In a packed Missoula courtroom on October 15, 2025, a group of 22 young Americans—ranging from age 7 to 25 and hailing from five states—heard U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen deliver a decision that would reverberate through environmental and legal circles nationwide. The youths, many of whom had previously triumphed in a landmark Montana climate trial in 2023, were seeking to block a series of executive orders from President Donald Trump that promote fossil fuels and discourage renewable energy. Their lawsuit, Lighthiser v. Trump, argued that these policies would worsen global warming, threaten their lives, and violate their constitutional rights.
The judge’s 31-page ruling was clear-eyed and, by his own admission, reluctant. Christensen acknowledged what he called “overwhelming evidence” that climate change is already affecting the plaintiffs and will worsen as a result of Trump’s executive orders. During a two-day hearing in September, the court heard emotional testimony from young people like Joseph Lee, who suffered a life-threatening heat stroke during a California heatwave, and Jorja McCormick, who described the trauma of fleeing wildfires in Montana. Expert witnesses, including Nobel Peace Prize-winning climatologist Steve Running and former White House official John Podesta, detailed how the administration’s actions would increase carbon dioxide emissions and erode federal climate science, leaving the public less informed about mounting dangers.
Yet, despite the compelling evidence and the judge’s expressed concern, the lawsuit was dismissed. Christensen wrote that the relief sought by the plaintiffs—blocking the executive orders and reverting to the previous administration’s climate policies—was simply “unworkable.” To grant it, the court would need to scrutinize every climate-related action taken since Trump’s January 2025 inauguration, monitoring “an untold number of federal agency actions to determine whether they contravene its injunction.” He concluded, “This is, quite simply, an unworkable request for which Plaintiffs provide no precedent.”
The legal reasoning behind the decision rested on the separation of powers enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Christensen cited the precedent set by Juliana v. United States, a similar youth-led climate lawsuit that wound its way through the courts for nearly a decade before the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal earlier this year. While the Montana state constitution guarantees its citizens a “right to a clean and healthful environment”—a provision that helped the same group of youths win their 2023 state-level case—no such language exists in the U.S. Constitution. That, the judge said, ties the hands of federal courts in matters of national environmental policy.
“With this understanding in mind, the Court reluctantly concludes...that it cannot grant Plaintiffs the relief they seek,” Christensen wrote, adding, “Rather, Plaintiffs’ compelling case for redress must be made to the political branches or to the electorate.” In other words, the judge recognized the gravity of the climate crisis and the harm caused by government policies but insisted that only Congress or the voting public—not the courts—could change the nation’s direction.
White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers responded to the ruling with celebration, calling it a victory for the Trump administration’s agenda of “energy dominance.” In an emailed statement, Rogers declared, “President Trump saved our country from Joe Biden’s wildly unpopular Green Energy Scam and he will continue to ‘DRILL, BABY, DRILL’.” The administration, bolstered by hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions from oil companies ahead of the 2024 election, has made fossil fuel expansion the centerpiece of its energy policy, rolling back permits for solar and wind farms and ending tax credits for renewables.
Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, whose office intervened in support of the federal government, echoed these sentiments. “We’re pleased the rule of law prevailed today and that the judge agreed with our conclusion that he did not have jurisdiction over this case,” Knudsen said. “Ultimately, the court rejected the plaintiffs’ request to force the Trump Administration to revert to Biden’s nonsensical and unpopular policies. Our suspicions were confirmed – this was just another show trial contrived by climate activists who wasted the taxpayer’s money.”
For the activists and their attorneys at Our Children’s Trust, the decision was a blow, but not the end of the road. Julia Olson, the group’s chief legal counsel and lead attorney for the plaintiffs, vowed a swift appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. “Every day these executive orders remain in effect, these 22 young Americans suffer irreparable harm to their health, safety, and future,” Olson said in a statement. “The judge recognized that the government’s fossil fuel directives are injuring these youth, but said his hands were tied by precedent. We will appeal—because courts cannot offer more protection to fossil fuel companies seeking to preserve their profits than to young Americans seeking to preserve their rights. This violates not only the Constitution and Supreme Court precedent, but the most basic principles of justice.”
The legal battle highlights a broader national debate over the role of the judiciary in addressing climate change. Legal experts, as reported by the Associated Press, had long warned that the young activists faced steep odds in federal court. The United Nations added urgency to the activists’ cause, reporting on the same day as the ruling that heat-trapping carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere had jumped by the highest amount on record last year, “turbo-charging” the climate and making weather more extreme.
Montana’s unique constitutional protections have yielded some local victories, including the 2023 state court ruling that requires officials to more closely analyze climate-warming emissions. However, as the Associated Press notes, that decision has produced few meaningful changes in a state dominated by Republicans. Only a handful of other states—Illinois, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York—enshrine environmental protections in their constitutions, leaving most Americans without explicit legal recourse at the state level.
The plaintiffs’ legal journey has already drawn national and international attention, with the France 24 news service noting the “emotional testimony” and the judge’s “reluctant” dismissal. The case underscores the frustration felt by a generation facing an uncertain future, as well as the limits of the American legal system to address what many scientists and citizens now call a children’s health emergency. While the courts may have closed the door for now, the battle over climate policy is far from over—shifting instead to the halls of Congress, the ballot box, and, inevitably, back to the courts.
As the appeal proceeds, the stakes remain high for both the plaintiffs and the millions of young Americans who see their own futures reflected in the courtroom drama unfolding in Montana and beyond.
