“For years, scientists have warned about what can happen when climate change supercharges extreme weather events. This is exactly what they meant,” the Milwaukee Sentinel Journal reported, describing the disaster as a 1,000-year flood.

Now, more than a dozen youth from Wisconsin, including Indigenous youth, are filing a lawsuit against the state’s utility regulator to force it to consider climate change when evaluating new fossil fuel projects.

Currently, Wisconsin law blocks the Public Service Commission from taking air pollution – including carbon dioxide emissions – into consideration during the permitting process. Fifteen children and teenagers, ages eight to 17, filed a lawsuit Friday against the utility regulator alleging that the law violates their constitutional rights to life and liberty.

The case is part of a growing climate litigation movement led in part by Indigenous youth. Twelve-year-old Miahlin B., who goes by her tribal name Waazakone, and her three siblings joined the lawsuit because climate change is eroding their traditional ways of life. The children harvest wild rice, which is sacred to their communities, but warming temperatures are making it harder to grow rice successfully. They tap sugar maple trees to make maple sugar, but last year came up dry in part because of a shorter winter season. They fish for walleye and sturgeon, but both fish populations are shrinking as waters warm.

Waazakone told Grist she wants to protect her community for future generations. She describes herself as a water protector, explaining that caring for water is part of her responsibility as a female member of the Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Indians. “We need the government to understand that clean water and air is a human right and our most valuable resource,” she said.

The youth plaintiffs are also challenging a Wisconsin law that prohibits the Public Service Commission from mandating more renewable energy from local utilities. Right now, about three-quarters of the state’s electricity generation comes from fossil fuels like oil and gas. That’s on par with the national average but lags far behind states like South Dakota, where more than 75% of its state energy production comes from renewables.

The plaintiffs are represented by Midwest Environmental Advocates, a Madison-based environmental non-profit law centre, and Our Children’s Trust, an Oregon-based non-profit dedicated to advancing youth-led climate litigation. The latter is perhaps best known for its successful litigation against the state of Montana in Held v. Montana. In December, the state’s Supreme Court affirmed that Montana youth have a constitutional right to “a clean and healthful environment” and concluded that the state should take greenhouse gas emissions into account when considering new fossil fuel projects. The state hasn’t considered any new oil and gas projects since then, so it remains to be seen what that will look like in practice.

“Wisconsin doesnʻt have any fossil fuel extraction like Montana, but they do continue to have an electricity sector that’s dominated by fossil fuels. Itʻs the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the state,” said Our Children’s Trust attorney Nate Bellinger, who is representing the Wisconsin plaintiffs.

The non-profit has filed dozens of lawsuits in the United States over the last decade and a half, including one against the Trump administrationʻs reversal of former president Joe Bidenʻs climate policies. Last year, they helped secure a landmark settlement in Hawaii with the case Navahine v. Hawaiʻi Department of Transportation, where youth plaintiffs contended that the state’s commitment to expanding infrastructure to support gas-powered cars and disregard for cleaner options violated their constitutional right to “a clean and healthful environment.” There, the state agreed to develop a plan to zero out carbon emissions from its transportation sector by 2045.

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In Wisconsin, the constitutional right to a clean environment isn’t as explicit as in Montana or Hawaii, where there is language in the state constitution spelling out that right. Wisconsin Democrats tried unsuccessfully earlier this year to add that language to the state constitution. But the attorneys in this new case are arguing that a stable climate system is necessary to achieve the constitutional rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Maria Antonia Tigre, director of global climate change litigation at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, says lawsuits like this take on new salience in light of the Trump administration’s rollback of climate action. “It’s even more important to bring these cases now given the current state of the United States’ stance on climate change in general,” she says.

A spokesman from the Wisconsin Public Service Commission declined to comment on pending litigation.

As state leaders grapple with mounting costs of flood recovery and plead for federal assistance, Waazakone hopes that her lawsuit forces them to take climate change seriously. “I want the state of Wisconsin to realize that you cannot allow businesses and people to continue to erode our futures,” she says.

This article originally appeared in Grist. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Grist is a non-profit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. 

The post The youth-led climate litigation movement keeps growing appeared first on Corporate Knights.

1. Hawaii vs. Big Oil

Since 2020, the city of Honolulu in Hawaii has sought to hold oil and gas companies liable for misleading the public about the impacts of burning fossil fuels. In January, the U.S. Supreme Court turned down an appeal to review the suit, clearing the way for Big Oil to finally stand trial for decades of deception. Honolulu’s lawsuit is one of many currently moving through U.S. courts that accuse big polluters of lying about climate change to hamper the energy transition.

2. Youth vs. fossil fuels

In 2018, Ontario passed the Cap and Trade Cancellation Act, which not only repealed the province’s cap-and-trade system but weakened its climate targets. The backtracking prompted seven young climate campaigners to launch a suit against the provincial government the following year. The Ontario Superior Court initially ruled against them, but in October, an appeals court restored their case and gave them a new hearing. Lawyers for the youth say the court will be asked to provide “meaningful remedies for the government’s ongoing violation of Charter rights.”

3. US. Chamber of Commerce vs. climate disclosure

In 2023, California passed two laws requiring companies to disclose their GHG emissions and their climate-related risks. Last January, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce teamed up with business groups to file a lawsuit claiming that the laws violate their first amendment rights. But two federal judgments on the challenge have so far gone against the plaintiffs, clearing the path for California to become the first state to implement compulsory climate reporting and setting a precedent for other states considering similar rules, like New York and Colorado.

4. Farmers vs. Trump’s anti-science agenda

Just one month into Donald Trump’s new presidency, a cohort of organic farmers and environmental groups sued the U.S. Agriculture Department for scrubbing climate change references from its website, including data and interactive tools. The purged information was used by farmers to plan for climate risks like heat waves, droughts, floods, extreme weather and wildfires. The federal agency also froze key funds, depriving businesses and non-profits of promised money for conservation and climate programs.

5. NGOs vs. oil pipelines

A group of African NGOs is suing the governments of Uganda and Tanzania for approving the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, a 1,500-kilometre, US$5-billion pipeline that is expected to produce 34 million tonnes of carbon per year over four decades. The plaintiffs say their governments failed to examine the project’s contribution to climate change, or the environmental and social impacts of a pipeline that will travel through local communities and ecologically sensitive areas.

This article appeared in the spring 2025 edition of the magazine. 

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The rejection was the second time this year that the Supreme Court refused to wade into the lawsuits, which accuse oil companies of deceiving the public about the dangers of fossil fuels. “It’s pretty clear that the Supreme Court is not going to get involved until there’s a final judgment in one of these cases, and that’ll be after trial,” said Pat Parenteau, an environmental law professor and senior fellow at Vermont Law School.

While Big Oil companies recently won some lower-court battles in lawsuits brought against them by state and local governments, experts say the Supreme Court’s actions, along with positive rulings for communities in other cases, make it increasingly likely that fossil fuel companies will eventually stand trial in multiple courtrooms across the country.

Now that the Supreme Court has denied repeated attempts by the companies and their red state allies to have the cases tossed out of court, the day of reckoning is fast approaching.

– Pat Parenteau, Senior Fellow, Vermont Law School

The fossil fuel industry has itself admitted it could face “massive monetary liability” from the lawsuits. After another failed effort by industry allies to stop those cases at the Supreme Court, supporters of the cases are sounding alarms about the possibility that oil companies will turn to a Republican-controlled federal government to gift them a political escape hatch.

Minnesota lawsuit targeting ‘campaign of deception’ moves forward

One of the lawsuits the Republican attorneys general had targeted was brought by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison against ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and Koch Industries. Last month, in a victory for Minnesota, Judge Reynaldo Aligada upheld nearly all of the state’s claims accusing the companies and trade group of violating state laws through a “campaign of deception” about their products’ harm to the climate.

The lawsuit seeks to make Exxon, Koch and the API fund a corrective public education campaign about the link between fossil fuels and climate change, publish all the research they conducted on the subject, and disgorge the profits they made through false advertising, among other remedies.

Minnesota’s win followed a series of dismissals of climate-deception lawsuits in New Jersey and Maryland, where state court judges sided with oil companies in their characterizations of the cases as efforts to reduce global emissions, and determined that the states’ claims were preempted by federal law.

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Aligada called that argument “unpersuasive,” concluding that federal laws “would not preempt the State’s claims because those claims do not aim to restrain pollution or regulate emissions,” and that Minnesota’s complaint is about “state law consumer deception and failure-to-warn claims that have never been subject to federal common law.”

The ruling added Minnesota to a list of climate accountability plaintiffs – including Massachusetts, Honolulu, Vermont and Boulder – that have prevailed over fossil fuel defendants’ motions to dismiss their cases, some of which dealt with the same question of preemption and what the cases seek to achieve.

In January, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review a ruling from the Hawai‘i Supreme Court that rejected Big Oil’s federal preemption arguments against Honolulu’s case. The Colorado Supreme Court will soon decide whether to uphold a similar ruling that allowed Boulder’s lawsuit against ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy to proceed toward trial.

Puerto Rico takes a page from court victories against Big Tobacco

In Puerto Rico, a newer legal theory for climate-deception cases is poised to get a green light to move forward in federal court.

Puerto Rico municipalities were the first to charge fossil fuel companies with violating the federal RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act, arguing in their lawsuit that oil majors engaged in a “multi-year, multi-million-dollar, multi-organization propaganda deception campaign designed explicitly to undermine climate science.” Those RICO charges have now “survived the first test,” Parenteau said, after a magistrate judge recommended in February that the 37 municipalities’ racketeering and antitrust claims be upheld.

Racketeering and antitrust charges may be new for climate litigation, but they were leveraged by the U.S. Department of Justice against major tobacco corporations, which in 2006 were found guilty of coordinating to deceive the public about the link between smoking and cancer. State-level racketeering claims have also been added to the complaint filed against fossil fuel companies by Hoboken, New Jersey.

In his recommendations to the federal district court judge on how the case should proceed, Magistrate Judge Héctor Ramos-Vega in San Juan said he would grant oil companies’ motions to dismiss Puerto Rico law-based claims including fraud, public nuisance and failure to warn, finding that they were inadequately laid out in the complaint. Yet he joined Aligada and other state court judges in rejecting the companies’ arguments that the lawsuits are aimed at reducing emissions and should be tossed out.

Local officials involved in the case are seeking to make Big Oil help pay for their communities to recover from a series of fatal hurricanes in 2017, including Hurricane Maria, and to adapt to future threats. Those disasters were in part the result of the companies’ campaigns “to convince consumers that their fossil fuel-based products did not – and would not – alter the climate, knowing full well the consequences of their combined carbon pollution on Puerto Rico,” according to the complaint.

“At the heart of Plaintiffs’ claims for relief is a purported decades-long misinformation and propaganda campaign,” Ramos-Vega wrote. “Thus, the culprit is Defendants’ words, not their emissions.”

Oil industry allies reach for Republican support

There are growing signs that industry allies are not resting on their laurels as cases against Big Oil continue to inch forward.

Last month, an industry front group called American Energy Institute launched a new campaign bemoaning “coordinated lawfare from radical climate groups” as “the biggest risk” to President Trump’s energy agenda. In The Guardian, Dharna Noor reported that a truck parked outside a major conference of oil and gas executives in Houston was broadcasting that “lawfare and anti-energy laws are threatening America’s pro-consumer energy dominance” and linking to an op-ed by another front group, Alliance for Consumers.

The groups have ties to conservative billionaire Leonard Leo, who was also linked to allied interest groups that unsuccessfully pushed Supreme Court justices to take up the cases. In response to the justices’ latest denial, Minnesota Attorney General Ellison also drew a connection: “The Republican Attorneys General Association takes its marching orders from its largest donors: fossil fuel interests and Leonard Leo.”

Advocates now fear that this same network and others, having failed to persuade the justices to step in, could turn to Congress to provide immunity to the industry. Last week, nearly 200 advocacy groups urged Senate Minority LeaderChuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to preemptively oppose any liability waiver for fossil fuel companies.

Tom Pyle, president of the industry-aligned think tank Institute for Energy Research, told E&E News that advocates’ concerns were “complete and total paranoia.” But there’s a well-documented history to back them up. An immunity provision for Big Oil has twice made its way into other proposed pieces of legislation, in 2017 and 2020.

With more cases poised to reach trial, Parenteau said, the industry might not pass up the opportunity to “seek protection from the Republican-controlled Congress.”

“Now that the Supreme Court has denied repeated attempts by the companies and their red state allies to have the cases tossed out of court, the day of reckoning is fast approaching,” he said.

This article by ExxonKnews is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. You can read the original here. 

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Adfree Cities and the New Weather Institute filed the complaint this week with the U.K. branch of the OECD. They charge that WPP’s work for major fossil fuel polluters like BP, Saudi Aramco and Shell, along with its work for other heavily polluting industries such as carmakers, airlines and plastics, makes the company accountable for enabling pollution as well as human rights violations. According to DeSmog’s research, WPP – the world’s largest advertising agency by revenue – also works with TotalEnergies, as well as a number of other oil and gas clients.

“The complaint significantly raises the legal risks for advertising firms,” said Harj Narulla, a barrister representing the climate campaign groups and co-author of the complaint. “By continuing to work for polluting clients, WPP is failing to meet its own environmental commitments and contributing to harm on a global scale.”

The groups filed the complaint at the OECD’s “National Contact Point” in the United Kingdom, where WPP is headquartered. The campaigners say this is the first time the OECD has received a complaint against an advertising company.

“While claiming to take the climate crisis seriously, WPP has become the chief propagandist for some of the most polluting corporations on the planet – many of whom are shredding their own, already limited, green pledges,” Andrew Simms, co-director of the New Weather Institute, told DeSmog. “This complaint is designed to compel WPP and its subsidiaries to comply with international rules it has signed up to, and the promises and claims it has made.”

Simms and his co-complainants say that WPP must disclose the emissions generated by its work for high-polluting clients, also known as “advertised emissions”; conduct due diligence to prevent damage to the environment and human rights as a result of its business operations; and drop clients not aligned with climate goals. “All this would just bring WPP into line with what it already claims to live up to,” Simms said.

As of 2024, WPP had more fossil fuel industry contracts – at least 79 – than its major ad industry rivals, according to research by campaign group Clean Creatives.

The complaint referenced two DeSmog investigations that had highlighted WPP’s work for big polluters.

Last July, DeSmog revealed that oil and gas companies had run more than 240 ad campaigns on the London public transport network since the mayor pledged to make the city “carbon zero” by 2030. Freedom-of-information requests sent by DeSmog showed that BP and Shell – serviced at the time by WPP ad agencies including VML, EssenceMediacom, Grey, Landor and Mindshare – had specifically targeted Westminster station with ads containing political messaging.

In October, DeSmog found that a WPP agency headquartered in South Africa called MetropolitanRepublic had enlisted social media influencers to promote TotalEnergies’ controversial East African Crude Oil Pipeline, even as anti-pipeline campaigners suffered beatings and arrests by Ugandan police.

The complaint also referenced two profiles of WPP agencies, content marketing agency SJR, and media buying agency EssenceMediacom, featured in DeSmog’s Advertising and Public Relations Database – a freely accessible resource that profiles more than three dozen agencies working to promote oil and gas companies.

WPP did not respond to a request for comment.

‘Enablers to planetary destruction’

In a June 2024 address, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called on nations to ban fossil fuel advertising and urged the advertising and PR industry “to stop acting as enablers to planetary destruction. Stop taking on new fossil fuel clients, from today, and set out plans to drop your existing ones.”

In 2022, WPP CEO Mark Read justified such work as supporting oil and gas companies to transition their business models from fossil fuels to clean energy, the trade publication Ad Week reported. In its 2023 annual report, WPP said that its “purpose” was to “use the power of creativity to build better futures for our people, planet, clients and communities.” The company also stated that taking on client work “designed to frustrate the objectives of the Paris [climate] Agreement” went against its internal policy.

U.K. ad regulators have banned several ads produced by WPP-owned agencies in recent years for making misleading green claims. In 2023, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) banned  Shell’s “Cleaner Energy” ad, created by Wunderman Thompson (now VML), for giving the impression that it was invested significantly in producing energy from low-carbon sources, which actually made up only a very small portion of Shell’s business.

In 2022, the ASA banned an ad created for U.K. bank HSBC, a leading financier of fossil fuels, by Ogilvy, for misleadingly portraying the company as doing a lot to fight climate change, while “omitt[ing] significant information about HSBC’s contribution to carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions.” WPP agencies also work with major plastics polluters, including Coca-Cola, Danone and Nestlé, which together are responsible for 17% of branded plastic pollution globally. Experts warn that plastic pollution is creating a global crisis for environmental and human health.

Reporting a company to the OECD triggers a five-stage process, beginning with an initial assessment to determine whether the OECD can accept the complaint. If it does, the OECD may then mediate a discussion between the complainants and the company to reach an agreement.

In 2019, BP stopped running a series of ads after the environmental legal group ClientEarth filed an OECD complaint charging that the ads misled the public by focusing on BP’s low-carbon products, and not the extent of its annual spend on oil and gas.

While OECD guidelines are not legally binding, they are backed by the countries that are OECD members. If WPP were found to be in breach of the guidelines, it could have reputational repercussions.

Paris-based advertising giant Havas acknowledged that its work with fossil fuel clients could harm its reputation in a recent prospectus for its listing on the Dutch stock exchange. The company had faced a backlash since September 2023, when it won a major account with Shell, and four of its agencies lost their B Corp ethical business certification as a result of the deal.

This article by DeSmog is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. 

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In a significant win last week, the Court of Session in Scotland ruled that the United Kingdom’s consent for two major offshore oil developments was illegal, after their environmental assessments failed to factor in the climate impacts of burning the fossil fuels they extracted, BBC reports. The judge, Lord Ericht, ordered the project owners to seek new approvals before they can go into production.

The Rosebank development, 128 kilometres west of Shetland in the North Atlantic, is the United Kingdom’s biggest undeveloped oilfield, The Guardian writes. It is 80% owned by Norwegian state fossil company Equinor. The smaller Jackdaw development, owned by Shell, is located in the North Sea.

Lord Ericht “said work on both fields could continue while the new information was gathered but no oil and gas could be extracted unless fresh approval was granted,” BBC says. That was enough for U.K. climate campaigners to declare a major milestone. “The climate science is crystal clear that we can’t create new oil and gas fields if we’re going to stay within safe climate thresholds,” said Tessa Khan, executive director of Uplift, one of the lead organizations in the fight to stop Rosebank.

“The age of governments approving new drilling sites by ignoring their climate impacts is over,” said Greenpeace U.K. senior campaigner Philip Evans. “The courts have agreed with what climate campaigners have said all along: Rosebank and Jackdaw are unlawful, and their full climate impacts must now be properly considered.”

Earlier last month in Ireland, the High Court overturned a planning authority’s decision to turn down a 13-turbine wind farm in County Laois. Oslo-based power generator Statkraft argued that planners at the local agency, An Bord Pleanála, “had discretion to override local development plans in the bigger pursuit of climate action but did not use this properly,” freelance journalist Isabella Kaminski wrote on LinkedIn.

And then, “what could have been a prosaic planning dispute resulted in a blistering judgment that strongly criticizes An Bord Pleanála for talking about the climate emergency but failing to walk the walk, particularly in allowing the development of renewable energy infrastructure,” Kaminski added. “Judge Richard Humphreys said the decision valued visual impacts over the many urgent benefits of combating climate change, which suggests a ‘deeply skewed set of values and an unwillingness to face new realities.’”

In Ontario, the seven youth litigants behind the long-running Mathur v. Ontario climate justice case are urging the Supreme Court of Canada to hear their “game-changer” lawsuit quickly after the provincial government asked the justices to weigh in late last year. “I was 12 years old when we took the Ontario government to court for the first time. Now, I’m in my first year of university,” youth applicant Zoe Keary-Matzner said in a January 28 media release. “We are counting on a sense of urgency from the courts that meets the urgency of the climate emergency we’re in.”

“This case has spanned several years, and multiple levels of court,” agreed lawywer Fraser Thomson, Ecojustice’s climate director. “With our environment, our health, our wallets and our futures at stake, nothing needs our attention – and the urgency of the courts – more than climate change.”

And in the United States, the year ended with the American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce filing suit against the new Climate Superfund Act that makes Vermont the first state to require polluters to pay for damages and applies the proceeds to the costs of climate harms, Inside Climate News reports.

“The suit will likely take years to play out, but its arguments could affect how similar bills in other states proceed,” Inside Climate News says.

This article was first published by The Energy Mix. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Read the original story here.

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An hour later, the Washington, D.C.–based Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) chimed in: “We sued Donald Trump 163 times during his first term, and we’re ready to do it again.” 

“Despair is not an option,” said San Francisco–based Earthjustice. “Last time around, Earthjustice filed more than 200 cases in response to the Trump administration’s policies. We won 85% of the decisions – and we’ll do it again.”

Becoming an environmental advocate is very much motivated by idealism. You certainly don’t get rich doing climate work.

– Andrew Wetzler, senior vice president for nature, Natural Resources Defense Council

Earthjustice urged worried Americans to support Biden-era emissions regulations and challenge Republican efforts to reopen public lands to drilling. The non-profit also vowed to up its state-level litigation: it’s fighting to electrify school bus fleets in New York and Washington, decarbonize homes in California and Maryland, and halt plans for gas plants in nine states and Puerto Rico.

Lawyers make unlikely heroes. In a 2015 American Bar Association survey of the public, 69% said that “lawyers are more interested in making money than in serving clients.” In a 2023 Gallup poll, just 16% rated lawyers’ ethics as “high” or “very high.”

NRDC’s Andrew Wetzler, senior vice president for nature, shuns the “hero” mantle: “In a judicial setting, anyone can be heard – even in the face of a powerful government.” Still, he agrees that environmental lawyers are a breed apart. “Becoming an environmental advocate is very much motivated by idealism,” he says. “You certainly don’t get rich doing climate work.”

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Canada’s climate lawyers have also earned a shout-out. Vancouver-based Ecojustice is Canada’s largest environmental law charity, with 35 lawyers. Among its cases, it’s fighting for Indigenous Peoples’ right of consultation on major projects and  the rights of youth (Mathur et al) opposing Ontario’s rollback of carbon targets, a challenge that produced the first judicial ruling that climate inaction may violate Canadians’ Charter rights. 

Ecojustice executive director Tracy London says that Canada’s environmental lawyers share their U.S. colleagues’ “ferocity.” But rather than count wins and losses, she says that Ecojustice measures its success “in being thought leaders, ensuring that environmental law remains a thoughtful, vigorous way to hold governments accountable.” 

Rick Spence is a business writer, speaker and consultant in Toronto specializing in entrepreneurship, innovation and growth. He is also a senior editor at Corporate Knights.

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It has been a long and obstacle-ridden road for Juliana v. United States, a case that argues that the government’s actions that cause climate change have violated the youngest generation’s constitutional rights to life, liberty and property.   

“This is no ordinary lawsuit,” Judge Ann Aiken, the Oregon District Court judge who has presided over much of the legal drama, declared back in 2016, when she first paved the way for the lawsuit to proceed to trial. In that ruling, Aiken denied a motion by the administration of President Barack Obama to have the case dismissed for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction. The case was groundbreaking because it was the first to frame a climate case around constitutional rights. And it would have been the first time that fossil fuel policy confronted climate science in the courts in the U.S. But that trial never happened, and instead it has been years of the Obama, Trump and most recently Biden administrations trying to delay, halt or vanquish the lawsuit altogether. It is no wonder, as the youth originally went for the climate jugular, so to speak, demanding that the court order the government to “swiftly phase-down CO2 emissions aimed at atmospheric CO2 concentrations that are no more than 350 [parts per million] by 2100, develop a national plan to restore Earth’s energy balance, and implement that national plan so as to stabilize the climate system.” They later pared down their demands in response to a court ruling.   

The case appeared to have crossed its last hurdle in December, as Judge Aiken declared – again – that the youth could proceed to a trial. And then a new barrage of opposing motions emanated from the Department of Justice, under President Joe Biden, including an unprecedented seventh petition (following six by the Trump administration) for “writ of mandamus,” a rare legal tool that would shut down the case before evidence is heard. In May, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals granted the petition.   

But if the government is relentless, so too are the youth. In September, they filed a motion at the Supreme Court, asking it to “reverse an egregious error” by the Ninth Circuit Court that “flagrantly disregarded” the limits Congress and the Supreme Court placed on its jurisdiction. “This case is about addressing the climate crisis and protecting our fundamental rights like our right to life and freedom,” said 18-year-old Avery, one of the plaintiffs in the case, in a statement. “However, it is also about ensuring access to justice.”  

Juliana v. United States is one of a number of youth-driven climate cases that have experienced varying degrees of success in the U.S. and abroad. Last year, a Montana judge ruled that the state of Montana violated the constitutional rights of 16 young plaintiffs to a clean and healthful environment through legislation, enacted in 2011, that limits the environmental factors that can be considered when approving oil and gas projects. The court declared that legislation unconstitutional and ordered that Montana consider climate change and the emission of greenhouse gases when approving fossil fuel projects. An appeal of that decision was heard in July, and a decision is pending.   

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Courts open the door to more climate lawsuits

In Canada, a decision is still pending on Mathur v. Ontario, the first Charter-based climate case to reach a trial in this country. A court dismissed the case in 2023, but the seven youth who brought the arguments forward appealed that decision in January and are awaiting a ruling. Another Canadian youth climate case involving 14 children and teens from seven provinces and one territory will be proceeding to trial, expected to take place in 2025.   

Lawyers for the Juliana case note that it has inspired other cases, like one in South Korea, where the Constitutional Court this year declared a provision of the country’s climate law unconstitutional, a milestone in climate litigation in Asia.   

“This declaration of youths’ rights and the government’s wrongs is a testament to the leadership of youth plaintiffs and their relentless advocacy for a safe and livable future, and of another judiciary doing its job,” said Julia Olson, co-executive director and chief legal counsel with Our Children’s Trust, a U.S. non-profit behind the Juliana case. “We hope it serves as a clarion call for U.S. courts to follow suit.”  

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The applicants – KlimaSeniorinnen, or Senior Women for Climate Protection, average age 73 – claimed that their government “failed to fulfil its positive obligations to protect life effectively” through appropriate legislation and targets to combat climate change. The court agreed, accepting the women’s contention that older women suffer disproportionately from intensifying heat waves.

Heat-related deaths have spiked by roughly 30% in Europe over the last two decades. A 2023 study published in Nature Medicine estimated 56% more heat-related deaths in European women than men. The judging panel declared 16 to 1 that Article 2 of Europe’s human rights convention guarantees citizens “effective protection by state authorities from the serious adverse effects of climate change on their lives, health, well-being and quality of life.”

What we do now, we are not doing for ourselves, but for the sake of our children and our children’s children.

– Elisabeth Stern, KlimaSeniorinnen member

The Swiss women’s group, formed in 2016 with the support of Greenpeace, faced an uphill battle. After their case was dismissed by the Swiss Supreme Court in 2020, they turned to the European Court of Human Rights. “We know statistically that in 10 years we will be gone,” KlimaSeniorinnen member Elisabeth Stern told BBC. “What we do now, we are not doing for ourselves, but for the sake of our children and our children’s children.”

Scientists say Switzerland is heating up at twice the global rate. Heat domes last fall set new temperature records. Of course, it’s not just Switzerland. The 2023 Lancet Countdown report on health and climate change estimated that global heat deaths could quadruple by mid-century if the world warms by 2°C. 

Given the court’s ruling, Switzerland will need to review and upgrade its climate policies. While the decision is not technically binding beyond Switzerland, it sets legal precedent for future climate legislation in all 46 countries that have signed the European Convention on Human Rights.

Andrew Gage, an environmental lawyer with Vancouver-based West Coast Environmental Law, believes the KlimaSeniorinnen decision will influence the outcome of cases beyond Europe – including in Canada, where the Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects individuals’ rights to life and security. “While not binding,” he says, the decision sets “a very strong precedent.”

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In the famous Urgenda case, the Dutch Supreme Court ordered a binding emissions reduction target on the national government. In the past few weeks, courts in Belgium and Germany have ordered greater emissions reductions from national governments.

Closer to home, Canada’s Federal Court of Appeal recently decided that two constitutional challenges against the government’s inadequate climate policies can go to trial. In essence, the court found the claims were “justiciable” — that is, they can be decided by the courts. This decision sets an important precedent that will likely increase the courts’ influence on climate policy.

The growing influence of courts is itself a contentious institutional phenomenon. It accepts that courts are an appropriate way to resolve the hotly contested issues at the centre of climate policy. This means that unelected judges have the power to scrutinize decisions made by elected officials and expert regulators.

‘Justiciability 101’

The debate surrounding the courts’ role in climate policy partly plays out through the doctrine of justiciability, which allows judges to strike claims that aren’t well-suited to be resolved by the courts.

Justiciability marks the line between what should be decided by courts versus other government branches. In the past, Canadian courts indicated climate change fell on the other side of that line.

In 2008, the Federal Court found that a claim seeking to enforce Canada’s obligations under the Kyoto Protocol was non-justiciable because the applicable law did not allow for court enforcement.

In 2012, the same court decided that the federal government’s decision to leave the Kyoto Protocol was also not a matter for the courts.

A turning tide?

In December 2023, the Federal Court of Appeal examined two constitutional challenges to federal climate policy.

The first was a youth-led challenge to current federal climate policy based on its disproportionate harms to young people. The second one involved two Wet’suwet’en House groups claiming that federal climate policy violated their rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

According to the lower court, these challenges were “too political” for courts to resolve and better left to legislators and government officials.

The lower court rulings put an early end to both challenges, preventing judicial scrutiny of claims of rights violations. They also cut off an opportunity to establish a pro-climate precedent for future cases.

In an important shift, the Federal Court of Appeal reversed the lower court’s decisions. In a direct rebuke, the appeal court ruled that climate change may be justiciable even if it raises complex or controversial issues.

According to the court, claims are justiciable so long as they have a “legal anchor” — some legal or regulatory link to the claim. In the challenges at issue, the court found that the federal government’s commitments under the Paris Agreement provided a sufficient legal anchor. It viewed these commitments as serving as an objective basis to consider the claims.

This broader approach to justiciability will likely open the door to more climate claims. It builds on recent judicial decisions that have held legislated rules like emissions reduction targets and climate reporting requirements can be challenged before the courts.

Perverse incentives?

Perhaps inadvertently, a “legal anchor” approach to justiciability creates an anti-regulatory bias. Governments expose themselves to court challenges when they enact laws and regulations, but not when they merely make policy statements.

As a result, climate action receives greater judicial scrutiny than climate inaction. This approach fails to capture how government inaction can itself be a political decision affecting constitutional and other rights. For this reason, some courts have maintained that challenges to government inaction are legitimate. The Federal Court of Appeal’s broader understanding of what constitutes a legal anchor may also alleviate this issue.

But a legal anchor approach raises other concerns. The rejection of non-justiciable claims based on the absence of laws and regulations — legal anchors — shows a deference to existing political processes that can disadvantage youth, Indigenous Peoples and others who lack political clout.

If these groups are unable to achieve results through political means, a narrow approach to what constitutes a legal anchor also limits their access to legal change.

The future role of courts

Going forward, the increase in cases related to climate change and climate policy will test the balance between courts and other government branches.

In the past, Canadian courts have generally not shied away from other complex and controversial issues, including prostitution, mandatory minimum sentences and even Québec independence.

Now those most suffering the effects of climate change want and need courts to act on climate when governments fail to do so.

Steve Lorteau is a candidate in the Doctor of Juridical Science program at the University of Toronto and Andrew Green is Metcalf Chair in Environmental Law at the University of Toronto.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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It’s not hard to see why the aviation industry has provoked the ire of climate activists. Flying is responsible for a staggering 5% or so of human-induced global warming and its climate impact is still growing at a rate far greater than almost any other sector.

In this context, a profusion of “green flying” and “sustainability” advertising campaigns has turned the industry into an emblematic example of the debate between growth and sustainability.

Why greenwashing?

The rise in greenwashing litigation can in part be attributed to the relative ease with which cases can be brought. It’s simply a lot easier to attack an airline’s advertising compared to other activities that might be targeted by strategic climate litigation.

Consumers can use legal mechanisms such as commercial practice or consumer protection regulations, as happened in a recent greenwashing complaint to the European Commission filed by consumer groups in 19 countries against 17 airlines.

It’s an effective form of climate action due to the power exerted by advertising on public perception and social norms. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has underscored the importance of reducing demand for flying in the first place, something significantly hindered by adverts that downplay its environmental impact.

A report by Greenpeace and think tank the New Weather Institute claimed that in 2019 airline advertisements influenced 34 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent emissions worldwide.

This litigation is also buoyed by the demonstrable falsehoods that riddle the sustainability strategies of these companies. The pillars upon which their net-zero strategies rest vary from the broadly ineffective to the dangerously fraudulent and facilitate growth in a sector in dire need of reduction.

Airlines all rely on some form of carbon offsetting – planting trees, for instance, to “offset” the carbon emitted by the planes – or sustainable aviation fuel or carbon capture and storage, in order to “mitigate” their climate impacts.

Common litigation strategies

Thus far, there have been six climate change-related cases brought against major airlines (four in Europe, one in the US and one in Brazil). These cases are buttressed by numerous legal complaints taken through the European Commission or the UK and US advertising standards boards which have already successfully ordered Ryanair, Lufthansa and Etihad to pull ad campaigns.

In each of these three cases, authorities found that terminology like “protecting the future”, “sustainable aviation” or “low-emissions airline” amounted to wilful misleading of consumers and breached advertising regulations.

A recent case taken by Dutch campaigners against airline giant KLM is the most daring example yet. Climate action group FossielVrij (Fossil-free) argues that KLM’s “Fly Responsibly” campaign constitutes misleading advertising under EU consumer law.

The group asserts that flying responsibly is impossible at present, and that KLM seeks company growth and increased flight sales, when it should be reducing emissions by reducing the number of flights. KLM said its “communications comply with the applicable legislation and regulations”, but has dropped the Fly Responsibly campaign.

Interestingly, this case builds upon a ruling of the Dutch Advertisement Code Commission and indicates the “snowballing” trend inherent in anti-greenwashing litigation, wherein cases rely upon precedent set by previous authorities. With this borne in mind, the recent 19-country complaint by the European Consumer Organisation could provide the strongest foundation to date for future litigation.

Delta Airlines is also facing a class action suit in the US, brought by a California resident who alleges that by marketing itself as a “carbon-neutral” Delta has grossly misrepresented its environmental impact. This points to a growing understanding of the ineffectiveness of carbon offsetting, a net-zero tactic adopted by almost every major airline.

A Delta spokesperson said the case is “without legal merit” as the airline has “transitioned its focus away from carbon offsets” towards decarbonising its own activities. European companies should follow this case closely as American-style “class action” litigation will soon be made possible in the EU.

Does this litigation have teeth?

These cases might result in companies simply pulling their green campaign while maintaining their existing corporate framework and growth models. More promisingly, recent research suggests that any climate-related case taken against a major emitting company will affect the firm’s value (on average by 0.057% following the filing of a case, and by 1.5% following an unfavourable decision).

In reality, these early cases are merely scratching the surface of what’s possible. Once these cases enter the public conversation, a growing understanding of consumer protection is bound to follow.

In many jurisdictions, such as my home country of Ireland, significant damages can be awarded against companies for misleading advertisement. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, which is currently investigating claims of greenwashing in other sectors, will soon be able to fine companies 10% of their global turnover for non-compliance.

While anti-greenwashing litigation might not halt the growth of this industry altogether, it is no doubt an invaluable tool. At its most effective, it can stop blatant profiteering from the climate crisis and force the aviation sector to confront the chimera that is green growth.

Calum Maclaren is a PhD Candidate, Climate Litigation, University College Dublin.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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