The Montana Supreme Court has ruled that the state has a “fundamental constitutional right” to provide a “clean and healthful” environment, upholding a landmark 2023 climate ruling that stated residents’ rights were being violated due to the state’s lack of a “stable climate system that sustains human lives and liberties.”
16 young Montanans, ages 7 to 23, filed a federal lawsuit in 2020, accusing the state, local officials, and several agencies of failing to protect them from “climate change” and its consequences.
The youths successfully argued at the trial last year that climate change had drastically altered their lives and that Montana officials were doing nothing to “assess the greenhouse gas emissions and climate impacts of all future fossil fuel permits” in the state, according to Melissa Hornbein, attorney for the plaintiffs, who spoke with The Associated Press.
“Montana has already seen (and will increasingly see) adverse impacts to its economy, including to recreation, agriculture, and tourism caused by a variety of factors, including decreased snowpack.
Water levels in summer and fall, extreme spring flooding events, accelerating forest mortality, and increased drought, wildfire, water temperatures, and heat waves,” said Chief Justice Mike McGrath in Wednesday’s ruling.
The state’s highest court upheld the 2023 ruling with a 6-1 majority vote, rejecting claims from Montana’s legal team that the “greenhouse gases” emitted there only caused minor problems for people around the world and that reducing them would have no effect on climate change.
“If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?” McGrath said.
The state of Montana filed an appeal earlier this year against the District Court’s 2023 order, which established the Montana Constitution’s right to a “clean and healthful environment” and “environmental life support system,” according to the original lawsuit.
Justice Jim Rice, the sole dissenter on Wednesday, argued that “plaintiffs’ stories are not legally unique” and “are not distinguishable from the general public at large.”
McGrath asserted, “The dissent acknowledges that ‘one million other Montanans’ could draw similarly compelling stories.”
Lead plaintiff Rikki Held told the Associated Press on Wednesday that, regardless of what others think, the Supreme Court decision was historic for him and countless others.
“This ruling is a victory not just for us, but for every young person whose future is threatened by climate change,” said lead plaintiff Rikki Held to the Associated Press.
“Plaintiffs showed at trial—without dispute—that climate change is harming Montana’s environmental life support system now and with increasing severity for the foreseeable future,” according to McGrath.
The state and its agencies have previously acknowledged the current and future impacts of climate change on the Montana environment, many of which are already increasingly visible today.
