Dr. Conca reports that in the first lawsuit to involve a planet, Judge Thomas Coffin of the U.S. Federal District Court in Eugene, Oregon, ruled on Friday in favor of 21 plaintiffs, ages 8 to 19, on behalf of future generations of Americans in a landmark constitutional climate change case brought against the Federal Government and the Fossil Fuel Industry. The lawsuit alleges that the Federal Government is violating the Plaintiffs constitutional and public-trust rights by promoting the use of fossil fuels. The Complaint explains that, for over 50 years, the U.S. Government and the Fossil Fuel Industry have known that carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels causes global warming and dangerous climate change, and that continuing to burn fossil fuels destabilizes the climate system. Judge Coffin wrote that the debate about climate change and its impact has been before various political bodies for some time now. Plaintiffs give this debate justiciability by asserting harms that befall or will befall them personally and to a greater extent than older segments of society. 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. 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.
This is legalese for global warming may eventually hurt all of us, but it will hurt our children and grandchildren the most, so they have the right to sue. Most importantly, the judge unequivocally rejected all arguments raised by the Federal Government and the Fossil Fuel Industry in their Motions to Dismiss that sought to deny the youths... Read on ..Original URL: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/04/10/federal-court-rules-on-climate-change-in-favor-of-todays-children/#436ec4e16149
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