Alaska Asks Court to Dismiss Youth Climate Change Lawsuit

“The right to a climate system that sustains human life, liberty, and dignity is both necessary for and foundational to the explicitly enumerated rights reserved by the Alaska Constitution,” the lawsuit alleges

The state of Alaska has asked an Anchorage court to dismiss a climate change lawsuit attempting to prevent the planned construction of a natural gas pipeline.

According to KTOO, the lawsuit was filed by the Oregon-based nonprofit Our Children’s Trust, which has bene involved in similar claims against the governments of Montana, Utah, and Hawaii. In the Alaska claim, attorneys for the Trust and the eight individual plaintiffs say that a planned natural gas pipeline between Prudhoe Bay and South-Central Alaska could violate provisions of the state’s constitution.

“The right to a climate system that sustains human life, liberty, and dignity is both necessary for and foundational to the explicitly enumerated rights reserved by the Alaska Constitution,” the lawsuit alleges. “Without a climate system that sustains human life, liberty, and dignity, Youth Plaintiffs cannot grow to adulthood in safety, live long healthy lives, provide for their basic human needs, safely raise families, learn and practice their religious and spiritual beliefs, learn and transmit their cultural traditions and practices, maintain their personal security and bodily integrity, or lead lives with sufficient access to clean air, water, shelter, and food.”

The plaintiffs, said attorney Andrew Welle, have already suffered the effects of climate change—and that the approval of the state’s most recent natural gas pipeline would exacerbate global warming’s impact.

“Yet, with the full knowledge of these dangers, their government has enacted and is actively carrying out a statutory mandate to advance and develop the Alaska LNG project, which, in the face of the climate emergency that is harming these plaintiffs, would more than triple Alaska’s greenhouse gas emissions of climate pollution for decades, locking in irreversible and escalating harms for these youth,” Welle said in court.

But the state said that the pipeline’s potential dangers are speculative.

“To get to where the plaintiffs are going in this case, the impact of that project on the access to fish and wildlife resources in the future, involves predictions upon predictions upon predictions,” Alaska Assistant Attorney General Margaret Paton-Walsh said in a statement. “Looking into a crystal ball and trying to determine how present-day decisions will shape the future is the work of policymakers, not courts.”

“To find that this is facially unconstitutionally would be to find that there is no way to develop Alaska’s natural gas consistent with […] [the] constitutional claims of the plaintiffs,” she said.

Alaska Superior Court Judge Dani Crosby said that at the end of Tuesday’s hearing that she would take the state’s request for a dismissal into consideration and enter a ruling at a later date.

Crosby, somewhat amusingly, also observed that the case has brought her court much more attention than it usually receives.

“My courtroom is not normally this packed, so this is very exciting for me,” Crosby said.

Sources

Alaska seeks to dismiss lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a trans-Alaska gas pipeline

Eight young Alaskans sue to block proposed trans-Alaska natural gas pipeline

State argues court should dismiss climate lawsuit from eight young Alaskans