Twenty two young Americans have filed a new lawsuit against the Trump administration over its anti-environment executive orders. By intentionally boosting oil and gas production and stymying carbon-free energy, federal officials are violating their constitutional rights to life and liberty, alleges the lawsuit, filed on Thursday.
The federal government is engaging in unlawful executive overreach by breaching congressional mandates to protect ecosystems and public health, argue the plaintiffs, who are between the ages of seven and 25 and hail from the heavily climate-impacted states of Montana, Hawaii, Oregon, California and Florida. They also say officials’ emissions-increasing and science-suppressing orders have violated the state-created danger doctrine, a legal principle meant to prevent government actors from inflicting injury upon their citizens.
“At its core, this suit is about the health of children, it’s about the right to life, it’s about the right to form families,” said Julia Olson, attorney and founder of Our Children’s Trust, the non-profit law firm that brought the suit. “We all have constitutional rights, and if we don’t use our constitution – if we walk away from it and we walk away from our youth – we will not have a democracy.”