How Obama, Trump, and Biden blocked court action on climate

My claim that our rulers are guilty of social murder does not hinge on formal legal or constitutional arguments. In fact, since the perpetrators have effective control over what laws allow and don’t allow, it’s not surprising that their actions are seldom formally illegal. Nevertheless, attempts to use their legal system against them can be an important part of building movements for justice, and much can be learned from those efforts, even when they fail.

Juliana v. United States is an important case in point. In addition to extensively documenting the role of successive U.S. governments in promoting climate disruption, it demonstrated that all-out support for the petrochemical industry is not limited to one political party. Democratic and Republican administrations alike fought to prevent courts from considering whether a government that knowingly destroys the climate system is violating the rights of its own children, and it was the Biden government that ultimately succeeded.

The case was originally filed on August 12, 2015, in a U.S. District Court in Oregon. They plaintiffs were 21 young people, aged 8 to 19—Black, Indigenous, white, biracial, and LGBTQ youth from eleven states. The case was named for 19-year-old Kelsey Juliana from Eugene, Oregon, who had previously sued Oregon’s government demanding climate action.

The Juliana 21 were represented by Our Children’s Trust, a small public interest law firm led by Julia Olson. The case was based on the legal strategy known as Atmospheric Trust Litigation, developed by University of Oregon law professor Mary Wood, which argued that the atmosphere is a public trust resource and that the government is constitutionally obligated to protect it for present and future generations.^[2]

The plaintiffs alleged that for over fifty years, the United States government had knowingly permitted, encouraged, and enabled the exploitation, production, and combustion of fossil fuels, deliberately allowing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations to reach levels unprecedented in human history.^[3] From the 1960s on, successive governments received scientific explicit warnings about the catastrophic consequences of unchecked fossil fuel combustion, but nevertheless continued subsidizing and promoting the industries responsible.

The result is massive disruption of a climate system on which the lives of the 21 depend. The government, they charged, had “acted with deliberate indifference to the peril they knowingly created.”^[4]

The plaintiffs argued that the Fifth Amendment protects a fundamental right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life, and that under both common law and constitutional tradition, the government has a duty to preserve natural resources essential to life, in trust for present and future generations.^[5]

They asked the court to issue an injunction requiring the government to cease permitting, authorizing, and subsidizing fossil fuel use, and to prepare a plan, subject to judicial approval, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Noted climate scientist James Hansen, whose granddaughter was one of the 21, joined the case as “guardian for future generations.” His expert report provided scientific evidence, backed by copious references to published research, that “human burning of fossil fuels has disrupted Earth’s energy balance.” As a result, “the planet is heating up—with no end in sight, unless we alter our present path.” He concluded:

Our government’s persistent permitting and underwriting of fossil fuel projects serves now to further disrupt the favorable climate system that to date enabled human civilization to develop. In order to preserve a viable climate system, our use of fossil fuels must be phased out as rapidly as is feasible. … Our government’s permitting of additional, new, or renewed fossil fuel projects is entirely antithetical to its fundamental responsibility to our children and their posterity. Their fundamental rights now hang in the balance.^[6]

Another expert report, later published as They Knew: The U.S. Federal Government’s Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis, was submitted by James Gustave Speth, whose resume, it has been justly said, “is as mainstream and establishment as it gets.” He was a senior environmental advisor to Presidents Carter and Clinton, founder of the National Resources Defense Council and the World Resources Institute, administrator of the UN Development Program, and dean of Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Time magazine once called him the “ultimate insider.”^[7]

He was, in short, uniquely qualified to document, in meticulous detail, how every administration from Carter through Trump had received explicit scientific warnings about the consequences of fossil fuel combustion—and how every one of them had failed to act. From 1976, when Carter was elected, to 2019, the third year of Trump’s first presidency, U.S. emissions from energy production had risen 16 percent.

The federal government’s actions on fossil fuels were, Speth wrote,

the greatest dereliction of civic responsibility in the history of the Republic.^[8] This shocking historical conduct, government malfeasance on a grand scale, has left current and future generations enormously vulnerable to substantial danger.^[9]

Speth’s report concluded:

After analyzing the last four decades of actions and inactions, a clear pattern of historical government conduct emerges relating to the nation’s energy system and climate change. For decades:

a. The defendants have understood both that the dangers of climate change are real, present, and intensifying and that they are caused predominantly by burning fossil fuels.

b. The defendants have understood how climate change will harm the nation and especially youth plaintiffs and future generations.

c. The defendants have understood there are alternative national energy system pathways that would provide greater protection and safety for the nation and our people.

Notwithstanding these understandings, the defendants have acted routinely and consistently, and continue to do so, to promote fossil fuels and thus to cause irreversible climate danger, a pattern that can only reflect a deliberate indifference to the severe impacts that will follow—impacts to be endured predominantly by youth plaintiffs and future generations.^[10]

The scientific and historical evidence so damning that the defendants didn’t even try to refute it. Instead, Barack Obama’s Department of Justice, supported by fossil fuel industry groups, argued that there is “no constitutional right to a pollution-free environment,” and urged the court to throw out the case without a trial.^[11]

To the government’s shock, Judge Ann Aiken refused to dismiss the suit. The plaintiffs, she ruled, had a right to a trial.

Exercising my ‘reasoned judgment,’ I have no doubt that the right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life is fundamental to a free and ordered society.^[12]

Where a complaint alleges governmental action is affirmatively and substantially damaging the climate system in a way that will cause human deaths, shorten human lifespans, result in widespread damage to property, threaten human food sources, and dramatically alter the planet’s ecosystem, it states a claim for a due process violation. To hold otherwise would be to say that the Constitution affords no protection against a government’s knowing decision to poison the air its citizens breathe or the water its citizens drink. Plaintiffs have adequately alleged infringement of a fundamental right.^[13]

Years of Obstruction

But what followed was not a trial, but a decade-long campaign by successive United States administrations—from Obama to Trump to Biden—to ensure that the case was not heard. The government deployed legal maneuvers of extraordinary and, in many instances, unprecedented aggressiveness. Again and again the Department of Justice filed for writs of mandamus—an extreme emergency legal tool historically reserved for only dire circumstances—to block the trial before it began. Each time the case inched toward the courtroom, another government motion postponed it further.^[14]

In January 2020, Trump’s officials finally got the decision they wanted, when the Ninth Circuit dismissed the case in a two-to-one decision.^[15] The majority ruled that the courts lacked the authority to order the federal government to develop a plan to decarbonize the economy, that such a remedy required policy judgments reserved to the political branches of government.

But the majority opinion was noteworthy for what it conceded as much as for what it decided. Referring to the hit 1960s song Eve of Destruction, Judge Andrew Hurwitz wrote that the plaintiffs “have presented compelling evidence that climate change has brought that eve nearer.”^[16]

A substantial evidentiary record documents that the federal government has long promoted fossil fuel use despite knowing that it can cause catastrophic climate change, and that failure to change existing policy may hasten an environmental apocalypse.^[17]

After summarizing the evidence, he agreed that “the plaintiffs have made a compelling case that action is needed,” but “reluctantly” concluded that the court did not have the authority to order action.^[18]

It was left to the dissenting judge, Josephine Staton, to express appropriate outrage at the government’s position.

In these proceedings, the government accepts as fact that the United States has reached a tipping point crying out for a concerted response—yet presses ahead toward calamity. It is as if an asteroid were barreling toward Earth and the government decided to shut down our only defenses. Seeking to quash this suit, the government bluntly insists that it has the absolute and unreviewable power to destroy the Nation.^[19]

The 50-year record, she wrote, shows that telling young people to depend on politicians “will rightfully be perceived as telling them they have no recourse.”^[20]

Where is the hope in today’s decision? Plaintiffs’ claims are based on science, specifically, an impending point of no return. If plaintiffs’ fears, backed by the government’s own studies, prove true, history will not judge us kindly. When the seas envelop our coastal cities, fires and droughts haunt our interiors, and storms ravage everything between, those remaining will ask: Why did so many do so little?^[21]

Biden versus climate justice

Karl Marx once wrote that in capitalist societies, elections meant “deciding … which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament.”^[22] That is certainly true of U.S. elections and climate change. Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement and actively promoted oil and gas production. Biden rejoined the Paris Agreement, but U.S. oil production during his presidency reached all-time records.^[23] And both have done everything they could to prevent courts from even considering mandatory cuts in greenhouse gas emission.

Joe Biden took office at the beginning of 2021, having promised to take action against climate change. Encouraged, the Juliana plaintiffs repeatedly asked his Department of Justice for a meeting to discuss their case. Their requests were ignored.^[24]

In July 2021, the plaintiffs filed a revised complaint that met the circuit court’s objections. Instead of a court-supervised national climate recovery plan, they now asked only for a ruling that the federal government’s fossil fuel policies violated their constitutional rights. The Biden administration refused to agree, stating explicitly that their goal, like Trump’s, was “to kill Juliana v. United States.”^[25] As Julia Olson, chief legal counsel for Our Children’s Trust, told a reporter,

There was zero shift when Biden took office, zero shift from the Trump administration.^[26]

In February 2024, after Judge Aiken agreed to hold a trial on the amended filing, the Biden DOJ filed an unprecedented seventh petition for a writ of mandamus, again seeking to prevent the case from ever reaching a jury. It was the same extraordinary legal weapon the Trump administration had wielded.

More than 50,000 people and 255 organizations signed a petition demanding that Attorney General Merrick Garland end the DOJ’s opposition to the case. Nothing changed.

In May 2024, a three-judge Ninth Circuit panel granted the DOJ’s seventh petition, ordering Judge Aiken to dismiss the case. On March 24, 2025, the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal.

Trump didn’t have to deal with Juliana v. United States in his second term, because Biden had successfully squashed it, using Trump’s methods.

As the Juliana 21 lawyers pointed out, the Trump and Biden administrations had “used every rare legal tool, more times than in any other case in history, to silence the constitutional claims of 21 of our nation’s youth.”

While they have been seeking to foil Juliana, every single administration has simultaneously expanded the United States’ fossil fuel energy system, thereby making this nation the largest producer of fossil fuels on Earth, exacerbating the climate crisis, and intensifying the constitutional injuries of these young Plaintiffs.…

This case involves an emergency of epic proportions: it is time for the United States to stand trial for creating an ‘environmental apocalypse’ and putting these youth’s lives, health, and safety in jeopardy in intentional violation of the U.S. Constitution.”^[27]

That trial hasn’t happened—yet.

References:

[1] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto, MECW vol. 6 (International Publishers, 1976), 486.

[2] Adams-Schoen, “Juliana v. United States”; Michael C. Blumm and Mary Christina Wood, “’No Ordinary Lawsuit’: Climate Change, Due Process, and the Public Trust Doctrine,” American University Law Review 67, no. 1 (2017): 1—87.

[3] Juliana, et al. v. United States, et al., SSRN, January 4, 2017, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2893912.

[4] . Adams-Schoen, “Juliana v. United States.”

[5] Juliana, et al. v. United States, SSRN; Blumm and Wood, “’No Ordinary Lawsuit.’“

[6] Exhibit A: Declaration of Dr. James E. Hansen in Support of Plaintiffs’ Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief, 4.

[7] Wen Stephenson, “Gus Speth: ‘Ultimate insider’ goes radical,” Grist, September 17, 2012.

[8] James Gustave Speth, They Knew: The U.S. Federal Government’s Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis (MIT Press, 2022), 38.

[9] Speth, They Knew, 5.

[10] Speth, They Knew, 152-3.

[11] John Sutter, “Climate kids take on the feds”. CNN, March 9 2016

[12] Case No. 6:15-cv-01517-TC, Document 83, November 10, 2016, 32.

[13] Ibid., 33

[14] Juliana v. U.S. Timeline, Climate Change Resources, https://climatechangeresources.org/youth/youth-take-action/through-judicial-action/juliana-v-u-s-timeline-youth/

[15] United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, No. 18-36082, D.C. No.6:15-cv-01517-AA, January 17, 2020. Opinion by Judge Hurwitz; Dissent by Judge Staton

[16] Ibid. (Hurwitz), 11.

[17] Ibid, 11.

[18] Ibid, 32.

[19] Ibid. (Staton), 32-3

[20] Ibid., 43.

[21] Ibid., 64.

[22] Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, MECW, vol. 22 (International Publishers, 1986), 333.

[23] Aleks Phillips, “Joe Biden Is Producing More Oil Than Donald Trump Did,” Newsweek, January 9, 2024.

[24] “Biden and the Department of Justice,” Our Children’s Trust, https://www.ourchildrenstrust.org/biden-doj

[25] Quoted in Case 6:15-cv-01517-AA, Document 574, Filed 02/01/24, 2.

[26] Quoted in Julia Rock, “Biden Is Aiming to Destroy a Historic Climate Change Lawsuit,” The Lever, May 26, 2022.

[27] Case 6:15-cv-01517-AA, Document 549, Filed 07/06/23.