Judge tosses kids’ pollution suit vs US government
LOS ANGELES—A federal lawsuit brought by a group of California children who claimed the US government was harming them by failing to clamp down on pollution has been tossed out by a judge.
The case was one of a series of legal actions taken around the world by young people worried about the effects of climate change.
The youths, aged between 8 and 17, had claimed the US Environmental Protection Agency “intentionally allows life-threatening climate pollution to be emitted by the fossil fuel sources of greenhouse gases it regulates, harming children’s health and welfare.”
The suit, filed on Dec. 10, asked the federal court to declare the EPA had violated the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights to equal protection under the law and their fundamental right to life.
But a federal judge on Wednesday dismissed the lawsuit, saying the children could not make their case.
“Here, plaintiffs’ claimed injuries include ‘a lifetime of harms and hardship,’” said US district judge Michael Fitzgerald in his ruling in Los Angeles.
What’s the remedy?
But they “have failed to demonstrate how a declaration regarding plaintiffs’ rights under the Constitution and the legality of defendants’ conduct, on its own, is likely to remedy these alleged injuries.”
Our Children’s Trust, a nonprofit that helped bring the case, slammed the judge’s decision as “unjust and dangerous.”
“When presented with a constitutional violation, there is no reason for a federal judge to throw up his hands and say nothing can be done,” said the organization’s coexecutive director Mat dos Santos.
“In doing just that, this order tells children that judges have no power to hear their complaints. Courts do, in fact, have that power. Courts have a responsibility to hear constitutional violations, as they’ve done in many important cases in our nation’s history.”
Dos Santos said the Trust would file an amended complaint.
