Climate Change Suit Filed by Oregon Teens, Others Against the Federal Government Gets the Go Ahead

PORTLAND, OR - A Federal Judge in Portland is allowing a lawsuit against the Federal Government to force action on climate change to proceed.

The suit, in the words of the judge, "seeks relief from government action and inaction that allegedly results in carbon pollution of the atmosphere, climate destabilization, and ocean acidification."

The judge says the plaintiffs - including Kelsey Juliana from Eugene - "assert a novel theory somewhere between a civil rights action" and a clean water act suit "to force the government to take action to reduce harmful pollution."

Juliana is one of 21 teens named as plaintiffs in the suit. Several are from cities in Oregon such as Beaverton and Eugene while others are from other parts of the country including Boulder, Colorado; Allentown, Pennsylvania, and White Plains, New York.

The suit describes Juliana as having been "born and raised in Oregon, the state where she hopes to work, grow food, recreate, have a family and raise children.

"Defendants' actions have caused damage to and continue to threaten the resources on which she relies for her survival and wellbeing."

Judge Thomas Coffin wrote that the political debate over climate change has been going on for years and Juliana and the other assert that inaction has the ability to do them harm for a longer period of time.

"It may be that eventually the alleged harms, assuming the correctness of plaintiffs' analysis of the impacts of global climate change, will befall all of us," he wrote.

"But the intractability of the debates before Congress and state legislatures and the alleged valuing of short term economic interest despite the cost to human life, necessitates a need for the courts to evaluate the constitutional parameters of the action or inaction taken by the government. This is especially true when such harms have an alleged disparate impact on a discrete class of society.”

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