Enlarge / Youth plaintiffs are greeted by supporters as they arrive for the nation's first youth climate change trial at Montana's First Judicial District Court on June 12, 2023. (credit: William Campbell / Contributor | Getty Images North America )

A Montana state court today sided with young people who sued the state for promoting the fossil fuel industry through its energy policy , which they alleged prohibits Montana from weighing greenhouse gas emissions in approving the development of new factories and power plants. This prohibition, 16 plaintiffs ages 5 to 22 successfully argued, violates their constitutional right to a "clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations."

Experts previously predicted that a win for youths in Montana would set an important legal precedent for how courts can hold states accountable for climate inaction. The same legal organization representing Montana's young plaintiffs, Our Children's Trust, is currently pursuing similar cases in four other states, The Washington Post reported .

The Post described this landmark case as "the nation’s first constitutional and first youth-led climate lawsuit to go to trial."

Enlarge / Westlands Solar Park, near the town of Lemoore in the San Joaquin Valley of California, is the largest solar power plant in the United States and could become one of the largest in the world. (credit: Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty)

California’s San Joaquin Valley, a strip of land between the Diablo Range and the Sierra Nevada, accounts for a significant portion of the state’s crop production and agricultural revenues. But with the state facing uncertain and uneven water supply due to climate change, some local governments and clean energy advocates hope solar energy installations could provide economic reliability where agriculture falters due to possible water shortages.

In the next two decades, the Valley could accommodate the majority of the state’s estimated buildout of solar energy under a state plan forecasting transmission needs [PDF], adding enough capacity to power 10 million homes as California strives to reach 100 percent clean electricity by 2045. The influx of solar development would come at a time when the historically agriculture-rich valley is coping with new restrictions on groundwater pumping. Growers may need to fallow land. And some clean energy boosters see solar as an ideal alternative land use.

But a significant technological hurdle stands in the way: California needs to plan and build more long-distance power lines to carry all the electricity produced there to different parts of the state, and development can take nearly a decade. Transmission has become a significant tension point for clean energy developers across the US, as the number of project proposals balloons and lines to connect to the grid grow ever longer.

Enlarge

The legislation passed by the US Senate Monday was downright frankensteinian: a pile of unrelated bills stitched together. Apart from the pandemic relief measures, it contained thousands of pages of government funding and tax credit extensions, like a semester’s worth of homework stapled to the final exam.

But in the end, it includes the most significant federal energy and climate policy in years, setting the agenda for Department of Energy research programs and authorizing higher funding levels for clean energy priorities.

Cool it

Shortly before the 2016 US election, the Obama administration joined an international agreement to phase out another generation of refrigerants with negative environmental consequences. This agreement—called the Kigali Amendment—was added onto the 1987 Montreal Protocol that banned ozone-depleting CFCs. Some were replaced with ozone-friendly HFCs, but these turned out to be quite potent greenhouse gases.

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