Court trims climate litigation

A federal appeals court in San Francisco shut down a climate case brought by 18 California minors on April 9, saying the children could not show that their injuries were caused closely enough by the Environmental Protection Agency’s rulemaking methods to let the suit go forward. The three-judge Ninth Circuit panel affirmed dismissal in G.B. v. Environmental Protection Agency after oral argument just one month earlier, on March 5. (ca9.uscourts.gov) The lawsuit targeted one dry-sounding habit with huge consequences: “discounting,” the math agencies use to compare costs today with benefits years from now. The children said that when the Environmental Protection Agency discounts future climate harms, it effectively treats damage to young people and future generations as worth less than damage felt by adults right now. (ca9.uscourts.gov) (reason.com) The panel did not say discounting is good policy. It said federal courts first need a plaintiff who can clear the standing test, which requires a concrete injury, a clear link between that injury and the defendant’s conduct, and a remedy a court can realistically provide. (law.cornell.edu) (congress.gov) Here the judges said the equal-protection theory did not create the kind of direct injury federal courts recognize, and the climate harms the children described were too spread out across the economy and the atmosphere to pin on this one agency practice. The opinion said those environmental harms were not “fairly traceable” to the government’s discounting policies. (ca9.uscourts.gov) That traceability problem has haunted youth climate suits for years. In Juliana v. United States, the same Ninth Circuit said in 2020 that the young plaintiffs had shown real climate injuries, but the courts could not design and supervise the sweeping national fix they wanted, so the case had to be dismissed for lack of standing. (justia.com) This newer case was narrower than Juliana. Genesis B. v. Environmental Protection Agency, filed on December 10, 2023, focused on one federal decision tool instead of decades of national energy policy, and Our Children’s Trust framed it as a discrimination case on behalf of 18 California children ages 8 to 17. (ourchildrenstrust.org) Even that narrower target was not enough. Judge Milan D. Smith Jr. wrote that the plaintiffs’ theories had “deep, fundamental flaws,” and the panel affirmed dismissal without giving them another chance to rewrite the complaint. (eenews.net) (reason.com) The practical result is that big federal constitutional climate claims still face a locked door in court, even when the plaintiffs are children describing smoke, heat, floods, asthma, and anxiety. If advocates want to move the number that agencies plug into cost-benefit models, the more open battleground now looks like agency comments, state law, and local rules that can be tied to a specific permit, standard, or budget line. (ca9.uscourts.gov) (eenews.net)