Two Pennsylvania children and a Philadelphia-based environmental organization filed suit on Monday against the Trump administration for its gutting of climate regulations, laws, and policies—actions which show the government’s “reckless and deliberate indifference to the established clear and present dangers of climate change.”
“We must hold the federal government accountable for the long-term environmental harm that is propagating under its direction. It’s time to fight back,” said Clean Air Council executive director and chief counsel Joseph Minott.
The suit (pdf), filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, names as defendants President Donald Trump, the Energy Department, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, and argues that through the administration’s rollbacks, which interfere “with a stable climate system,” they violated the public trust doctrine and infringed upon the defendants’ Fifth and Ninth Amendment rights.
Among the actions cited in the suit are ditching the Paris climate accord, stopping methane emissions reporting by oil and gas companies, approving the Keystone XL pipeline, proposing cuts to federal agencies dealing with climate change, proposing the repeal of the Clean Power Plan, and purging scientists from the EPA board of scientific counselors.
All such actions, the suit argues, “will cause irreversible and catastrophic harm to the natural systems critical to plaintiffs’ rights to life, liberty, and property.” They will also “cause human deaths, shorten human lifespans, result in widespread damage to property, threaten human food sources, and dramatically alter the planet’s ecosystem, thereby violating plaintiffs’ fundamental right to a life-sustaining climate system.”
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