LOS ANGELES (CN) — A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a class action lawsuit brought by minors who sought to hold the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency accountable for the air pollution and unfolding climate crisis that they claim is destroying their lives.
U.S. District Judge Michael Fitzgerald in Los Angeles, relying on a Ninth Circuit decision in a long-running climate lawsuit by children that ultimately failed, granted the EPA's request to throw out the complaint.
"The declaratory judgment sought by plaintiffs is unlikely to redress their injuries," Fitzgerald said in his ruling, adding that the children lack standing to proceed with their claims that the federal government is violating their constitutional rights.
"Here, plaintiffs’ claimed injuries include 'a lifetime of harms and hardship,'" Fitzgerald said. But just as in the case decided by the Ninth Circuit, the minors "have failed to demonstrate how a declaration regarding plaintiffs’ rights under the Constitution and the legality of defendants’ conduct, on its own, is likely to remedy these alleged injuries."
As such, it is unclear how a declaration that the federal government's conduct burdens the children’s ability to live and enjoy their lives or that the children fall within a protected class will do more than provide psychological relief, the judge said.
Representatives of Our Children's Trust, an Oregon-based nonprofit public interest law firm that brought the lawsuit on behalf of more than a dozen children, didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling.
In their complaint filed last December, the children said that fossil fuel pollution and human-induced climate change harm and burden them with a lifetime of hardship. They claimed that they are harmed by the effects of the climate crisis in ways that are different from and worse than adults, because children’s bodies and minds are still growing and, unlike adults, they will be around into the 22nd century.
"Yet, children are consistently ignored, overlooked, and undervalued," they said. "At no time in our nation’s history has Congress delegated authority to any governmental agency to allow levels of pollution that are harmful to children. Yet that is what EPA has done."
Today's ruling comes a week after the Ninth Circuit terminated the landmark Juliana v. U.S. case that had been been bouncing back and forth for nine years between the appellate court and the district court in Oregon.
In that lawsuit, 21 young climate activists between the ages of 8 and 19 at the time of filing, who were represented by some of the same lawyers as the minors in the case before Fitzgerald, also accused the federal government of contributing to climate change through fossil fuel production, thus harming them and violating their constitutional rights to life, liberty and property while failing to protect public trust resources.
A Ninth Circuit panel already concluded in 2020 that the children lacked standing to bring the lawsuit. The judge in Oregon nevertheless gave them a chance to amend their complaint, leading to another trip to the Ninth Circuit and a finding that case should be dismissed without further leave to amend.
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