Youth At the Forefront of Petitions Challenging EPA’s Rescission of Landmark Climate Finding and Greenhouse Gas Standards for Vehicles
Contacts:
Julia Olson, Chief Legal Counsel, 415.786.4825, julia@ourchildrenstrust.org
Helen Britto, Comms. Associate Director, 925.588.1171, helen@ourchildrenstrust.org
Nicole Funaro, Media Relations Strategist, communications@publicjustice.net
WASHINGTON — 18 young people from across the United States, represented by Our Children’s Trust and Public Justice, have filed a petition challenging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) decision to rescind the 2009 Endangerment Finding, a landmark determination that greenhouse gas pollution threatens public health and welfare, and simultaneously eliminate all greenhouse gas emission standards for cars and trucks.
The Venner v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency petition asks the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to reverse EPA’s elimination of these pollution control rules as unconstitutional. Petitioners say EPA violated their constitutional rights to life, liberty, and religious freedom by unleashing pollution that injures their fundamental rights when the agency’s singular job is to control and limit pollution harmful to their lives. The youth petitioners will assert that the agency’s rulemaking deliberately covered up decades of established climate science and the true costs to their lives, their health, and their religious and cultural practices. Youth who previously settled a case with their state government under the Hawai‘i Constitution to eliminate greenhouse gas pollution in their state transportation system, also invoke their reserved rights not to live with the fossil fuel pollution this administration is intent on imposing on their communities and their State.
The petitioners include 18 young people ages 1 to 22 from Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawai‘i, Montana, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Washington, and Wisconsin, including students, Tribal and Native youth, and youth from rural and coastal communities. Each of them experience deeply personal injuries from greenhouse gas pollution, including respiratory conditions, weekly exposure to diesel school buses commuting to school, loss of important religious and spiritual practices from extreme climate events, and other threats to their personal security in their homes and in their schools. Transportation-sector greenhouse gas pollution is the largest driver of climate change and causes human deaths each year. Every added ton of greenhouse gas pollution EPA is unleashing through this rule irreversibly adds to the injuries the young petitioners face in the coming year and over their lifetimes.
“My Catholic faith teaches me to care for all life and protect the most vulnerable, and it teaches that children are a gift,” said Elena Venner, lead petitioner. “I now struggle to imagine bringing a child into a world where the air is unsafe and the climate is increasingly unstable. The EPA’s repeal of the Endangerment Finding violates my First Amendment right to practice my faith and my Fifth Amendment rights to life and liberty. I have asthma, and worsening pollution harms my health and makes it harder for me to breathe and live fully outdoors. When the air is thick with the pollution of fossil fuel burning cars and trucks and ever increasing wildfire smoke, I feel it in my chest, and I am reminded that something as basic as breathing is no longer guaranteed. That is not the life today or the future my generation deserves.”
The petitioners assert that EPA’s rescission of the Endangerment Finding and greenhouse gas standards for vehicles violates their constitutional rights:
- Right to Life (Fifth Amendment): Threatens health, safety, and longevity; increases vulnerability to heat stress on organs, respiratory injury, and long-term harm to the enjoyment of life.
- Right to Liberty (Fifth Amendment): Infringes on personal security, bodily integrity, dignity, family formation, and free movement.
- Right to Free Exercise of Religion (First Amendment): Burdens faith and spiritual practices as pollution and temperatures increase, rather than decline, and living conditions become more extreme and injurious.
- Separation of Powers: EPA acted outside its authority by abandoning pollution control in favor of the economic interests of certain industries, overriding Congress’s mandate.
These violations threaten both the physical and spiritual well-being of young people and raise profound constitutional and legal concerns about agency overreach.
“EPA’s duty to curb greenhouse gas pollution is settled law,” said Julia Olson, lead attorney for the petitioners and Chief Legal Counsel of Our Children’s Trust. “EPA doesn’t get to abandon that duty, hiding behind junk science and economics, and call it policy. By reversing the Endangerment Finding and standards for cleaner vehicles, EPA is greenlighting dangerous pollution that will fill our communities and lungs with dirty air. That violates children’s constitutional rights to life, liberty, and religious freedom. The court must stop it.”
“The Endangerment Finding is not a bell that the Trump administration can simply unring,” said Dan Snyder, director of Public Justice’s Environmental Enforcement Project. “Decades of settled science form its foundation, and no legal chicanery can undermine the reality that greenhouse gas emissions harm children. Not a single American child will remember the illusory auto savings touted by EPA. But they will remember a lifetime of impairment caused by worsening climate change.”
These young petitioners are among the first to challenge EPA’s rule rescinding the Endangerment Finding and greenhouse gas standards for vehicles in federal court, part of a growing wave of petitioners contesting the rule. The outcome will determine how the federal government’s policies on greenhouse gas pollution move forward and whether children’s lives and freedoms are protected from government harm.
The case is Venner v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, case number 26-1038.
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Our Children’s Trust was founded in 2010 on the idea that courts are vital to democracy and empowered to protect our children and the planet. Without a stable climate system, every natural resource we rely upon to exercise our basic human rights—life, liberty, home, happiness—is under threat. Our work will be achieved when there is universal recognition of children’s climate rights by courts around the world and children’s fundamental rights to life on this planet are protected. www.ourchildrenstrust.org
Public Justice takes on the most significant systemic threats to justice of our time—abusive corporate power and predatory practices, the assault on civil rights and liberties, and the destruction of the earth’s sustainability. We link high-impact litigation with strategic communications and the strength of our partnerships to combat these abusive and discriminatory systems and achieve social and economic justice. For more information, visit www.publicjustice.net