2023 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #26

A chronological listing of news and opinion articles posted on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week: Sun, Jun 25, 2023 thru Sat, Jul 1 2023.

Story of the Week

In a Montana Courtroom, Debate Over Whether States Can Make a Difference on Climate Change, and if They Have a Responsibility to Try

The first youth-led climate lawsuit to go to trial considered if a statute preventing the state’s environmental agency from denying permits for fossil fuel development contradicts its constitution’s guarantee of a “clean and healthful environment.

 

Plaintiff Mica Kantor, 14, testifies on the second day of the trial. He shared that he felt like a "prisoner in his own home" when he contracted Covid during an outbreak of wildfire smoke and was forced to stay in his basement alone. He suffers from asthma and must stay indoors when the air quality is poor. Credit: Richard Forbes

HELENA, Montana—At the close of the final day of their lawsuit against Montana for its failure to rein in development of fossil fuels in the state and slow climate change, all but one of the 16 young plaintiffs filed out of the Helena courtroom with their lawyers, family members and other supporters. Grace Gibson-Snyder stayed, helping the judge’s scheduling clerk, Farrah Looney, collect the beige and blue cushions that had padded the uncomfortable wooden benches where the plaintiffs sat during the trial.

“You don’t have to help,” said Looney.

 “I know,” responded Grace, who smiled as she continued collecting cushions, unwilling to leave until she’d done what she could to clean up.

It was a fitting scene to close the first youth-led climate trial in the United States last Tuesday. Held v. Montana was, on its face, about a very specific statutory provision buried in Montana’s Environmental Policy Act that forbids the state’s environmental agency from assessing the climate impacts of fossil fuel extraction within the state. But the central tension of this lawsuit was much larger.

Click here to access the entire article as originally posted on the Inside Climate News website.

In a Montana Courtroom, Debate Over Whether States Can Make a Difference on Climate Change, and if They Have a Responsibility to Try by Richard Forbes, Justice, Inside Climate News, June 28, 2023


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Posted by John Hartz on Saturday, 1 July, 2023


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