, was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon in 2015 and included allegations similar to those in Held v. Montana, but that case has not yet been given a trial date.
“One way that people respond when other systems fail, when politics fail, governments fail, corporate governance fails is they go to court to try and seek redress,” said Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. Though the Montana trial is not set to start for another year, Burger said its outcome would be “highly significant.”“The fact that they’re going to trial doesn’t mean that the plaintiffs have won,” he said. “One of the things that the plaintiffs have to prove is that these government policies and statutes are a substantial cause of their injury. And that may have some interesting twists and turns.”Rikki Held, 20, the only named plaintiff in the suit, said: “It’s been a long time coming.
Nate Bellinger, co-counsel for the youth plaintiffs and a senior staff attorney with Our Children’s Trust, a nonprofit law firm that focuses on young people’s right to a safe climate, said: “We have an opportunity to go into open court before a judge, before the public, and tell this story from beginning to end.
“How the state of Montana is permitting fossil fuels, how those fossil fuels are causing and contributing to climate change, how climate change is harming the 16 youth plaintiffs in really specific and individualized ways,” he said.Last year, every county in Montana experienced some level of drought, and the state had a particularly active year for wildfires. Fires burned the