California children are suing the U.S. government over its failure to reduce pollution. This is the latest in a series of lawsuits filed by young people around the world concerned about climate change.
These young people, ages 8 to 17, allege that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “intentionally allows the emission of hazardous pollutants that contribute to greenhouse gases from the fossil fuels that it (the EPA) regulates, thereby harming human health and the environment.” “Well-being harms children,” said Our Children’s Trust, a nonprofit law firm.
The plaintiffs say they are being discriminated against by the EPA as children whose economic prospects and futures are being sacrificed at the altar of pollution.
The lawsuit, filed Dec. 10, asks federal courts to find that the EPA violated the Constitution's right to equality before the law and the right to life.
For example, one of the complainants, whose first name is Genesis, explains that she lives in a house without air conditioning and that the situation becomes unbearable as temperatures rise.
She has to “keep the windows of her home open in the summer, exposing her to ashes from wildfires and even more pollen, which worsens her allergies and often causes a runny nose,” Our Children's Trust said on its website.
Another, Maya, suffers from breathing problems and severe headaches, which the complaint says are due to the increasing number of wildfires and prevent her from “participating in soccer competitions at the level she would like to.”
In addition to the EPA, the complaint is also directed at the head of the agency, Michael Reagan, and the federal government.
Across the Atlantic, the European Court of Human Rights in September began considering a complaint from six young Portuguese people against 32 countries they accuse of failing to make the necessary efforts to limit global warming.
And in August, a court in Montana, in the northwestern United States, ruled in favor of a group of young people who accused the state of violating their right to live in a clean environment.