I sure hope one of the questions asked is whether the youts have given up their own use of fossil fuels and made their lives carbon neutral
Utah Supreme Court agrees to hear teens’ climate change lawsuit
The Utah Supreme Court will hear a lawsuit brought by a group of teens challenging the state’s fossil fuel policies that they say harm their health and exacerbate climate change.
The state’s top court could revive a legal challenge that was dismissed in 2022 by a lower court judge. While he declared the teens “have a valid concern” about climate change and the impacts of the state’s fossil fuel policies, the judge dismissed their lawsuit, declaring that the issues fell within the realm of the legislative branch of government.
The teens appealed and the Court agreed to take up the case, setting arguments for Sept. 4. A notation in the docket indicates Associate Chief Justice John Pearce has recused himself from hearing the case. Prior to joining the Court, he was legal counsel for then-Governor Gary Herbert.
“We are hopeful that the Court will set this case back on the path towards trial, where it belongs. With each passing day that Utah’s statutory policy to maximize fossil fuel development remains in place, Utah’s government continues to increase the state’s dangerous air pollution and worsen the climate crisis, directly harming the health and safety of these brave young plaintiffs,” the teens’ attorney, Andrew Welle, said.
Will this turn out the way they hope? Probably not. But, anything can happen. Sadly, judges and opposing attorneys never seem to ask the questions they should. Are they practicing what they preach? Who’s funding this? Are the youts traveling around to take all their selfies and vids, eating meat, using a ton of energy, buying fast fashion?
The difficulty with modern Leftists running roughshod in our courts is the trend to ignore long standing legal principles:
1. Jurisdiction: The court selected has the authority to hear such cases as may arise in their location, limited by statute.
2. Standing: The plaintiff must show that they have suffered harm and that such harm is related to the accused.
3. Proximate cause: That the harms are directly related to the actions of the accused and not some other coincident activity.
4. Reasonable remedies: That the plaintiff can prove the value of their actual harm and are seeking remedies in scale to that value.
Leftists in the courts ignore all of these principles to achieve the outcomes they want and in so doing undermine the basic confidence that the American people have in the Justice system. Instead leftist courts have become a circus with goals of punishment of political enemies, pillaging corporate assets, rewarding activists, and intimidating others.
thank you professor, I’m gonna be quoting you on that but I will give you credit. That is in a nutshell precisely what the leftists have done in America and that is why most of us on the right have absolutely zero faith left in either the legal system the jury system where the idea that the goal is justice. It is not. The goal is power, justice doesn’t even enter into the question.
Sadly the left is done the jurisprudence when it’s done everything else it’s touched in this country from education to the military, it’s ruined it beyond repair. They destroyed the constitution years ago when they started changing the meanings of words they started changing the meaning of the constitution. Just read some of Elwood’s comments here and see how he uses language to wiggle out of the lies that his side uses. Then you’ll see how they’ve destroyed our country.
How deep and wide the Deep State is and how almost every Democrat and RHINO who was voted in, or appointed, is responsible for advancing conspiracies, lies, innuendo, conjecture, supposition and hearsay to advance disinformation and misinformation on every platform, including, but not limited to, the MSM press, cable news, comedy, sitcoms, much of entertainment and other Hollywood productions, social media, scientific publications, Federal Intel bureaucracies, the Military, the “woke” corporations, the public education platforms from K1 to K12 , the colleges and universities, the House and Senate, the Executive’s Cabinet members, the health and welfare bureaucracies and agencies, right down to family doctors, and just about every legal organization in the country. And despite all of this the public is figuring out that they are the victims of a massive domestic con job.
Fortunately for America and Americans the US Courts system has multiple levels of oversight!! A single Texas reactionary or Illinois radical judge’s decision can be reviewed and reviewed again.
According to Republican lore, corporations are people with rights AND responsibilities.
It’s natural for the losers in a court case to whine about losing. Just about every convict blames the judge, the jury and the system. Every losing corporation brays about being abused by the system.
We now have a reactionary majority Supreme Court.
Chicken Little Karen Man
According to Republican lore, corporations are people with rights AND responsibilities.
To be sued it must first be shown that you were/are involved. E.g. You are the car’s driver. You were the doctor. Etc., etc.,etc.
This lawsuit assumes that CO2 produced by the defendants causes them damage.
And if that be true, isn’t the users of the products also guilty?? Shouldn’t the citizens of UTAH park their cars, turn off their heating/cooling systems and quit using the thousands of products that use oil??? And yes, EV’s too. They’re part of the manufacturing cycle.
Of course all of that is silly and shows why the oil folks can’t/shouldn’t be sued.
If the problem is caused by the use of oil, we are all guilty.
Chickenshit Lewis Man,
And this is why we have courts. And rules.
I still have confidence in American jurisprudence. Yes, I believe we should transition from fossil fuels to renewables and nuclear power, but the laws are the laws.
No one likes it when the rulings go against them.
Who was culpable for the tobacco brouhaha? Our governments had some responsibility for allowing companies to promote and sell known deadly products. Smokers share some responsibility. But the corporations (they are people too) legally, but knowingly, sold deadly addictive drugs to young people. The corporations and their execs made billions. Their products caused millions of premature deaths and millions more morbidities (COPD, asthma), costing billions of dollars in the US alone.
Fossil fuel companies have been accused of knowingly promoting products that are causing global warming. If the governments couldn’t ban a worthless product (tobacco) they will not/ can not ban useful products (fossil fuels). We will all pay the costs of global warming – heat waves, electricity costs, major storms, sea level rise, wildfires, floods, droughts, glacier loss, drop in oceans’ pH, distribution of flora, fauna and disease vectors etc.
Chicken Little Karen Man
And this is why we have courts. And rules.
Then the Utah SC is taking the case for who? All the citizens?
You can’t have a lawsuit unless you have specific harm to specific people by people/corporation’s.
And no, it hasn’t been proven that global warming is caused by CO2.
Chicken Little Karen Man
This shows where what you want will lead us to.
“One crisp winter morning in Sweden, a cute little girl named Greta woke up to a perfect world, one where there were no petroleum products ruining the earth. She tossed aside her cotton sheet and wool blanket and stepped out onto a dirt floor covered with willow bark that had been pulverized with rocks.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“Pulverized willow bark,” replied her fairy godmother.
“What happened to the carpet?” she asked.
“The carpet was nylon, which is made from butadiene and hydrogen cyanide, both made from petroleum,” came the response.
Greta smiled, acknowledging that adjustments are necessary to save the planet, and moved to the sink to brush her teeth where instead of a toothbrush, she found a willow, mangled on one end to expose wood fibre bristles.
“Your old toothbrush?” noted her godmother, “Also nylon.”
“Where’s the water?” asked Greta.
“Down the road in the canal,” replied her godmother, ‘Just make sure you avoid water with cholera in it”
“Why’s there no running water?” Greta asked, becoming a little peevish.
“Well,” said her godmother, who happened to teach engineering at MIT, “Where do we begin?” There followed a long monologue about how sink valves need elastomer seats and how copper pipes contain copper, which has to be mined and how it’s impossible to make all-electric earth-moving equipment with no gear lubrication or tires and how ore has to be smelted to a make metal, and that’s tough to do with only electricity as a source of heat, and even if you use only electricity, the wires need insulation, which is petroleum-based, and though most of Sweden’s energy is produced in an environmentally friendly way because of hydro and nuclear, if you do a mass and energy balance around the whole system, you still need lots of petroleum products like lubricants and nylon and rubber for tires and asphalt for filling potholes and wax and iPhone plastic and elastic to hold your underwear up while operating a copper smelting furnace and . . .
“What’s for breakfast?” interjected Greta, whose head was hurting.
“Fresh, range-fed chicken eggs,” replied her godmother. “Raw.”
“How so, raw?” inquired Greta.
“Well, . . .” And once again, Greta was told about the need for petroleum products like transformer oil and scores of petroleum products essential for producing metals for frying pans and in the end was educated about how you can’t have a petroleum-free world and then cook eggs. Unless you rip your front fence up and start a fire and carefully cook your egg in an orange peel like you do in Boy Scouts. Not that you can find oranges in Sweden anymore.
“But I want poached eggs like my Aunt Tilda makes,” lamented Greta.
“Tilda died this morning,” the godmother explained. “Bacterial pneumonia.”
“What?!” interjected Greta. “No one dies of bacterial pneumonia! We have penicillin.”
“Not anymore,” explained godmother “The production of penicillin requires chemical extraction using isobutyl acetate, which, if you know your organic chemistry, is petroleum-based. Lots of people are dying, which is problematic because there’s not any easy way of disposing of the bodies since backhoes need hydraulic oil and crematoriums can’t really burn many bodies using as fuel Swedish fences and furniture, which are rapidly disappearing – being used on the black market for roasting eggs and staying warm.”
This represents only a fraction of Greta’s day, a day without microphones to exclaim into and a day without much food, and a day without carbon-fibre boats to sail in, but a day that will save the planet.
Tune in tomorrow when Greta needs a root canal and learns how Novocain is synthesized.”
“Heat waves, electricity costs, major storms, SLR, wildfires, droughts, floods, glacier loss, drop in ocean ph, distribution of flora, fauna, ect…”
All of which have occurred with lower CO2 and aren’t any worse now