led to consistent and increasing carbon emissions from the fossil fuel industry. And the climate impacts then of all of these things affect Montana citizens as well as the Montana landscape. And so the impacts of these on youth are particularly strong, partly because we are more susceptible to the health risks of climate change, as well as the fact that we will be suffering longer from all of these things. And so our case is bringing

this to attention so that the state of Montana can bring its actions back in line with the Constitution and hopefully seize this opportunity to become leaders in a renewable energy. when I was your age and my friends too, and there were so many changes we wanted to make in the world. But it seems like you and these other plaintiffs are actually taking active steps in order to do that. What's it been like, you know, spending all these years, all this time working on this. It's really up and down. I am super grateful to be a part of this community, even more than just, you know, the immediate community involved in this case. But this experience has also been incredibly frustrating and repeatedly so. How? In what way? The state government in responding to our case has been consistently reluctant to hear what we're trying to say, to allow this case to move forward, to make any sort of meaningful change on a little bit of a larger scale. To be a youth involved in in climate work is also a very mixed bag I mean there's so much change happening

and yet I have other things I would rather be doing I mean there's so much I'd love to do and I took for example a philosophy class for the first time this year and I discovered that I really love philosophy I would love to spend my life thinking about things, but I have this sense of obligation to work in protecting the world, protecting other people, and protecting myself and my own future. I don't see how I could choose anything else when there's so much at stake. In addition to the kind of public contribution to this, which is that there's two sides, right? There's one side, the very supportive side, and are the people who support our case, the people who support youth movements, the people who just believe in climate change and want it to change, are an incredible

community. And there is also a lot of pressure from them. You hear it all the time. The youth will solve this. The youth are the solution. They will be the change makers. That is a lot of pressure when you are 14 or 16, as I was getting involved in this case, to hear that you are the ones that they are relying on for the future. And so I think that creates a really intense mix of emotions and experiences that a lot of people in this type of youth climate work that we experience on a regular basis. I know there's so much, obviously, technical and logistical challenges to the clean energy transition.

I understand that. I'm not asking for a change tomorrow, either in Montana or federally or whatever level it may be. I know fossil fuels are not going to disappear tomorrow, but I'm asking, we are asking that the legislature or the government take this opportunity to become leaders in clean energy, to shift our focus, to make a choice that will become equally lucrative, equally economically viable, and that there's just a choice that has to be made here. And I wish they understood that this was what is shown to be that best decision. JQ, thank you for bringing us that interview with Grace.

It was really telling to hear her say, you old heads think that young people are the future and are going to get things done. But if you're 19 years old, being told that the future is all on you is a very frustrating position to be put in. Yeah, I thought that was so interesting. I mean, you hear the rhetoric all the time. The kids are all right.

The children are the future, especially when they mobilize around these big policy issues. But listening to Grace, yeah, that's a lot of pressure. And, you know, as nerdy as some of us might have been at 19, we weren't necessarily spending our freshman year of college suing our state government over climate change. It's a lot of pressure for these kids. JQ Hills Vox podcast is called The Weeds. It's a show about the personal ramifications of policy decisions, and it is a very good place to nerd out if you're interested. Coming up after the break, a Northwest Montana-based reporter tells us how the trial's going so far. And we're going to ask him whether other kids are going to try something like this.

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gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge bet mgm operates pursuant to an operating agreement with i gaming ontario it's today explained micah drew is a staff reporter at the flathead beacon it's a newspaper in northwest montana he's been covering Held versus Montana, which started on Monday. Yeah, so Monday we had opening statements by both sides. Restoring climate stability will take time, Your Honor. But every ton of CO2 we keep out of the air

matters. We saw the lawyers for the plaintiffs lay out kind of a pretty broad overview of how they expect the trial to go. The witnesses they expect to call the science. They expect to go through the plaintiffs and their stories that we'll hear from throughout the week. And then on the other side for the state, they laid out a pretty different version of this trial, one that's very cut and dry. They called it a very boring lawsuit that's just about a single statute that's no longer on the books. So we saw two very different ideas of how this is supposed to play out over two weeks. And then we did get our first witnesses. We heard from five different people. Three of the youth plaintiffs spoke, as well as scientist Dr. Stephen Running, a noted

climate researcher, and then May Nan Ellingson, who's one of the authors of the Montana Constitution. The reason these young people were able to sue the state is that Montana's Constitution enshrines the right of residents to a clean and healthful environment. How did that end up in the state constitution? It's really interesting. We got to hear firsthand from the person who was influential and really essential in getting that to happen, Maynard Ellingson. She was the youngest delegate to our 1972 constitutional convention where the Constitution of Montana was rewritten.

Mr. Peacock, it seems to me that in the Bill of Rights, the Constitution of the United States, there are quite a few metaphysical things, such as liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Liberty means personal liberty, and that has a rather clear meaning, certainly much more clear than a high-quality environment. I would suggest that what is liberty to one person is not necessarily liberty to another. And she, along with a couple other delegates, really wanted to make sure that Montana's environment was protected. We have a long history in the state of heavy extraction industries, coal mining and other things that kind of left the environment a little degraded, and they wanted to make sure that that stopped and ideally got better. So there's two places in the Constitution that we see this clean and healthful environment language. One section, the Constitution directs the state and all people to maintain and improve that environment. And then it's also listed as

one of our inalienable rights in the Bill of Rights. Is this an unusual thing to see in a state's constitution? Is Montana odd? It's pretty unusual, I would say. There's only a handful of states that have similar provisions that are this strong. I'd say more states, they'll mention the constitution or they'll mention, you know, the right of its citizens to recreate. But we have a very, very strong protection. I mean, directing the state and everybody to. And it's interesting, there's a similar youth-led lawsuit in Hawaii that's going to go to trial in a couple of months, and they're using the same kind of legal framework. We keep fighting so that the next generation won't have to fight as hard,

but it keeps getting harder. But across the nation, there's also a movement modeled on Pennsylvania and Hawaii to add in amendments to state constitutions. They're known as green amendments. They've seen some success there. In New York in 2021, they successfully added language protecting the environment into their constitution. Constitution. So these young plaintiffs say that the Constitution promises them a clean environment, but the state, because it has pursued and continues to pursue the production of coal and natural gas, is breaking the promise to them. Is that essentially what this is about? Yeah, in its essence, they decided to specifically go after two laws in Montana.

One of them is the state energy policy, which was basically this overall list of goals on how the state should move forward with energy production. And a couple of those goals specifically included expanding the fossil fuel industry. And I speak about that in the past tense because a couple months ago,

the legislature repealed the entire law. The section of Montana code that would be cut has been called toothless by supporters of this bill who say the Gianforte administration should be able to work with a clean slate. And subsequently, we saw the lawyers for the state in this case try to dismiss all the claims based on that since the law was no longer on the books and they were successful. So we are moving forward in the trial with a pretty narrowed scope compared to where we started. And so the second part of this that we'll be hearing about is a law known as the Montana Environmental Policy Act. We call it MEPA. And there's a provision to MEPA where the state, when it conducts environmental reviews for, you know, projects or new buildings or a new coal mine, they are instructed not to consider climate change or greenhouse gases. the section of law that is at the heart of this case to specifically say you can't consider climate change inside Montana or outside in an environmental review. The bill blocks the

State Department of Environmental Quality from analyzing the impacts of greenhouse gases when reviewing a project. Supporters say this will rein in what they consider to be judicial activism. Opponents worry about the environmental consequences of blocking public input. So even though the language is completely different and the state thinks that that was a reason to dismiss the case, the judge and our Supreme Court decided that it was, in essence,

the arguments are still the same. So that's one area that they've been arguing. And then the other is gonna be that Montana not being a very large presence on the global scale, even if we went cold turkey on fossil fuels tomorrow, the state argues that that wouldn't make enough of an impact globally and on the global climate that they shouldn't be penalized essentially for the decisions they're currently making. What happens if the plaintiffs win?

If they win, the complaint that they ask for is the declaration of this specific MIPA climate change exception to be declared unconstitutional. So what we'd see, you know, in terms of the laws is we would have one law removed, taken off the books. But and the state is arguing this, they don't believe that the judge has much more authority than that. Even if the plaintiffs win, the judge isn't going to say the state of Montana has to stop producing coal and natural gas. Exactly. She could maybe say that you can't have laws that, you know, make sure that you ignore climate change or anything like that. But fundamentally, the judgment in this case will not change Montana's fossil fuel economy.

How do the plaintiffs feel about that? I think that one of the biggest things, and we heard this a little bit on the stand, is no matter what, if there's a ruling and the plaintiffs win, that is still a monumental judgment to come down from a court. And it will be likely a big enough decision that there's a chance that either the legislature could decide to voluntarily take action, or it will lead to a cascade of future suits that will probably get more specific and more specific. And this will be an ongoing fight, but it would really be the first brick in this kind of foundation where we see these fights against climate change in the core system.

What do you hear when you're out knocking doors? Do the residents of Montana support these young people? Do they think this is nonsense? Where do people stand? I would say both of those ring very true. I think a lot of people in this state don't understand why this is happening. A lot of people think that the money being used for the courts to fight this and the state to fight this could be better used elsewhere. But there's also a lot of people that understand Montana's environment is a key resource and really want to make sure that that is maintained and improved as was promised. And we actually do see here in Helena, when the plaintiffs walked in on Monday, there were people lining up outside the courthouse with signs.

There's rallies planned, I think, every single day after the trial by climate groups and different environmental groups. So there's certainly support, and certainly on the ground we see a lot of support. I mean, we are a relatively conservative state. We have a Republican supermajority that's been passing some of these fossil fuel laws. And so I'd say across the board, there's certainly people on both sides who would argue both ways. You said we've seen similar lawsuits in Pennsylvania and Hawaii. Montana makes three. Do you think we could see more of these types of lawsuits in other states or maybe even a lawsuit at the federal level?

Well, yeah, actually, we have seen all of that. There's a law firm, a nonprofit law firm out of Oregon called Our Children's Trust. They have actually brought legal actions and lawsuits in all 50 states that have these youth plaintiffs. And their idea is that these youths can't vote, they can't do much action, but they have a route through the courts to argue for their future. And so they filed, all 50 states, they also have filed a federal case, Juliana v. United States, that almost went to trial and was stopped about two years ago. But a month ago, a federal judge ruled that that case can start moving forward again and moving towards trial. So we'll really be watching to see if this has an effect

on any of the other actions that have been filed. That was Micah Drew from the Flathead Beacon in stunningly beautiful Northwest Montana. Today's show was produced by Abishai Artsy and edited by Amina El-Sadi. It was fact-checked by Laura Bullard and engineered by Michael Raphael. Thank you so much to the fantastic team over at The Weeds, Sophie Lalonde, Christian Ayala,

Anouk Doussou, A.M. Hall, and J.Q. Hill. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. you