I am one of 22 young Americans suing President Donald Trump. I didn’t want to have to sue the president as a teenager, but he left us no other choice.
We are students, ranchers, scientists-in-training, artists and athletes. We come from Montana, Oregon, Hawai’i, California and Florida, from different places and different backgrounds, but we share one thing: We followed their rules to protect our rights, and the courts still slammed the door on us.
We’ve watched the wildfires get closer. We’ve breathed the smoke that sends us to the hospital. We’ve evacuated our homes. We’ve seen the landscapes we grew up in change beyond recognition. We’ve lain awake at night worrying about what kind of planet we are inheriting. So we did something about it. Many of us are too young to vote, so we turned to the only branch of government with the power to protect us. We went to court.
We sued President Trump over the executive orders he signed on his first day back in office. These orders are directing the entire federal government to unleash fossil fuels, suppress climate science, and block clean energy. They are already being carried out and making our lives worse.
The Constitution guarantees our right to life and liberty. What do those rights mean if we cannot breathe? If our government has decided our lives are worth less than fossil fuel profits?
We stood in a federal courtroom in Missoula last September and told the truth. We brought expert witnesses, including a pediatrician, a Nobel Prize-winning climate scientist, and former White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, who all testified under oath that President Trump’s executive orders are already being carried out across the federal government and are already making our lives worse. The district court found overwhelming evidence that we are being harmed, calling it a “children’s health emergency.” The government presented no evidence and called no witnesses.
And still, last week, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals told us our harm was “speculative.”
The court didn’t say we are wrong. It didn’t say the harm isn’t real. It didn’t say the executive orders are constitutional. It simply said that what the President is doing to us is too much for one court to stop. That we must instead chase each individual action carrying out his fossil fuel agenda separately, case by case, while the harms to our lives, health, and futures continue to compound in real time.
There is something else worth saying. Tuesday’s decision was unpublished, meaning the court itself indicated it should not be used as legal precedent. The court issued a ruling significant enough to affect the lives and futures of an entire generation of young Americans, and then quietly signaled that it wasn’t a decision worth repeating. That is not justice. That is not courage. That is a court hiding the weight of what it did.
We won’t hide. We can’t afford to. Young people have been bringing constitutional climate cases to federal courts for 15 years. But the United States government has thrown everything it has at keeping us out of the courtroom. Procedural excuses. Technical barriers. Emergency writs that most lawyers have never even heard of. Anything to avoid a trial. Anything to avoid answering the one question that actually matters: Is harming children constitutional? You don’t fight that hard to avoid a trial unless you’re afraid of the final judgment.
We are heartbroken. We are outraged. We have shown up, told the truth, and asked our government and the courts to do their jobs. The court was supposed to give us the benefit of the doubt; instead, it deferred to the government, who admitted over and over that their intention was to unleash on us more fossil fuels and block the technologies that save our lives. To grow up safely in a livable climate is not a political preference. It is the foundation on which every other right depends. Our government cannot treat our lives as an acceptable price for its fossil fuel agenda. And the courts cannot keep slamming the doors on us while it opens them to the fossil fuel industry to protect its profits.
We intend to keep showing up until a court is willing to measure this President’s actions against the Constitution and rule on the merits. Not because we want to. Because our lives depend on it. Because we deserve better than a system that keeps telling us to come back later.
Later is not an option. The time is now.