Claiming the federal government has violated their rights by failing to protect present and future generations from human-caused climate change, 21 young people from across the U.S. filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration this week.
The plaintiffs, whose ages range from 8 to 19, filed their complaint in U.S. District Court in Oregon on Tuesday, naming numerous defendants, including President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, the Department of Defense, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior and the Department of Transportation, reported The Huffington Post.
The suit alleges that for over 50 years, the U.S. government has known that carbon dioxide pollution from burning fossil fuels was causing global warming and potentially disastrous climate change, and has known that continuing to burn fossil fuels would only further destabilize the climate system that so many depend on for survival.
"Defendants have for decades ignored their own plans for stopping the dangerous destabilization of our nation's climate system," the plaintiffs said in their complaint.
"Defendants have known of the unusually dangerous risk," the complaint continues, asking the court to declare that the U.S. government "violated and are violating Plaintiffs' fundamental constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property by causing dangerous CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and dangerous government interference with a stable climate system."
They also asked the judge to order an inventory of the country's carbon dioxide emissions and to force lawmakers to devise a plan to phase out those emissions, according to Oregon Live.
The youngest plaintiff, 8-year-old Levi Draheim, said that he is no longer able to swim in a river near his home in Florida due to an increase in fish die-offs and bacteria. Another plaintiff, 15-year-old Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, said that climate change is threatening forests and will lead to a scarcity of water near his home in Boulder, Colo. For 18-year-old Alexander Lozak, extreme drought conditions threatens the Oregon land that his great, great, great, grandmother first farmed, according to HuffPo.
The lawsuit is the largest yet, backed by Our Children's Trust, an Oregon-based nonprofit that supports similar lawsuits from children in all 50 states.
The Environmental Protection Agency responded to the lawsuit by defending its effort to confront climate change.
"That's why President Obama launched the Climate Action Plan and why EPA is taking action with our Clean Power Plan: to give our kids and grandkids the cleaner, safer future they deserve," Laura Allen, deputy press secretary for the EPA, said in a statement to HuffPo. "We have a moral obligation to leave a healthy planet for future generations."
"A child born today will turn fifteen in the year 2030 - the year when the full benefits of the Clean Power Plan will be realized," Allen said. "The actions we take now will clear the way for that child - and kids everywhere - to learn, play, and grow up in a world that's not only clean and safe, but full of opportunity."
President Barack Obama has called climate change "one of the key challenges of our lifetime" that poses just as much of a threat to U.S. national security as terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, cyberattacks and Russian aggression, as HNGN previously reported.
