Youth ask federal judge to halt Trump fossil-fuel orders

Laura Lundquist

(Missoula Current) Young Americans who face an uncertain future due to climate change are once again going to court, this time to stop Trump administration orders intended to favor the fossil fuel industry, among other things.

Early Tuesday morning, dozens of locals lined the sidewalk outside Missoula’s Russell Smith Federal Courthouse to cheer on several youth plaintiffs who prepared to testify in favor of an injunction to stop President Donald Trump’s executive orders favoring fossil fuel development. The crowd of around 100 then filled the Donald W. Molloy courtroom and settled in for the first of two days of testimony scheduled for the Lighthiser v. Trump injunction request filed by Our Children’s Trust.

On May 29, the nonprofit Our Children’s Trust filed a lawsuit for 22 youth plaintiffs from Montana, Oregon, Hawaii, California and Florida challenging three Trump executive orders that the plaintiffs say will worsen the effects of climate change, threaten their health and put their futures in question. While that case progresses, the plaintiffs want federal Judge Dana Christensen to put the orders on hold.

“Your honor noted that this case is complex, and while I agree in certain respects it is, I also want to offer its simplicity: The uncontested purpose of these executive orders is to expand fossil fuel use and suppress its biggest competitors. Defendants want us to buy more fossil fuels and less renewable energy; more combustion vehicles and fewer electric vehicles,” said Julia Olson, Our Children’s Trust attorney, during her opening statement. “The whole point of the trio of these executive orders is to unleash fossil fuels.”

Trump signed two of the executive orders the day he took office, revoking about a dozen Biden administration orders. The Unleashing American Energy order, eliminates electric vehicle mandates, energy efficiency ratings for appliances, and encourages more mining and energy exploration on land and offshore.

The Declaring a National Energy Emergency order claimed energy and critical minerals were “far too inadequate to meet our Nation's needs,” so agencies are to use emergency authority to shortcut federal laws and identify and lease all energy resources, including those on federal lands.

The last order of the three, Reinvigorating American’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry signed on April 8, declared coal as a “mineral” essential to U.S. economic security, so federal land and energy agencies are to open more lands to coal mining using categorical exclusions and remove programs and policies that are against coal production and coal energy generation.

After the orders were published, agency secretaries and department directors turned the orders into more specific actions, shutting down conservation programs and rolling out streamlined processes to enable resource extraction.

U.S. Department of Justice attorney Micheal Sawyer argued that the three executive orders weren’t limited to fossil fuels because they also mention hydropower, geothermal and nuclear power.

“(The plaintiffs) disagree with the president’s energy policy. They disagree with his policy decision to ease the deployment of renewable, affordable base-load power sources like hydropower, geothermal and natural gas. Instead, they think there’s a better energy policy option that focuses on intermittent energy sources like wind and solar,” Sawyer said. “And they are perfectly entitled to their opinions. But what they’re not entitled to is to ask the court to step in and resolve this energy policy dispute by interpreting the Constitution to require a specific energy policy.”

To be granted an injunction, the plaintiffs have to convince Christensen that the lawsuit will likely succeed on the merits of their case. To do that, they had three big-league experts testify on Tuesday: University of Montana climate change professor emeritus Steve Running, Stanford University Civil Engineering professor Mark Jacobson, and John Podesta Jr., senior advisor to the President for International Climate Policy and former Clinton administration Chief of Staff.

Running addressed the role science has played in identifying the proof of human-caused climate change and how its effects have amplified over the past 60-plus years. That information informs current national and international reports that document the progression and threats of climate change. It also proves that more greenhouse gases translate to worse climate change effects.

“It’s clear to us scientifically now that the warming trend and the emissions trend that we’re experiencing is a continuum. There isn’t like a safe level where we’re okay up until here and then things fall apart. Every additional ton of CO2 matters to the whole world and these plaintiffs,” Running said.

For that reason, he said the need to continue that scientific inquiry is just as dire now as it was in the beginning, and yet, the Trump administration is defunding certain climate change programs and proposing to shut down others, such as the Mona Loa Observatory, where Dave Keeling first observed the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, or the Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellites that were launched in 2014.

Running said the National Climate Assessment comes out every four or five years - compiling the report takes more than two years and a couple hundred contributors - so the next report was scheduled to be published in 2027. But the Trump administration has dismissed the team of authors that were preparing the report.

In 2009, the Environmental Protection Agency finalized the Endangerment rule that designated six greenhouse gases as pollutants. The Trump administration has ordered the EPA to reconsider the rule.

Running and the American Meteorological Society are critical of a May 23 Department of Energy report that downplayed the role of greenhouse gases, saying the scientific evidence is poor at best. The American Meteorological Society highlighted all the problems in a Aug. 27 letter. Only five authors - two were economists, not scientists - compiled the report within two months and it wasn’t peer reviewed. Dozens of authors cited in the report said they were misquoted or misunderstood.

DOJ attorney  Miranda Jensen pointed out that all the climate issues were developing before Trump signed the three orders so they didn’t cause climate change. She added that there was no proof the National Climate Assessment authors were dismissed as a result of the orders, and with two years to go, a report could still be produced.

“I really hope so. I really hope that they decide to bring the author team back and get back to work. So far there’s no evidence of that,” Running said. “If you have no authors, you have no report.”

Podesta addressed what executive orders do, how presidential administrations are supposed to work and how this administration is breaking the mold, from issuing executive orders almost daily to firing employees who question the effect of the orders.

The Unleashing America’s Energy order gets rid of efficiency standards and other regulations so they’re not a “burden” on the use of fossil fuels, Podesta said. Climate science is also a burden on fossil fuel production, because it doesn’t allow people to ignore the problem with emissions.

“The decision to shut down the satellites, the decision to stop collecting data on sea ice observation, the decision to remove so much information from websites - those are all ways of eliminating facts that are quite inconvenient. If you have those facts in front of you, if you know what the science is telling you, if you understand the burden that pollution is causing, then the decision to ignore it and to rush to unleash more fossil fuels and more pollution is going to be challenged as arbitrary and capricious,” Podesta said.

Podesta said no energy emergency exists in the U.S. when wind and solar are fueling an increasing percentage of the nation’s energy. But in Trump’s executive order, the definition of “energy” leaves out wind and solar in favor of fossil fuels.

Sawyer said the order includes other renewables and nothing in the order says “hobble wind.” He repeatedly asked Podesta if undermining climate science would help hydropower or geothermal power.

“You keep focusing on hydropower, but I haven’t seen any actions on hydropower by this administration,” Podesta said. “The gloss of the executive orders along with the president’s statements about what he intended, combined with the actions of federal agencies are indications that the interpretations by the secretaries of these orders is to hobble (wind and solar) projects. And the president has said as much.”

Four of the youth plaintiffs testified about the ways they’ve already been harmed by the effects of climate change. Two have respiratory problems that are made worse by wildfire smoke and climate change has increased the risk of wildfire. Jorja M., 17, of Livingston is not only concerned about summers full of more smoke but also coal dust from trains passing through town daily and spring floods caused by rain-on-snow events that will now happen more often than every 500 years. Avery McRae, 20, of Eugene, Ore., said she doesn’t want to have children because she doesn’t even know what her future will look like, let alone that of an infant just entering a world facing more fossil fuel emissions. Jeff K., 11, formerly of Helena, has similar worries about the survival of his younger brother who has suffered bouts of pneumonia due to wildfire smoke.

“The general statement of (the orders) is to unleash fossil fuels and that will make the entire environment worse,” Jeff said. “I’m asking the judge to stop these orders from going through so we can try and move things back.”

The hearing will continue on Wednesday.

Contact reporter Laura Lundquist at lundquist@missoulacurrent.com.