Hello, and welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westervelt. Today an update on a big climate case that's been ongoing for about seven years now. It's probably the best known of all of the climate cases, the Juliana Case, or officially Juliana versus the United States. In this case, twenty one young plaintiffs sue the US government over climate change. It's often been misreported that they sued the government for inaction on climate but that's not actually what they said.
In fact, the plaintiffs sued the government for effectively enabling and accelerating climate change via policies that support and encourage more and more fossil fuel extraction, so fossil fuel subsidies or highway bills that make the country dependent on cars. There's anything that basically encourages more emissions. That's not just me being all well. Actually, although okay, fine, I do like to do that sometimes, it is actually a really
important distinction. Here's Julia Olsen, the lead attorney on the case, to explain.
So, the case is about the government's affirmative acts that have put these young people in a position of danger and continue to act in ways that are enhancing the danger for young people. As a lawyer, I'm looking at the party most responsible for causing the harm, and I'm also looking at the remedy that's available to really stop the climate emergency from worsening and to begin to redress it so that we can protect these fundamental life support
resources for these young people. When I look as the party most responsible, it is the United States government, historically and presently because of the government's creation of promotion, of support of a national fossil fuel energy system.
Some lawyers, especially those going up against the oil companies themselves, have criticized the Juliana case for being too broad or for taking the spotlight off of the fossil fuel industry. But Olsen doesn't see the two as mutually exclusive, and having covered the climate crisis for more than twenty years now, I kind of tend to agree. Seems to me like
there's plenty of accountability to go around. The Juliana case was originally filed in twenty fifteen, and in twenty twenty one it looked like it was dead in the water. Back in twenty twenty, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the plaintiffs didn't have standing to bring this case, So the plaintiffs asked for what's called an on banc rehearing.
That's a request that a full panel of judges, So in this case, eleven judges look at a case, not just the three who happened to review it the first time. They asked for that in twenty twenty, and in early twenty twenty one, the Ninth Circuit said, Nope, we're not going to rehear it. Our decision is our decision. So a lot of folks thought this case was done for, but the Ninth Circuit issued a mandate to send the case back to District court in Oregon.
So now it's back in front of Judge Aigan. And at that point we decided the best path forward and sort of the most efficient past path forward to get to a ruling in the case and to get to trial was to amend the complaint.
We're going to get into how the complaint was amended, what's happened since then, and what's going on with youth climate cases in general. Right now, that's all coming up right after this quick break. Okay, So, back in twenty twenty one, Olsen and her team filed an amended complaint and the Juliana case got a second life.
So we amended our complaint and we changed the request for relief. At the end, we took out the specific request for the court to order a plan be prepared on fixing the climate crisis, and we really refocused our requests for relief on what's called declaratory judgment, so asking the court in the first place to just declare the constitutional rights and say whether the government has violated those constitutional rights of these young people. And so the request
for relief focuses on that. It does also ask the court to award plaintiffs any other relief that the Court finds is appropriate or necessary after a trial is held and all the evidence comes out. So we did that and then we added new factual allegations to the body of the complaint and we connected the dots better to say, hey, you know, one big part of the injury here is that the US government is saying to young people that
they don't have constitutional rights. They are saying that it's totally within the law for them to continue to promote fossil fuel energy, that that's okay to do. And so there's a real controversy there. And if the court resolves that controversy in favor of these young people and says that that conduct is unconstitutional. You know that the fossil fuel energy policies and practices of the United States government are unconstitutional. Then that changes this whole legal relationship between
these young people and their government. And then the government can't keep saying, oh, we can keep promoting fossil fuels, we can permit all of this, we can lease public lands for fossil fuel extraction. That's totally within our right. They will be wrong at that point, and then things
will really begin to change. And so we said in the complaint that if the court issues that declaration of constitutional law, that the federal government will abide by it and they will begin to change the way our energy system is run in our country.
That actually feels like a pretty huge deal, especially as we've been watching the Biden administry struggle to change any policies at all with respect to climate and fossil fuels. One of the first things the district court judge in Oregon who's overseeing this case, Judge Aiken, did was to order Olsen and her team to have a settlement conference with the US Department of Justice to see if they could work out a settlement agreement instead of taking this case back to court.
June twenty third was our first settlement conference, and June twenty fifth was the oral argument on the motion to amend. So we've had one settlement conference and what happens in those conversations has to be kept confidential. It's the way settlement negotiations work. It frees the parties to talk freely with the settlement judge and to not disclose that conversation publicly, So I can't talk about the content.
That was Julie Olsen talking to me back in July when the team had just had one settlement conference friends and gone through oral arguments on this new amended complaint. The reason I wanted to talk to her back then, kind of in the middle of all of this process, was that something really strange happened as that first settlement conference was getting underway. The Attorney General of Alabama, joined by a Republican attorneys general from sixteen other states, filed
a motion to intervene in this case. And that means we got to talk about RAGA. The Republican Attorneys General Association RAGA was started back in the nineteen nineties. As a reaction to the tobacco litigation. That litigation had been started mostly by Democratic attorneys general, and Republicans took a look at the legal landscape in the country and realized that they were vastly outnumbered by Democrats in state attorneys
general offices. That was something that was going to need to change if they were going to avoid states going after an industry ever again. So the attorney's general of Alabama, Texas, and South Carolina came together and created RAGA, and then they set about getting Republican attorneys general elected.
I had looked at this back when I was working on the Senate Judiciary Committee in terms of the rise of RAGA, the Republican Attorney's General Association, where we know that it's a pay to play operation.
Lisa Greeves ran the Center for Media and Democracy for years and now runs the research firm True North. She's been tracking RAGA since its inception.
We know that it has had enormously distorting effect on US law. It provides a mechanism for corporations to pass money through to help attorneys general in ways that they would not be able to individually solicit for their own campaigns given their role their regulatory role over those very industries, and that's been going on since RAGA was created back
more than twenty years ago. Now, RAGA now is not just a recipient of donations from big oil and big huge corporations, but it's also a major recipient of funds in which the source is completely unknown to anyone other than the person raising the money. The agenda of the people who fund the RAGA the Republican Jurney General's Association, and have been really attempting to work a legal revolution through offices that we would otherwise consider to be independent.
It would be nice to have attorneys general of states who were not so captive to advancing the interest of Charles Coke, but unfortunately we are in an era in which those interests have been dominating.
They successfully took the lead over Democrats several years ago and transitioned to Phase two, coordinating on a meek briefs and constitutional cases. You definitely know their work, even if you've never heard of RAGA before. Today.
Now for an opposing view, we're joined by Ted Cruz. He is the Solicitor General for the State of Texas, and he drafted the amicus brief signed by Attorney's General of thirty one states who say the DC handgun ban should be struck down.
More than one hundred House Republicans on Thursday signed onto an amicus brief in support of the Texas lawsuit aimed at overturning the election result in four swing states Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
So yeah, the same group that's been mobilizing against gun control and abortion for years and that tried to get the twenty twenty election results overturned all of a sudden showed up in the Juliana case six years after the case was filed. Now, normally, when someone files a motion to intervene in a case, they're effectively joining that case as a co defendant or a coplaintiff. But in this case, the Republican ags don't want to be co defendants with
the US government. They only wanted to intervene in certain parts of the proceedings. Here's Julia Olsen again.
They have a political agenda to protect gun rights, to put limits on voting rights, to stop women from having access to choices about their health and childbearing and abortion, and they also have a climate agenda and on their climate agenda is the Juliana case, and they have decided that this case has a real shot at winning, I think, and really establishing the constantitutional law around the extensive harm
being caused by this crisis and by energy policies. So I think they realized that, oh, this case is going somewhere, and as a result of that, they asked the district court if they could come in and intervene for limited purposes.
And so this intervention motion that they filed.
It's really bizarre because typically when you have interveners, people who want to come into a case, they either want to come in as a plaintiff or they want to come in as a defendant and they want to participate in a case as a full party. And these attorney generals from these eighteen states.
They aren't asking to come in as a party.
They want to come in as sort of an interlocky tour.
To just blow things up.
They said very explicitly, they want to come and have a seat at the settlement table in order to prevent any settlement from happening.
Keep in mind, this motion was filed in June twenty twenty one, so the Biden administration was just getting going and it maybe wasn't clear yet what his Department of Justice was going to look like. These attorneys general had no reason to intervene when it was a Trump DOJ dealing with the Juliana case, but now they weren't so sure, and they did not want the government settling with these attorneys and effectively creating a constitutional right to a livable
planet in the US. According to Julia Olsen, they needn't have worried.
I actually think the DOJ is not very different at all. In talking to lawyers in a lot of other cases, people aren't seeing a shift in the DOJ under the Biden administration and under the leadership of Merrick Garland, and I think they're still taking a lot of the same positions they have taken.
And I actually think there's sort of a.
Dangerous backlash happening from what went on during the Trump administration in terms of there was a lot of concern that the president at the time Trump was using the Department of Justice to achieve his personal needs.
You know that they the Attorney.
General Barber's acting as his private attorney kind of you know, that was a lot of the public perception and the concern of Congress, and that DOJ was not on the up and up. And so you know, President Biden has said, We're going to have clear rules and the Department of Justice will have prosecutorial discretion, and I'm not going to tell them who to prosecute, Right, that's their decision as the people's lawyer.
And that all makes sense.
But when the Department of Justice is defending clients, like different agencies that have been sued by people, then there is a really important role for the executive branch, that the political officials and the agencies and the White House to play in how they want to be defended in those cases.
Right.
So, as an attorney, you have an obligation to confer with your client and make recommendations. But at the end of the day, if your client wants to settle, or if your client wants to admit facts, or your client wants to take a particular legal position, the clients make that decision, not attorneys by themselves. And so I think the Department of Justice is kind of overreacting or overcorrecting
what happened previously. And and in many cases, the policies of the Biden administration are not aligning with what the Department of Justice is doing in cases that have a huge bearing on those policies.
Ultimately, it was a mood point. Judge Aikins still hasn't ruled on whether or not the RAGA attorneys can intervene, nor has she ruled on the amended complaint, and in the meantime, the settlement conferences have ended with no settlement. I spoke with Olsen again this week to get an update.
You know, we have filed some unnoticed there's a supplemental authority that have been some Supreme Court cases that have been decided that we think are favorable to the mission to amend. So you know, when something arises, some new precedent that binds her, we it's on that her way. But otherwise we are just waiting on her decision on that mission to an end, which could come any day now.
And we also for about about five months, starting in probably July, we were working with magistrate we're former magistrate Judge Tom Coffin as our settlement judge and engaging in settlement talks with the Department of Justice. Those became no, you know, we're not fruitful, and so we ended those talks in October.
Wasn't part of the Republican Attorney General's request was like to be in on those talks.
Yeah, yeah, they wanted they wanted to be able to have a seat at the settlement table, and that question had not been decided, but there was, you know, no need for them to have a seat at that settlement table.
The Biden DOJ is.
Continuing to do its job to fight this case, and at this point, you know, has not shown any non alignment with the position of the Trump administration, or for that matter, or the Red States.
So that's interesting because it did seem like that might have been part of the motivation for the Republican Attorneys general, right, was that they thought, oh, a Biden DOJ is going to settle with them, and that might be bad. But they needn't have worried.
They mayn't have worried.
Now Olsen and her team are just waiting on a decision from Judge Aiken about whether she's going to accept this amended complaint and whether she'll allow the RAGA attorneys to intervene. In addition to wanting to be part of those settlement conferences, the Republican attorneys wanted to be able to weigh in on the amended complaint. Everyone is eagerly awaiting a ruling from Judge Eachin, which could come any day.
Now, all right.
I was hopeful that we would have had it before the end of twenty twenty one. And I also know that she has a very full docket that has obviously been impacted by COVID. So we are waiting and hopefully she cleared things out and Juliana will be next up.
Yeah, and I don't know.
I mean, if you've seen the projections that the projections from the EIA are showing, you know, continued increases in our oil and gas production, in our emissions, and of course I think twenty twenty one was like, what a six percent increase in emissions again, so we're headed in that exact opposite direction we need to, which is why we need to get back to court and get to trial.
In the meantime, several other youth climate cases have been filed all over the world, including a few by Olsen in her team, most recently in Mexico and Canada. Olsen's happy to see it, but is also concerned about a
new and troubling trend. She's seeing cases pushing for governments to adhere to the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement, so limiting warming to between one point five and two degrees, but also points out that those targets were a political compromise, they're not what science indicates is actually safe.
And of course, for the most part, judges aren't going to independently lead climate science, and so they're going to rely on council to bring them the evidence, right, and when the evidence is coming in and they're saying, you know, yeah, to go with the Parish Agreement numbers, then judges are
doing that. And so they're actually chases now and there's precedent building around the world that text human rights in whatever iteration the claims are brought, but whatever where that human rights law is in a particular country, whether it's in an international treaty or in a constitution.
Or codified in some other place, they.
Are linking it now to those one point five and two degrees seeing numbers, which is catastrophic.
For humanity and for young people. And you know, it's my experience that most.
Lawyers and even a lot of journalists don't understand that the foundational science is about Earth's energy and balance, right, Because as long as we have an energy and balance that the plants going to keep heating, right, And this is like fundamental science, that climate that sciences.
Have interested for one hundred years or more.
And there's this just phenomenal group of interdisciplinary scientists working together to continually define what that energy's number it is and what level of CO two in the atmosphere would correct that energy of balance, Like what do we have to go back to?
And they continue to come.
Up with the number three fifty We have to get below three fifty parts per million.
Yeah.
You know when I ask her any scientists the question, what do you think one point five is safe? Like do you think we can save these levels? And they're all like no, it's it's totally dangerous in catastropha.
That sets a precedent not only for cases like Olsen's, but for policy too. If courts start to codify those targets, suddenly it becomes harder and harder to push for policies that align with science and human rights rather than politics. We'll be following that trend here and also on our new spin off show Damages, which is launching next month. On Damages, we'll be following the hundreds of climate cases making their way through courts all over the globe at
the moment. Stay tuned after the credits for a quick trailer with more on that show. That's it for this week. Thanks for listening as always, and we'll see you next time. Drilled is an original Critical Frequency production. Our producer is Jules Bradley, mixing and mastering by Peter Duff. Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton of the First Amendment Project. Our artwork is by Matthew Fleming. The show is reported
and written by me Amy Westervelt. If you'd like to support our work, you can do that at patreon dot com slash Drilled. That will also get you access to add free episodes and exclusive merchandise, so check that out. Thanks again and we'll see you next week. All right, You know what, there's a reason courtroom dramas stay on TV forever. They're dramatic. You've got the salty lawyers. Well, the First Amendment doesn't protect fraud and deception.
Why would you keep a failing company as a partner to build your country's futurem and.
The expert witnesses they were giving millions of dollars to other entities to support the idea that the Santo Breen has with.
A house.
And look, people don't file lawsuits, at least the kinds that you go to courtover for months and months and months unless they feel really wronged and are ready to fight reality.
What both sides really want is more power.
To me.
It was like, bring it on, you know, and I'm not going to back down to fight. I'm not going to back down, not when it's right, you know, and not when people.
Are being hurt.
Right now, around two hundred court cases are making their way through legal systems around the world with one goal to hold companies and governments accountable for their roles in the climate crisis. They hinge on different legal strategies, but they're all fighting for one pointiff. It's all of us and life on this planet.
Opponents of n Bridge Energies Line three oil pipeline that's being replaced across northern Minnesota are.
Taking a unique legal approach to try to halt construction.
Thanks on Mobiles subsidiary pays no text. They've been giving these texts bricks in addition to taking out eighty seven point five percent of Diana's oil.
You're not allowed to lie when you know that you have a dangerous product and you're lying about it.
That's a tour.
Sometimes they win.
The decision and Agenda was a huge breakthrough because it was an example of a national court actually enforcing an obligation of a government to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the national level. No court had ever done that before.
You have to take them to court to enforce law, and it looks like we're going to be able to enforce travel law and travel court against the state. So we use the ordinances and we find Shell and Conical Phillips in Ordnance Court in Madison County, Illinois for putting unzen on people's proferty.
Welcome to Damages a new kind of legal drama. I'm Amy Westervelt and this is a podcast about a crime against humanity and the quest to bring the world's biggest climate criminals to justice.