The government never intends to go to trial. That is its chief defense against Juliana: to end it before it ever moves from the courthouse steps into an actual trial court. When I get the rare opportunity to ask its lead attorney why one day, as he walks briskly from a courtroom to an elevator, he reiterates what spectators from the legal community have been saying all along: “The constitutional design has to be respected.” In other words, Juliana is asking the courts to go too far in telling the government what to do. If the government isn’t doing enough about climate change, he says, “that’s an argument to make to Congress.”
But despite the government’s firm position that Juliana should be dismissed altogether, the Department of Justice has to prepare for trial anyway, just in case.
Which means that in the days before the case would have gone to trial, before it was stayed by the Supreme Court, the court docket was absolutely stuffed with reports from the experts who planned to turn up and testify. By the time the trial was canceled, everything that might have been presented in a courtroom in the US District Court of Oregon was already there to see—in hundreds of pages written by doctors, scientists, economists, and policy analysts, and in expert testimony on both sides of the Juliana case.
This tome—a reading of which, done carefully, takes five weeks—leaves very little to the imagination about what would have happened inside the courtroom had the trial actually occurred, what might still happen someday if the plaintiffs ever get their trial.
This is what it looks like.
In the fall of 2018, the Juliana twenty-one were headed into court with an entourage of some of the top climate scientists in the world, not to mention historians, engineers, even a past government appointee with unique insight into prior government efforts to avert global warming. All were offering pro bono testimony in defense of the youth and the planet. And to prove, perhaps most critically, not just that climate change is happening and that it stands to affect the Juliana twenty-one but also that climate impacts are already harming the plaintiffs, not just causing them possible harm in some apocalyptic future.
The Department of Justice, meanwhile, planned a defense strategy straight out of the Big Tobacco playbook. Its two parts can be summarized in a few sentences. First, the defense aimed to show that even if the plaintiffs had worsening asthma and allergies from all the wildfire smoke and drought-related dust and increasing allergens, they couldn’t prove that climate change had caused their symptoms. And second, while climate change is real and humans caused it, nobody knows when the seas will rise or when the ice caps will melt, so it’s impossible to argue that these things could directly harm these plaintiffs, since they haven’t actually happened yet. Also, if this havoc does unfold during their lifetimes, isn’t it already too late to do anything about it?
This second argument was the eyepopper that seemed to be skirting public view. Without the daily limelight a trial would have brought—media circus on the courthouse steps—the broader public was not spotting the fact that while the Trump administration and the president himself were nearly daily disputing the reality of climate change, the government’s experts did not, in fact had filed extensive reports asserting that climate change is real and man-made, and that climate breakdown now poses a very real threat to all Americans. At one point, the government’s attorneys even asked the court to do away with the part of the trial in which climate scientists would testify. They sought a motion to exclude them on the basis that everyone already agreed climate change is real, so there would be no reason to trot the science out in court.
It didn’t work out that way. By the time the trial was set, the finer points about when the seas would rise and the ice caps would melt, and to what extent that would equal specific horrors for the plaintiffs, were still in dispute, and in the end the dispute kept the scientists on the plaintiffs’ witness list ready to give the court and the public a full picture of how climate breakdown was already unfolding. The court wanted to hear, needed to hear, to what extent these plaintiffs were already colliding with—and would continue to collide with—the distinct fates science portended. Otherwise it would never be clear to what extent these outcomes were the government’s fault.
In the twilight of the Obama days, the government had already admitted a lot of the underlying facts. “They admitted they knew about climate change and subsidized fossil fuels,” said Ann Carlson, co-director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the UCLA School of Law. Among the questions that remained, she said, was “Do you need additional evidence about all the individual ways the government subsidizes fossil fuels?”
Permits. Financial aid. And the authorization of industry practices: air emissions, pipelines, spill cleanups. Nobody really knew what the government—and, in effect, industry—might have to disclose. But she imagined vast evidentiary battles loomed.
Already the fossil fuel industry had funneled billions of dollars into exactly the kind of public disinformation campaigns that once caused people to embrace cigarettes as a symbol of freedom and personal choice, even while science showed cigarettes were killing them. (More later on industry’s forays into disinformation and doubt.) Chevron’s attorney, Ted Boutrous, speaking on behalf of five fossil fuel companies in a different climate case in San Francisco, told the court that fossil fuel demand was the cause of climate change, not supply, which is a whole lot like saying that even though cigarettes give you cancer, and cancer kills people, smokers assumed these risks when they could have just listened to the science. The fact that such science had been obscured by industry since the tobacco companies first invented that move was, at least for the sake of Boutrous’s arguments, suddenly immaterial.
Considering the relative success of this strategy, there was no reason the government should have avoided it. At least if the objective was to win. Being long past the ethical yardsticks that would have kept the nation out of this arena in the first place, the tobacco defense led to good outcomes—read: financial windfall—for that industry. Despite the fact that people think tobacco companies lost in the end, did they really? Referring to their $206 billion settlement with states over the public health costs of smoking in 1998, Michael Liebreich, a former advisor to Shell New Energies, summed it up in a column for BloombergNEF as more business decision than defeat. “The companies calculated that it was worth doing a deal in order to remain in the cigarette business and they are still highly profitable today,” he wrote. Now it’s the sale of cigarettes that funds continuing payouts to the state governments that sued over the public health costs of smoking. Hardly the template for climate reparations, especially if you consider that funding the fix necessarily perpetuates the problem. Also, not a coup for the public where health and safety are concerned. Between the 1950s, when the tobacco companies first rolled out this legal defense, and its monstrous settlement in 1998, the industry acquired a whole new generation of smokers and another forty-plus years of profits. And they’re still in business.
Every day of delay in halting climate change similarly promises more supply, more use, more profit, and future business for fossil fuel companies. And there could be no better path to assuring industry’s course in delay than for the federal government to appoint an industry attorney to defend it in the Juliana case. Which is exactly what happened, though it is perhaps the strangest part of this story.
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Jeffrey Bossert Clark had spent years settling claims for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on behalf of BP before Trump nominated him to lead environment and natural resource litigation for the Department of Justice in June 2017. Clark had served in the division previously, under George W. Bush. And in this way, he’d spent much of his career in the revolving door of employment between the Department of Justice and Kirkland & Ellis, the private law firm that represented industry in some of its highest-stakes litigation. At Kirkland & Ellis, where Clark became a partner, he figured prominently in industry efforts to ward off government regulation of greenhouse gas emissions in the Obama days. Today, Clark supervises “all federal civil environmental and natural resources litigation involving agencies of the United States” and personally handles “select, high-profile cases,” including Juliana v. United States.
The optics of having a former BP attorney leading the government’s defense was certainly symptomatic of the larger problem: the government failing to separate its own interests from the interests of industry in Juliana and a lot of other matters. But nobody seemed worried about optics, at least not openly. Clark’s nomination coincided with the fossil fuel industry’s withdrawal from the Juliana case, though industry had fought hard to intervene under Obama. Having an entire industry step out of such consequential litigation was partly due to the pesky fact that some of the biggest oil companies in the world were about to be subject to discovery and probably not so keen on turning over documents. After all, they were being sued for securities fraud by stakeholders, in nuisance cases, in product liability cases, and by others seeking climate redress. If they turned over documents in one case, they would likely have to do so in these others. And who knows what criminal charges might surface for individual actors. That aside, the industry also didn’t need to represent itself anymore. Its lawyer was already in the ring, helping the government do it for them.
Clark was just the man for this job. He’d been hostile to attempts to regulate greenhouse gases for enough years that he was well versed in how to dismantle these regulations. In 2010, Clark had given a talk at the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention called “EPA: An Agency Gone Wild or Just Doing Its Job?” In it he’d characterized US efforts to regulate greenhouse gases as akin to a socialist power grab for the top tiers of the economy. This just a few months after Clark authored a column on the right-wing PJ Media blog that asked the rhetorical question: When did America risk coming to be ruled by foreign scientists and apparatchiks at the United Nations? His answer: the moment Lisa Jackson, the EPA director under Obama, issued a rule determining greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, resting largely on UN science. “The United States is not a technocracy, let alone a UN-ocracy. It is a republic—but only for as long as we can keep it,” he wrote.
“Here’s what plagues me,” said Mary Christina Wood. “The big question, sort of the elephant-in-the-room question, is why on earth is our government representing fossil fuel interests when doing so is going to bring civilization to an end? If they succeed, their success would drive us over the climate cliff. How did we get here where our government is on this tyrannical track that would lead, literally, to massive death, destruction, property loss, misery, economic loss? How did we get here?”
That part isn’t as clear. But what is clear is that the government planned its own expert witnesses to make the bedrock case against a climate remediation plan. None of its witnesses were climate scientists. Instead, the government planned to have three medical doctors testify that even if some of the plaintiffs were sick—with asthma and allergies and the like, as Nick and Kiran and some of the others claimed—it couldn’t be proved that climate change was the culprit. Two professors tied to the Energy Modeling Forum (EMF) at Stanford University, which had long been funded by industry to influence energy policy, would testify about how hard decarbonization is, among other things. An MIT scientist who worked on carbon storage planned to testify about how difficult that is too. Also, a Cato Institute scholar on land management planned to testify on the possible pitfalls of planning for carbon impacts. The government’s expert roster also included David Victor, a researcher of climate policy who literally wrote the book about why the world hadn’t made progress on a global climate accord. He was the cheapest of all of them at $325 an hour. One of the Stanford professors, James Sweeney, charged $800. Two had served on panels of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), three had served or worked for government, and at least half had ties to fossil fuel companies. They were typically in the employ of either medical practices or universities. Now they were also in the employ of the public to defend the government.
Small wonder the Trump administration ducked this trial. What loomed looked like an expensive boondoggle, full of opportunity for questions about ethics, character, conflicts of interest, and the direction of the nation and its learning institutions. And since you don’t get in the ring with a Million Dollar Baby, Juliana fit the bill for the next best legal tactics: dismissal and delay.
The case was always going to take years, even without the government’s emergency petitions and the consequent slowdowns. If the District Court of Oregon decided it quickly, it would face another three years of appeals, at least. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals first. Then, likely, the US Supreme Court. Many of the Juliana plaintiffs would be college graduates by then, most high school graduates, at least. The outcome was a long way off. But the trial—the trial was also for a nation that needed the spectacle, the epic, the television version of the conversation it needed to have. If not over fires and floods, the prospect of the impending end to us all, there was this stuff, so American: made for TV.
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Who could help but root for a bunch of young people against a prime-time cast of villains, anyway? The social cachet the youth would have—zoomers, all of them—in a court stacked by and for baby boomers and a few Gen Xers could have catapulted the plaintiffs to infamy, if not spurred an intergenerational culture war that could have spilled into the streets.
But the fear that the government’s case would have stoked in Americans? The great swaths of the nation where people worried over basics like affording bread and milk while the prescriptions and the rent were breaking them? That fear was for real. Even though 71 percent of Americans believed in climate change in the fall of 2018, only 57 percent were willing to pay to help fix it, and even then they would only pay $1 a month. Faced with a fee of $40 a month to halt a climate breakdown, public support plunged by more than half, to 23 percent. Americans were similarly lukewarm about a carbon tax. In other words, people knew there was a problem and wanted the government to fix it, but they were very worried about what it would cost. The debate about remedies brought forth this undercurrent of unease people already had about whether reacting to climate breakdown spelled financial chaos.
And then there was this: one study found that climate denial in America also stemmed from “the strong ideological commitment” to personal freedom and a lack of government regulation by small-government conservatives and libertarians. “US climate deniers often rest their case on the defense of the American way of life, defined by high consumption and ever-expanding material prosperity,” its author found. Many people just did not want to change. And the study found there was a lack of forthrightness, of understanding even, on the part of the proponents of change about just how much American life would really have to.
These distressing questions of how much it would cost to avert a climate catastrophe, who would pay, and how much American culture could be altered by it, they were the questions the government’s experts were poised to raise in the form of critique.
The Juliana experts planned to argue past these fears. Or to try. Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University and director of its Atmosphere/Energy Program, offered dozens of pages of documents arguing it was possible to convert the US energy system to 80 percent renewable energy by 2030, 100 percent by 2050. He said it could be done using mostly existing technologies—things like solar, wind, and wave power, hydroelectric and geothermal. And he wrote that such a transition could create two million jobs and spur economic gains, all while minimizing harm from air pollution and climate change and energy insecurity, something he had modeled using computers. “Based on the scientific results presented, current barriers to implementing (wind, water, and solar) roadmaps are neither technical nor economic. They are social and political,” he wrote.
James H. Williams, a professor of energy systems management at the University of San Francisco, similarly said in his expert report that it would be possible to deeply decarbonize the atmosphere to 80 percent of 1990 levels by 2050 without everyone in the nation having to be on some sort of energy rations. What he meant by energy rations was, ironically, the kind of brownouts that California would soon be facing to avoid wildfire—brownouts that might also be necessary if the world waited too long to decarbonize. Williams added, though, that these measures might not be enough. And if the US wanted to avert the catastrophic impacts of climate change by decarbonizing another 20 percent, it could. People might have to spend more money, and “it will likely require some early retirements of fossil fuel infrastructure”—things like coal plants, pipelines, refineries—but it could be done without drastic reductions in the amount of energy our consumption-hungry nation used day to day. In the end, it would “not diminish basic quality of life and standards of living” in America, the very things people feared.
In the furious paper war that ensued, however, Howard Herzog, a researcher in the MIT Energy Initiative, attacked these ideas on the government’s behalf, raising questions about the ripple effect of the transition in the marketplace, the unknowns. Things like lag times in siting new energy facilities, in getting permits, things that could add unplanned cost. And he said Jacobson “fails to comment on the numerous coordination issues associated with rapid large-scale transformation of the US energy system.” Herzog suggested people might not be willing to charge their electric vehicles during the day, for example, something a renewable energy system would require. And that dams might not be able to spill the needed amounts of water for hydroelectric at times because of competing needs for irrigation and water for fish. Generally, the picture he painted was of an America that would be lumbering through the transition in a staid, rigid bureaucracy, even as the planet was in a state of emergency. The questions he raised were often good ones. But the answers were unknowable. They could only be answered by trying, by living in the lab. To stir the fear that it would all be harder than anybody said and cost more, too, was to suggest that things would be better if we left them alone. As if it were better to just die on the operating table than do the surgery.
This argument from a government that landed the first man on the moon and invented the Internet, in a culture that built the first personal computer, cell phones, telegraphs—it seemed absurd. Suddenly this nation, the one with the world’s most powerful military, the one whose moral compass and courage won the Second World War, was cowering. Afraid of risk.
It was hard to fathom what America really stood for in such a moment.
James Sweeney, who analyzes energy economics and policy for Stanford’s EMF, painted a dystopian reality at the point when the nation would no longer permit fossil fuel facilities. Prices would fall. The rest of the world would just use more fossil fuel anyway. The US would have to import fuels. Suddenly national security would be at risk. Consumers would have to change behavior. And leaps in technology would be required too. The energy systems proposed by the plaintiffs’ experts “could become a reality only if the government abandoned free market principles throughout the economy, adopted a command-and-control approach, and mandated the adoption of the technologies proposed in their energy system, or provided massive subsidies, which would require tax increases,” he wrote. It was all very full throated. It was also like a very scary movie, except usually in the movie there was a meteor headed for Earth and people were trying to run from the problem, not trying to solve it. The government’s experts offered nothing in the way of solutions, only these sorts of defenses of the status quo.
It made me wonder what the cafeterias were like at Stanford, where Sweeney and Jacobson stalked the same ground after submitting expert reports on opposite sides of the Juliana case. So, too, at symposia, where experts similarly stood crosswise in the litigation. I imagined fights over the last of the hot dogs, or at least mean looks. Parts of the reports reflected this kind of hostility, the prose so searing, so personal and pedantic—“Erickson demonstrates lack of attention”—that it sometimes read like a grade-school spat for very educated adults.
I asked Jacobson what it was like to share the academic bubble in these times.
“It’s not normal to be at odds with people in your own community,” he said. “I just basically ignore them and they ignore me. It is very awkward.”
It was especially awkward since, around this time, Jacobson’s office was three doors down from Sweeney’s. A third Stanford professor, John Weyant, was also an expert witness for the government, and served with Jacobson on some of the same university committees.
“I go to one meeting where there are only five people in the meeting: me, Weyant, Sweeney, and two other people.” A difficult meeting at which all three tended to communicate in circles.
There had also been a lawsuit, Jacobson charging another scientist and a journal with defamation over a critique of his work by a group of authors that included Sweeney and Weyant and David Victor. Jacobson charged the scientists never actually reviewed his data, just wrote the paper, but he withdrew the lawsuit later, saying it took too much time and money to sue.
Similar disputes among the experts—and deep ideological debates about the ethical role for scientists in defending the government against Juliana—were under way in other scientific fields and at other institutions.
Take land management. Climate remediation would call for new practices to decarbonize the atmosphere. After all, you need a certain number of trees for such things, and for soil to be carefully managed. The plaintiffs’ expert Philip Robertson—a professor of plant, soil, and microbial sciences at Michigan State University—charted a path to maximum carbon storage and said 20 percent of the global need could be met on US soil, about a third on federally managed land, the rest private, with policy and funding for such measures being the only obstacles. These were big obstacles. Saying that you could control people’s land seemed to violate some cardinal rule of American values, except when you considered that the government had been buying these kinds of outcomes from farmers for years. Still, these were the very things conservatives abhorred: restrictions on personal property, on freedom.
Daniel Sumner, the government’s expert, said the plaintiffs hadn’t proved these investments were reasonable or cost-effective. And his points about what such measures would do to the cost of food, to rural economies, to other conservation goals were cautions that would alarm ordinary Americans. They were perhaps the strongest and most troubling arguments the government had. But they were policy questions, too, questions typically answered through policy making in other situations. Like what people should be made to recycle, prevented from dumping in the form of hazardous waste, and forbidden to do in order to protect rivers and streams. True, some policies would come with big cultural adjustments. Things that in an emergency people would also have to get used to. They were harder than saving string and aluminum foil, the woman taking on jobs in factories, as they had in World War II.
The bigger fright, economist Joseph Stiglitz argued, would be the cost to younger people if the nation did nothing.
“More than half a century ago, President Johnson sent a message to Congress that we faced two paths: the cheaper option, in the short term, of carrying down the path of pollution, or the more expensive option (at the time), of restoring the country and its natural heritage to the people,” Stiglitz, who taught at Columbia, wrote. He said for the last fifty years, the government had “shirked from the ‘more demanding’ course of restoring ‘America . . . to her people.’” With policies that discounted the eventual impacts on children, the government continued “to steer America on the path of incalculable losses and away from that more demanding and sane course. The costs of fixing the damage today are much higher than they would have been in 1966 when President Johnson sent his message; but, the costs today are much lower than what they will be after another fifty years of fossil fuel pollution and inaction.”
Stiglitz had a Nobel Prize by then, shared another with Al Gore. He had also taught at Yale, Stanford, Princeton, and Oxford. He was the kind of ringer who could make any opposition weak kneed just by stepping into a room. He told the court in his report that if catastrophe hit before the nation could fix things, it would take personal wealth to escape the perils of climate change. That some people would lose homes while the tax burden of disaster relief would skyrocket, right along with the rising costs of insurance, of food, and of health care in a society suddenly rife with diseases like Zika, carried to new lands by mosquitos that would range farther in warmer temperatures. The economy would weaken, increasing income disparity. Some people would have, others not. And everyone would need more money to dig out of the situation at a time when less money would be available.
Stiglitz compared what the plaintiffs were seeking—a full carbon accounting of the nation, plus an order to create a climate remediation plan—to the simple practice of having business insurance. At a certain point it just made sense for the nation to do this. There wasn’t some third-party insurer waiting to make financial bets on who would be harmed by climate change and who would not. No free market insurer wanted to make this wager, which said everything about the degree to which the free market could ever address climate change. And climate change would hurt developing countries much worse than America; the cost of adaptation would be “well beyond anything that those countries can afford.” What that meant, Stiglitz said, was because the United States made the bulk of this mess, responsible as it was for 25 percent of historical carbon dioxide emissions across the globe, it would be American youth who might be tasked with cleaning its share someday. If not for their own sake, then because mass migration from other nations would force them to have to.
To look clear-eyed at this, at about fifty pages of frightful prognosis for American youth, was to understand what Greta Thunberg would mean, in another year, when she would tell the UN Climate Action Summit that if governments continued to do nothing about climate change, left all the problem solving to the youth, “We will never forgive you.” And scientists were seeing, in increments since at least 2014, that they had already greatly underestimated how fast this future was coming.
Lise Van Susteren, an expert on the trauma effects of disaster, drew on literature from the nation’s already lengthy list of superstorms and hurricanes—Katrina, Charley, Sandy, bad enough to remember by name—to conclude the Juliana plaintiffs and lots of other youth were being harmed by climate change in ways that would lead to lasting psychological impacts. And even while the government’s expert discounted their duress, since none of the plaintiffs were suffering from acute mental illness, a third expert likened this dismissal to telling the kids from Flint, Michigan, that even though there was lead in the water, if it hadn’t made them sick yet, they should just keep drinking it.
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The tall task of drawing out this joust in front of a judicial panel would have been up to the attorneys. They had twelve weeks to craft the trial. Climate change as theater. As public performance. As education. In addition to the expert witnesses planned, they also had others to support basic facts, including people who had previously worked for the government. To craft this spectacle on the courtroom stage would have been a tense dance between fact and fear, played out in the slow theatrics of legalese.
Still, it would have been an epic show. To be in this room, to witness the trial for humankind, the plaintiffs in the galley, all buoyed by the relief and stress of finally having made it there, it was a reporter’s dream—like Scopes, the Monkey Trial for the climate. Though no chimpanzees would dance at the courthouse, the spectacle of Juliana v. United States was already primed. Daily press conferences had been planned. Major media was set to attend: I’d agreed to cover for Reuters, plus reporters were being sent by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Bloomberg, to name just a few. Other events in the case had been so stacked with press that the courts had reserved rows of seats just for the journalists that would arrive in droves to cram in.
Advocacy groups, lawyers, civic organizations, and others also had a stake in the case, and having papered the courts with friend briefs on behalf of the plaintiffs, they were also primed to dive in. For months, the Juliana press team had been grooming their hashtag—#YouthvGov—and the attending social media was expected to trend big. If past retweets of case updates from Ellen DeGeneres and Leonardo DiCaprio were any barometer, it would have. The documentary crew was still in tow, having followed the plaintiffs in the three-year lead-up to trial and launched their Kickstarter campaign for production costs in September, riding the pretrial wave of excitement. By early October, there’d been so much buzz that court staff was telling anyone who wanted a seat to arrive at 6:30 a.m. and prepare to stand in line, like for a rock concert, for the 9 a.m. trial time.
The trial would have drawn the media eye to climate change and held it for weeks, months, a fact that could have changed the national conversation about global warming for good, win or lose. It was a moment I did not want to miss. And when I missed it, when we all missed it, what it felt like was the nation’s loss, a missed opportunity to join the civilized world in a conversation most other nations were already having: How do we fix this? How does humankind survive?
Attorneys were expected to make opening arguments with a full complement of heartstrings: Jayden sleeping on her living room floor with her single mom and siblings. The fires plaguing western states, forcing Nick to spend his summer indoors listening to the air purifiers. The trial was to be a narrative, and each of the Juliana plaintiffs was to tell, through experts and exhibits, the story of the warming planet. Each had a unique role to play: that of ambassador to the crisis, chronicler of how it looked through the lens of their youth. They were uniquely able to speak about what the breakdown of the planet’s ecosystems meant for them and for other young people their age. And for each of them, climate change was personal.
To strike the balance between this emotional tenor and the terrifying, sometimes stultifying facts of the problem, renowned climate scientist James Hansen was to have taken the lead, stalking the line between fact and fear. Ever since his landmark 1988 testimony to Congress in which, as a NASA scientist, he told the government that climate change was real and human caused, and that the time for action was now, he’d had a unique ability to connect with audiences and hold their gaze. He’d commanded stadium crowds, front pages of newspapers. Thirty years later, his granddaughter, Sophie Kivlehan, a Juliana plaintiff, had spent a lifetime watching him do it.
When she was young, she said, he would bring her to his speeches. Speeches that were televised, one audience so large it filled a football field. At interviews, people would ask her questions too. “He would bring me for kind of that visualization . . . needing someone younger than you to make you feel that emotional motivation to do something.” This compulsion to act was a thing Sophie, at twenty, now felt when she looked at Levi, the youngest plaintiff in the Juliana case. Hansen knew the impulse well, could play to it, align the climate science with this basic instinct to protect the young.
“He’s very matter-of-fact. And he does his science in his office and presents it, and at the end and at the beginning he will say something emotional. And throughout it he will say something emotional to get people involved,” Sophie said. “But at some point, he defined this balance of connecting with the emotional burden of it and disconnecting with it so that he doesn’t burn out.”
Hansen could do that for listeners too. Show them the child and let them turn back to the facts, countermand the horror of what was at stake with glimpses of what could be done about it. He’d kept in the fight longer than most this way. And it was how he taught Sophie to integrate climate advocacy into her life. How to separate herself from the movement and not exhaust herself like so many advocates she had known, attending every march, no time for jobs. Now Hansen would do this in the courtroom too. Try to inspire both the courts and the public to act without causing them to turn away.
When he was through, the Juliana attorneys planned to move through the effects of climate change piece by piece, letting their experts walk through its dimensions. Warming oceans, rising seas, superstorms, worsening wildfires and droughts, glacial melt, collapsing ice sheets, intensifying rains, floods, the collapse of ecosystems, species extinction, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, dying coral reefs and marine life, a collapsing food web. In between, each plaintiff was to tell their story. Stories of bedrooms that filled with water in the night, of beaches set to be underwater, and of centuries-old family farms threatened by encroaching wildfire and drought. Stories of asthma made worse in summer heat, of forests destroyed by bugs that no longer died for lack of cold. There were ice storms, sinkholes, wells run dry, whole populations relocated from rising seas, melting glacier parks, and beaches lined with dead fish.
No one knows what these stories would have looked like in a courtroom. But as November 2018 begins, it is up to the Supreme Court to decide if there will ever be a trial that could tell them all.