A federal appeals court has sided with the Trump administration and 19 Republican-led states in a constitutional challenge to several of President Donald Trump’s executive orders designed to boost fossil fuels, concluding that the youth plaintiffs failed to bring a viable case against the federal government. In affirming a lower court’s dismissal of the lawsuit, called Lighthiser v. Trump, the appeals court said that it was not the role of the judiciary to supervise government energy policy.
The ruling, issued by a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Portland, Oregon, on Tuesday, came after the panel heard the case in April. During the hearing the judges—an Obama appointee, a Biden appointee and a Trump appointee—expressed skepticism toward some of the plaintiffs’ arguments, such as the assertion that their requested relief was manageable and that the case was meaningfully distinct from a previous youth climate suit against the federal government called Juliana v. United States, which the Ninth Circuit had also dismissed.
Unlike Juliana, a case alleging that the government’s decades-long, systemic fossil fuel-based energy policies were unconstitutional, the Lighthiser case targeted just three executive orders signed by Trump at the beginning of his second term, including two orders—“Unleashing American Energy” and “Declaring a National Energy Emergency”—issued on his first day back in office. The 22 youth plaintiffs wanted the court to declare the orders unconstitutional, since they are expected to unleash more dangerous carbon pollution and worsen the climate emergency. Plaintiffs also asked the court to block the Trump administration from taking further actions to implement the orders.
