Judge dismisses young climate activists’ lawsuit challenging Trump on
fossil fuels
[October 16, 2025]
By MATTHEW BROWN
BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit
from young climate activists seeking to block President Donald Trump’s
executive orders promoting fossil fuels and discouraging renewable
energy.
U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen said the plaintiffs showed
overwhelming evidence climate change affects them and that it will
worsen as a result of Trump’s orders.
But Christensen concluded their request for the courts to intervene was
“unworkable” because it was beyond the power of the judiciary to create
environmental policies.
The 22 plaintiffs included youths who prevailed in a landmark climate
trial against the state of Montana in 2023. During a two-day hearing
last month in Missoula, the activists and experts who testified on their
behalf described Trump’s actions to boost drilling and mining and
discourage renewable energy as a growing danger to children and the
planet.
A United Nations agency said on Wednesday that heat-trapping carbon
dioxide levels in the atmosphere jumped by the highest amount on record
last year, “turbo-charging” the climate and making weather more extreme.
Legal experts said the young activists and their lawyers from the
environmental group Our Children’s Trust faced long odds in the federal
case. The Montana state constitution declares that people have a "right
to a clean and healthful environment," but that language is absent from
the U.S. Constitution.
White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said Wednesday's ruling marked a
victory for the administration and voters who supported its agenda to
create American “energy dominance” by producing more fossil fuels.
“President Trump saved our country from Joe Biden’s wildly unpopular
Green Energy Scam and he will continue to ‘DRILL, BABY, DRILL’,” Rogers
said in an e-mailed statement.
Christensen said in a 31-page ruling that injunction sought by the
activists would have effectively meant reverting to the environmental
policies of the Biden administration. Enforcing it would have required
scrutiny of every climate-related action taken since Trump took office
in January, the judge added.
That would mean monitoring “an untold number of federal agency actions
to determine whether they contravene its injunction,” Christensen wrote.
“This is, quite simply, an unworkable request.”
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University of Montana student Maddie Grebb leads a chant across the
street from the Russell Smith federal courthouse, where young
climate activists were in court challenging President Donald Trump's
orders promoting fossil fuels, Sept. 17, 2025, in Missoula, Montana.
(Ben Allan Smith/The Missoulian via AP)
The climate activists will appeal Wednesday's ruling, said Julia
Olson, chief legal counsel at Our Children’s Trust.
“Every day these executive orders remain in effect, these 22 young
Americans suffer irreparable harm to their health, safety, and
future," Olson said. “The judge recognized that the government’s
fossil fuel directives are injuring these youth, but said his hands
were tied.”
A previous federal climate lawsuit in Oregon from Our Children’s
Trust went on for a decade before the U.S. Supreme Court declined to
consider their final appeal this year. Christensen cited that case
in concluding that the plaintiffs in Montana lacked standing to sue
the government.
“This Court is certainly troubled by the very real harms presented
by climate change," he wrote. “This concern does not automatically
confer upon it the power to act.”
Attorneys for the U.S. Department of Justice and more than a dozen
states led by Montana had urged Christensen to dismiss the case.
Acting Assistant Attorney General Adam Gustafson said in a statement
that the lawsuit was a sweeping and baseless challenge to Trump's
energy agenda that the court correctly threw out.
Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen said the rule of law had
prevailed.
"Our suspicions were confirmed – this was just another show trial
contrived by climate activists who wasted the taxpayer’s money,” he
said.
Only a few states, including Montana, Illinois, Pennsylvania,
Massachusetts and New York, have environmental protections enshrined
in their constitutions.
Montana’s Supreme Court upheld the 2023 trial outcome last year,
requiring officials to more closely analyze climate-warming
emissions. To date, that has yielded few meaningful changes in a
state dominated by Republicans.
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