High court declines to block youths’ climate suit

The U.S. Supreme Court expressed qualms Monday about the scope of a climate-change lawsuit by 21 young people against the government, but rejected the Trump administration’s request to block a trial of the unprecedented suit that accuses federal officials of endangering their futures by failing to act against global warming.

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco had turned down the administration’s attempt to halt the case in a July 20 ruling. With the case now pending before a federal judge in Oregon, the justices said Monday that the government was being “premature” by seeking intervention from the nation’s highest court.

The court’s unsigned order added, however, that “the breadth of (the youths’) claims is striking,” and there were “substantial grounds for difference of opinion” about whether those claims belong in court.

The judge in Oregon should consider those concerns, the justices said, in “assessing the burdens” that the government would face by making its officials available for sworn pretrial questioning, and then by going to trial. The court also noted that the Trump administration has asked the trial judge for a prompt ruling on its latest motion to dismiss the suit.

The bottom line, though, is that “the case goes to trial Oct. 29,” said one of the youths’ attorneys, Philip Gregory of Woodside. “The Trump administration has filed every motion conceivable to stop this case from going to trial and has lost at every stage.”

The suit was filed in 2015, during President Barack Obama’s administration, by plaintiffs from different states who now range in age from 10 to 21.

They contend government officials have known for decades that oil, coal and other fossil fuels emit carbon dioxide that heats the atmosphere, but have promoted mining and use of those fuels while temperatures reach historic levels. If they prove their rights were violated, the youths want the courts to order the government to establish a carbon-free energy system by midcentury.

In seeking Supreme Court intervention, Justice Department lawyers argued that the suit was “an attempt to redirect federal environmental and energy policies through the courts rather than through the political process, by asserting a new and unsupported fundamental due process right to certain climate conditions.”