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Judge rules in favor of Montana youths in landmark climate decision

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Judge rules in favor of Montana youths in landmark climate decision

#141

Post by undersuit »

shadowtree wrote: post #126
undersuit wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Montana can start at home. Our government recently approved Northwest Energy's purchase of a coal plant after Washington and Oregon companies divested because of climate policies from their home states.

Montana has a population of 1.1 million people. Does not even make the size of a small Chinese city. Nothing Montana does has a measurable effect on global climate change.

You said Montana should declare war on China.

I can do things to make my state better, China is distant and far more powerful than even the Big Sky state.

Re: Judge rules in favor of Montana youths in landmark climate decision

#142

Post by pseudalopex »

the-printer wrote: post #135
gaganyaan wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does it specify what you claim?

> The legislature shall provide adequate remedies for the protection of the environmental life support system from degradation and provide adequate remedies to prevent unreasonable depletion and degradation of natural resources. https://leg.mt.gov/bills/mca/Constitution/IX/1.htm#

Where does that sentence specify the legislature shall ignore indirect or shared harms?

Re: Judge rules in favor of Montana youths in landmark climate decision

#143

Post by qingcharles »

PretzelPirate wrote: post #10

> detailed how extreme weather has hurt her family’s ranch. Animal agriculture is also a big contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, dead zones, and habitat loss. Her family's ranch my not align with her fight against climate change.

This would come under the doctrine of "unclean hands," where the plaintiff is also culpable in the matter they are suing for. I think it would be an affirmative defense the defendant would have had to plead before trial, so they've forfeited it, IMO.

Source: I play a lawyer on TV.

Re: Judge rules in favor of Montana youths in landmark climate decision

#144

Post by qingcharles »

renewiltord wrote: post #7

AFAICT without being an expert: 1. The state constitution says it's got to provide a clean environment https://leg.mt.gov/bills/mca/Constitution/IX/1.htm (so short I won't provide a quote) 2. The Montana Environmental Policy Act in Montana has some exceptions written into it and in subsequent revisions https://leg.mt.gov/content/Publications/Environmental/2021-m... 3. One of these exceptions is that it limits the sco…

A statute can't generally over-rule or limit a constitutional provision, though. Statutes generally expand upon rights given in constitutions.

Re: Judge rules in favor of Montana youths in landmark climate decision

#145

Post by hash872 »

Supermancho wrote: post #134
hash872 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's a legal maneuver that will be challenged both in another legal arena and in the court of public opinion It will not be meaningfully challenged in the court of public opinion, which is completely irrelevant to judicial decisions. If it'll be challenged in an appellate court.... why not limit decisions blocking the democratically elected legislature to a full appeals court of 15 judges, as opposed to just 1? One…

> It will not be meaningfully challenged in the court of public opinion, which is completely irrelevant to judicial decisions. Dismissing public opinion because you do not see a direct mechanism to affect change, is a misunderstanding of the inherent social power of Democracy. It is not irrelevant at all. Democracy is about policy being affected by public opinion through representation. A mechanism that doesn't suit…

I have a Master's in Comparative Politics. What you learned in high school is simplified and incorrect.

I (somewhat incredulously here) can't tell if you really believe that the judiciary only interprets laws, but no, that's wrong. In a country with strong judicial review, like the US or Germany, they can literally strike them down for being unconstitutional. Once that happens, both popular will and the legislature are irrelevant. Your 1st paragraph.... no idea what you're trying to say there.

Just as a quick example, banning flag burning has always been overwhelmingly popular with the electorate, and every single state plus the federal government used to have anti-flag burning laws on the books. The Supreme Court twice struck down such laws, which made the public and Congress enormously angry. And.... popular will is irrelevant. The Court has the final word on this and any other topic that you choose to take up. You could read

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_v._Johnson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Eichman

And in general I think it'd help to read up on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_activism. But yes, the judiciary essentially makes the law all the time (for example, see qualified immunity- created from whole cloth by the Court), in addition to striking them down as they choose. They hold ultimate power in our system of government. I don't think your general understanding of what judicial review is is correct

Re: Judge rules in favor of Montana youths in landmark climate decision

#146

Post by Volundr »

phpisthebest wrote: post #119
pseudalopex wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the clear intention of the law?

Clearly not the abstract "harms" asserted in the case, where by one plaintiff has a medical aliment that was acerbated by COVID and because of that MT did not due enough for climate change. Also the case was largely about individual "extreme weather" events that have no clear, direct link to MT pollution, and there is zero evidence to suggest that should MT suspend all their pollution today, right now, it would chang…

> Clearly not the abstract "harms" asserted in the case

...

> The clear intention of the law was to preserve the land from direct, articulable harm such as chemical dumping, clear cut mining, deforestation, etc etc etc

I've read the Montana constitution and read up on the case. The points above are not clear to me. Is there something else your looking at that makes it clear to you?

Re: Judge rules in favor of Montana youths in landmark climate decision

#147

Post by dqv »

e93849 wrote: post #107
jwells89 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the distinction here is scale. The rate at which natural predators killed bison is only a small fraction of the rate that cattle are killed for food. If human livestock consumption were closely matched to natural grazer consumption, essentially acting as a 1:1 replacement, this argument makes more sense. I don’t think that’s been true for at least a century at this point though.

Citation needed. A quick Google search says the US has about 90 million heads of cattle, while the peak population of wild bison was 60 million and of wild deer was 40 million. That seems pretty close.

>That seems pretty close.

You're wildly off in your calculations because you've failed to account for replacement rate. It's 90 million heads of cattle with 30 million killed each year.

https://usda.library.cornell.edu/concern/publications/rx913p...

Re: Judge rules in favor of Montana youths in landmark climate decision

#148

Post by dqv »

ticviking wrote: post #94
dqv wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wild animal grazing where we're not killing them and breeding more every year has tremendous environmental benefits. Killing them and eating them is not compatible with the environmental benefits of grazing: >Small numbers of grazers may be consistent with healthy ecosystems and have minimal greenhouse gas impact, but only if their populations stay within ecologically defined limits. https://newrepublic.com/article/1…

The number of grazers that are needed to maintain a prairie or plains ecosystem is far higher than most people assume, and vast spaces in the US are becoming forested because of lack of wildlands management.

OK, we need a lot of grazers. That still doesn't really help with the fact that 30 million bovines are killed and "restocked" on a yearly basis. If the argument is "we can keep eating meat at the current rate because we need a lot of grazers", I don't think it's a very good one. Whatever carbon sequestering benefits we were supposed to get are almost immediately invalidated. It's the same issue with trees - you don't realize the carbon sequestering benefits of planting trees until they've been alive along enough to offset the input carbon.

Re: Judge rules in favor of Montana youths in landmark climate decision

#149

Post by e93849 »

dqv wrote: post #147
e93849 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation needed. A quick Google search says the US has about 90 million heads of cattle, while the peak population of wild bison was 60 million and of wild deer was 40 million. That seems pretty close.

>That seems pretty close. You're wildly off in your calculations because you've failed to account for replacement rate. It's 90 million heads of cattle with 30 million killed each year . https://usda.library.cornell.edu/concern/publications/rx913p...

How many wild bison/deer/elk got killed each year? Right now it seems about 2/3 of fawns die, most of them eaten by predators: https://wildlife.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jwmg.21...

I wonder if that number was higher before humans reduced the number of predators.

Re: Judge rules in favor of Montana youths in landmark climate decision

#150

Post by kredd »

edgyquant wrote: post #67
kredd wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was referring to the political right in the states. Historically speaking, in 70s/80s, even Nixon, passed laws for conserving the nature, protectionism and etc. At some point there was a switch into “nah, screw the environment” to align with the voter base.

There wasn’t a switch. The Republican Party is still very much pro-conservationist. You are spewing talking points from their political enemies. https://www.rpc.senate.gov/policy-papers/republicans-deliver...

Ah apologies then, my knowledge of US politics is fairly surface based. I usually associate the oil and co. lobbyists with the conservative government, and they don’t have the best record in terms of natural conservation (I understand they do the same with the liberal side as well). I guess, that’s a bad habit.
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