A Beginning to the End Perhaps
As Billy Ray Dungy II known professionally as Jesse Hunter, croons the country-rock song, “Long Legged Hannah from Butte, Montana”, sixteen children ranging in age from two through eighteen are suing the State of Montana for failing to provide a “clean and healthful environment.”
In the Montana Constitution, Article II of the Declaration of Rights, Section 3 entitled, Inalienable Rights reads, “All persons are born free and have certain inalienable rights. They include the right to a clean and healthful environment and the rights of pursuing life’s basic necessities, enjoying and defending their lives and liberties, acquiring, possessing and protecting property, and seeking their safety, health and happiness in all lawful ways. In enjoying these rights, all persons recognize corresponding responsibilities.”
In the same Constitution, Article IX of the Environment and Natural Resources, Section 1 entitled Protection and Improvement, reads “The state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations.
It is under these provisions that the young people along with what appears to be the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, in New York City, are suing the state alleging fossil fuel energies are in violation or contrary to its constitution. While a column in an advocate climate newsletter, called “The Cool Down” simply cites, an environmental legal organization” as part of the suit, the division of the Columbia Law School provides a quote and thus appears to have partnered, or more likely, propelled, litigation using children as make-believe martyrs and to bolster sympathies from the courts.
The subject article, “Group of 16 Young People Sue State for Allegedly Violating Its Own Constitution: The State may have to Change Its Policies” is rot with prejudicial citations and cherry-picked links. Naturally, the same, tired statistics that have been disproven are being used which the column dubs “insurmountable evidence”. Adding fuel to their fictitious fire, the column also states, “It should be noted that Montana is currently the fifth-largest coal provider and the 12th-largest oil-producing state in the country. These assertions have always been prejudicially irrational. Even if one is connivingly convinced that CO2 is a controller of climate, it is not where it is made or mined but where it is burned. The State of Montana maintains that its “energy sources are not driving climate change and denied that Montana is experiencing severe weather linked to rising temperatures.”
The State of Montana was my home for two decades. Self-employment took me to every corner of the Treasure State. The Big Sky with its many mountain ranges, high plateaus, arid lands, and eastern prairies has seven (7) weather or growing/zones. The weather is substantially diverse and the 800-mile-long Continental Divide that runs through the State generates its own weather and weather patterns.
Every year since the divergent lands were settled, farmers and ranchers have suffered weather tragedies like hail, high winds, gully-washer rains, early and late frosts, brutal winters, and several other weather-related hardships. Everyone in the agronomy and livestock business knows the reduction of risk is not in pursuit of nonsensical climate change litigation but in purchasing agricultural insurance.
It is my sincere hope that the case subject of this essay travels all the way to the Supreme Court, not of Montana, but rather the Federal Supreme Court, where the true, verifiable statistics and radical climate change claims will be severely tested and eventually proven false.