Youth Petitioners Ask Federal Court to Pause EPA’s Erasure of the Endangerment Finding and Vehicle Pollution Limits Before Damage to Children’s Constitutional Rights Becomes Impossible to Reverse
Contacts:
Julia Olson, Chief Legal Counsel, 415.786.4825, julia@ourchildrenstrust.org
Helen Britto, Communications Director, 925.588.1171, helen@ourchildrenstrust.org
Nicole Funaro, Media Relations Strategist, communications@publicjustice.net
WASHINGTON — Eighteen young people represented by Our Children’s Trust and Public Justice filed a motion for stay in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, asking the court to pause the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Repeal Rule, which rescinded the 2009 Endangerment Finding and eliminated all greenhouse gas emission standards for vehicles, while their constitutional petition is litigated on the merits.
The youth petitioners of Venner v. EPA took the lead among the parties litigating the Repeal Rule to formally request a stay from EPA before filing their motion in court. EPA denied that request last month, prompting today’s motion. The youth petitioners’ constitutional injuries are unique among the eight groups of petitioners challenging the rule.
The motion argues that without a stay, car manufacturers are already making fleet and model decisions based on the Repeal Rule that will lock in more gas-powered vehicles for at least the next 15 years, decisions that cannot be undone even if the petitioners ultimately prevail. The petitioners also assert immediate and irreparable harm to their health, religious practices, and constitutional rights.
“EPA called the additional pollution this rule will impose on young people ‘de minimis,’ but I have already had two surgeries, months of antibiotics, and I still wear a mask on bad air days just to protect my health from current levels of pollution,” said lead petitioner Elena Venner. “I have grown up breathing air that the American Lung Association grades an ‘F.’ My college is next to a highway with the same grade. And now, the EPA is making my living conditions even worse, not better. There is nothing minimal about that. Clean air and a livable climate are not privileges. They are the foundation on which everything else is built, and EPA is making that foundation less stable for everyone. I am just starting out in life, and my Catholic faith calls me to be open to the possibility of children in my future, but I cannot reconcile that with what EPA has just done. EPA’s decision does not stay on paper. It stays in my lungs, and in the future I am afraid to give my children.”
Unlike every other petition challenging the Endangerment Finding repeal, Venner v. EPA centers the religious freedom, health, and safety of children and youth. The 18 youth petitioners assert that EPA violated their fundamental constitutional rights: the right to life and liberty under the Fifth Amendment, the right to freely practice their faith under the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and the state-created liberty interests of two Hawaii petitioners whose constitutional and court-ordered right to a clean and healthful environment and public trust resources is protected under the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. The petitioners further argue that EPA compounded those violations by failing to address detailed constitutional concerns raised in formal public comments, acting throughout the rulemaking process as though the Constitution placed no limits on its authority.
The petitioners include students, Tribal and Native youth, and youth from rural and coastal communities across ten states, including two petitioners from Hawai’i who hold a state constitutional and court-ordered right to a clean and healthful environment that the Repeal Rule is directly undermining.
“By one baseless rule, EPA erased 15 years of science and nationwide protections from vehicle pollution. Not because the science or danger to children changed, but because a president fixated on unleashing fossil fuels told EPA to unburden industry and treat the value of children’s lives at zero,” said Julia Olson, lead attorney to the plaintiffs and Chief Legal Counsel for Our Children’s Trust. “While this petition moves through the courts, car manufacturers are already ramping up to put more gas-powered vehicles on the road for decades, cancelling EVs. Children with asthma will breathe worse air because of EPA’s decision. An 8-year-old sees her classmates with asthma and wonders if she’s next. A seventeen-year-old Jewish boy in Memphis cannot walk to synagogue on the Sabbath in the escalating heat. A young Muslim girl in California is forced to choose between her faith and her health. The heat-trapping carbon dioxide pollution will outlast every one of these children. A court cannot give those years, or clean air, back. If this rule is allowed to stand while the petition drags on, children will carry the consequences in their lungs, their health, and their daily lives long after the people who made this decision are gone.”
This motion is backed by 18 declarations, including six from leading experts in pediatrics, climate science, transportation, and energy, eight from the youth petitioners themselves, and four from parents of petitioners. Together they document the immediate, specific, and irreversible harms the Repeal Rule is already causing to children’s health, development, religious practices, and constitutional rights.
“I am proud to be from a state that values my constitutional rights to a clean and healthful environment […] My hope is that my children will grow up in a Hawai’i where we have achieved the zero-emissions target required by our state laws and the Navahine settlement agreement, and where the health of Hawai’i’s people and precious natural resources will be thriving. My federal Environmental Protection Agency should live up to its name and not take actions that make air pollution and climate change worse. If it cannot do that, it should at least avoid making it harder for my state to meet my state’s legal obligations and commitments that are designed to protect me,” said N.N., a youth petitioner from Hawai’i in his declaration to the court.
The motion argues that a stay imposes no new burdens on manufacturers, who have operated under greenhouse gas emission standards since 2012 and have broadly supported them. Unlike the coal industry’s opposition to the Clean Power Plan, major automakers told EPA during the comment period that they want regulatory stability, not deregulation. Ford Motor Company stated that eliminating the standards altogether is not likely to provide the industry with the long-term stability it needs to make historic investments in America and compete globally. The petitioners are not asking for something new. They are asking the court to preserve the legal paradigm and pollution standards that already exist while the legality of their upending is reviewed.
“The EPA knows greenhouse gas emissions cause air pollution that harms our children. It has known this for decades — longer than many of these petitioners have been alive,” said Dan Snyder, director of Public Justice’s Environmental Enforcement Project. “And yet, the agency has chosen to ignore all relevant and reliable science and binding Supreme Court precedent in lieu of padding the pockets of oil and gas companies, which already make billions of dollars in profit each year. Repealing the Endangerment Finding commits the United States to a dirty, unhealthy future that will shorten your children’s lifespans and make their existence on this planet materially worse. It is imperative that the D.C. Circuit stay this rule to preserve the status quo and prevent injuries to Petitioners’ constitutional rights to life, liberty, and religious freedom.”
The petition is Venner v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 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