A funny thing happens: the media eye keeps staring. Maybe the machine isn’t satisfied, after all. Maybe the tease of the trial was just too much, the beast still needing to be fed. Maybe it’s just that some news shows, like 60 Minutes, were already midproduction when trial was canceled and decided to go ahead anyway. Within the next few weeks, the plaintiffs will be prime time, Levi walking on a beach with correspondent Steve Kroft, and the whole gang scattered on the courthouse steps again, this time for a Vogue photo shoot, careening toward a feature in People. The momentum of the almost-trial is still rolling.
That sense that Aji has that there needs to be something bigger, or that Kiran has that perhaps winning the pop culture war will be the victory after all—both seem to be right. There is a noise in the world that is coming from the youth, a kind of siren. It is getting louder.
Halfway around the world, fifteen-year-old Greta Thunberg has been sitting outside the Swedish parliament protesting inaction on climate change on Fridays. She’s been on a parallel track with the Juliana plaintiffs this year, demonstrating since August when the Juliana twenty-one were doing depositions and trial prep. By December 2018, she’s become popular enough to be invited to speak at the UN’s climate conference in Katowice, Poland, where she delivers the lines that will make her what Time later calls an “avatar” of young activists everywhere: “You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes. We have come here to let you know that change is coming, whether you like it or not.”
By then, tens of thousands of young people across Europe are skipping school to join her Friday protests, and in the beginning of 2019, thirty-five thousand children attend a single protest in Belgium. Then a brigade of teens leads twelve thousand on a march into the Netherlands to The Hague. Two young women from Brussels next make a pleading video that draws more than one hundred thousand youth to a march on the capitol there. Then a twenty-two-year-old Berliner answers the call and leads a climate strike in Germany.
In the United States, a trio of young women begin organizing the US answer to this movement abroad, US Youth Climate Strike. Young organizers from Australia, Uganda, Britain, and China also join, orchestrating their own strikes and planning larger actions too. Solitary pickets of capitol buildings and outposts begin to grow into crowds all over the world. As youth assume the leadership the adults have abdicated, they stall traffic in the streets, halt buses, make signs and slogans, and recite chants asking why they ought to be in school anyway. They don’t care about being the next cogs in the wheels of a civilization on a disastrous course. They want change. And they reason if they stop showing up at school, the effect on the adults will be that they have to start paying attention. These youth tell their leaders, their parents, and their teachers to listen up as they stump for global climate remediation. And it increasingly seems that some will get it. In nations across the globe, action influences elections that influence policy.
They call it Fridays for Future, with some students boycotting school every Friday to protest global inaction on climate change. Talk of a nationwide climate strike hits the street, lights up social media, and the American answer to youth movements abroad is set for March 15, 2019, a Friday, where a school boycott and climate march is planned on the Capitol lawn in Washington, DC, with solidarity events planned in schools and towns across the nation.
Climate organizations founded for and by youth meanwhile explode into policy debates, voicing support for climate legislation, shaming business leaders and policy makers with ties to fossil fuels, and skewering older adults for inaction. Groups like the Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion, intent on raising the voice of youth and disrupting business as usual, follow in the path of organizations like iMatter, Earth Guardians, and Zero Hour.
Fitting, then, that Jamie Margolin, the seventeen-year-old co-founder of Zero Hour who led a climate march in Washington, DC, in July 2018, one event among many to inspire Greta Thunberg, has already tried her luck to force climate action in the courts. She was Aji’s co-plaintiff in his second case against the State of Washington, the case in which the plaintiffs won a clear air rule but were never able to turn it into the climate recovery plan they sought. Aji was there the day Jamie first conceived the 2018 climate march. Back when it was a chore. Now, Jamie says marching doesn’t feel so frustrating anymore. The fever to do something, anything, runs deep among many, and the urge to do whatever has to be done, and do it by the thousands, is no longer a monumental task for just Jamie, her colleagues and co-plaintiffs, and a slimmer number of other youth.
As young Americans plan to hit the streets, Jamie turns her attention elsewhere. On February 8, 2019, the Juliana plaintiffs file a motion with the Ninth Circuit asking the court to freeze fossil fuel development on public lands before their case can be heard, a prospect that would interrupt an estimated hundred such projects around the nation. Our Children’s Trust asks Jamie to leverage Zero Hour to help, so Jamie recruits a batch of new youth volunteers, then bushwhacks among young Americans for support for Juliana. Pro bono attorneys craft a friend-of-the-court brief for Zero Hour. It urges the Ninth Circuit to bring Juliana to trial—and quickly. Then Jamie asks other kids to sign. NowThis News pitches in. So does a writer from Jimmy Kimmel and, again, Leonardo DiCaprio. The objective, Jamie says, is “showing this isn’t just twenty-one young people suing the government,” that the frustration the Juliana plaintiffs feel is being felt by young Americans everywhere.
“Our childhoods are being spent begging them to stop ruining our adulthoods, and our adulthoods are going to be spent dealing with the consequences of their actions,” she says, this on the phone during a break from high school in Seattle, where she’s a junior. “I don’t want to be picking these fights. The youth don’t want to be picking these fights. And honestly, it’s exhausting to be in the streets all the time. . . . But people don’t seem to want to listen to anything civil.”
In about six weeks, Jamie and her cohort gather more than thirty thousand signatures.
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The day of the US Youth Climate Strike march, the Capitol lawn smells like bark dust and twittering birds. It’s covered in beach balls and parachutes and a hefty crowd of young people. The crowd chants for a while (“Hey-hey, ho-ho, fossil fuels have got to go!”) and almost everyone has a sign. The messages range from the assertive (“Like the sea, we rise”) to the ironically humorous (“I’m so angry I made a sign”).
There are talks by organizers, passionate and breathless, and music by performers, heartfelt songs by participants too. There’s a way to text your representatives to ask them to back a Green New Deal. And a solid showing by oldsters, including one man handing out leaflets and urging attendees to ban the bomb. It’s a crowd of backpacks and tote bags, ripped jeans and knit caps, bike helmets and skateboards. Surprisingly, there are very few phones. Everyone seems to pay attention to the stage whenever anyone is on it. Those on it include, among others, the three organizers (Haven Coleman, Isra Hirsi, and Alexandria Villasenor), soul pop singer Rebel Rae, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (whose daughter is Isra Hirsi), and an eight-year-old self-described “tiny diplomat” who has to stand on a ladder to be seen.
Their ask is articulated throughout the day: a Green New Deal, an end to new fossil fuel infrastructure, compulsory education on climate change for youth, a national emergency declaration on climate change, and for the nation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 100 percent by 2050. In the world ahead, the youth also want government decisions to be based on science.
In the crowd, a young man sits on a parachute with a sign listing the ten hottest years on record. He is seventeen and tells me he has been alive for nine of them.
Later, organizers count school boycotts and rallies in forty-seven states. In another six months, they will do it again, this time joining at least six million others worldwide for the largest climate march in world history.
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When it’s over, Alex meets me for ramen and sushi burritos in New York. He was a speaker at the US Youth Climate Strike rally at Columbia, where afterward he interviewed Jay Inslee, then a presidential hopeful for 2020, on MTV News with a couple of other young activists. It was an interesting conversation, Alex asking what Inslee planned to do for rural communities left behind by globalization and automation in a Green New Deal. These types of invites—to speak to crowds at Columbia and interview presidential hopefuls on MTV—are the kind of invites he and other Juliana plaintiffs are increasingly getting. Alex has a wry sense of humor about this newfound celebrity. Earlier in the day, he says, a fact-checker from the New Yorker called him to confirm the details of an upcoming story. “The fact-checker asked me, with no trace of irony, if I was withholding my official endorsement of Inslee,” Alex says. Then he just laughs.
He is about to graduate from Columbia and is working on his thesis during spring break. Working on a lot of other things, too, his brain on its unique overdrive while he considers what life after college will look like. He turned up to the restaurant just off campus wearing a collared shirt and a black peacoat, having just had three job interviews, and is juggling possibilities that include the prestigious fellowship he has applied to, beginning the ascent to law school, and a handful of potential jobs. Despite the pressure of these decisions, Alex is as upbeat as always, looking forward to a night out with his girlfriend to celebrate the interviews that seem to be going well. By this time, managing pressure is just a skill that Alex has mastered, like a lot of others. Since October, he has spoken to the United Nations about the Juliana litigation, appeared in media with the rest of the plaintiffs, and given his own interviews to the New Yorker and the Yale Politic. Some of the plaintiffs are set to testify before Congress later in the month, and Alex is thinking of joining them.
The stakes in the Juliana case are only rising. The Ninth Circuit is scheduled to hear oral arguments in June to determine whether it should go to trial. And by now, it is clear that the climate movement has changed—not just for Alex, not just for his fellow Juliana plaintiffs, but also for the nation and the world. Such momentum could prompt the courts to move faster. And we acknowledge as we sit, fussing over rice and noodles with chopsticks, how much has changed. I ask Alex what he thinks it is that is waking the world. Besides the budding iconography of Greta, whether the lawsuit has anything to do with it, or the new recruits in Congress who began the talk of a Green New Deal. I spitball a bunch of ideas. But Alex doesn’t buy any of them. Instead, he says, unequivocally, “It’s Donald Trump.” I’m not sure I buy that, either, so Alex explains. “It’s having a good villain. . . . I think every movement, every story needs a really good bad guy to motivate. This man is like the Darth Vader of global warming.” Then he likens Trump to the James Bond villain Goldfinger. Calls him Orangefinger.
It is perfect.
In the 1964 spy film, a James Bond classic, Auric Goldfinger is a wealthy gold trader intent on destroying the US economy so that he can make himself comparably richer. He has a history of smuggling and has stashes of gold bars all over the world—Caracas, Hong Kong, Zurich, Amsterdam—which he intends to sell at triple the gains to a guy in Pakistan. The plan only works if Goldfinger can devalue US gold first. And he’s in league with a horde of criminals who support this dubious plan. These villains meet in boardrooms, where they use fancy toys and technobabble to make the business of collapsing the government all the more official. Bond catches Goldfinger in the act when Goldfinger poses as a US military man, tries to kill the entire military, then runs away after being spotted trying to detonate a bomb in a gold vault. Later, Goldfinger dies by being sucked out the window of an airplane because he is fool enough to fire a gun on it. In between, he is obsessed with winning, enough to lie and cheat, and beautiful women are inexplicably drawn to him.
In this moment, I can think of no better analogy for the leader of the free world.
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Congress seems to wake up, and suddenly even presidential hopefuls want Juliana endorsements. It isn’t clear whether any of these politicians will change anything, but many congressional leaders understand they at least have to act like they are trying. Over the course of the next few months, the Juliana twenty-one become something of a stage prop. Aji testifies in April before the brand-new House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, then stars in a handshake video with Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts. Bernie Sanders, again a presidential hopeful, makes videos supporting the Juliana plaintiffs, including talking-head segments starring Aji and attorney Andrea Rodgers, interspersed with shots of smokestacks and oil rigs churning, highways chugging like platelet-filled arteries, and clips of the American flag. By mid-May, Alex is a popular selfie on the Hill, posing with congressmen from Oregon and California, and Representative Raúl M. Grijalva from the soon-to-be-uninhabitable state of Arizona. He meets with Representative Dick Durbin, the Democratic whip from Illinois, and lands his own star-studded selfie with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In June, Sheldon Whitehouse, D-Rhode Island, posts a photo of himself high-clapping Kelsey in a marble hallway next to an AED machine.
Then it is June 4.
The Juliana attorneys walk into a federal courtroom in downtown Portland with a rolling cart stuffed with case files. Our Children’s Trust is throwing so much legal firepower at today’s Ninth Circuit hearing that it’s a task just to get all of the attorneys into chairs. A panel of three judges is set to hear arguments about whether the Juliana trial should go forward. With only a hundred seats in the courtroom—a wood-paneled place with the typical wooden benches—plaintiffs, their parents, and the press are seated first. Then the court staff begins the tall task of filling the remaining seats and a nearby overflow room.
The people who have lined up to attend this hearing, most of them are still school age. Many have no affiliation with the case, no affiliation with the plaintiffs. Their only affiliation is the issue. They are here because Juliana v. United States is about them.
In fact, there is such demand to see this hearing, and enough of an effort on the part of Our Children’s Trust to make it visible, that the court has agreed to livestream the proceedings into nearby Director Park, an open plaza between a triad of towering buildings and a historic movie theater. In the park, it is bedlam. The stone ground is covered with supporters and activists rallying around signs to “Let the Youth Be Heard.” They assemble under the watchful eye of twelve giant puppets—puppets of the last twelve presidents, the ones to have presided over the nation’s lackluster response to climate change—as organizers rally the crowd in anticipation.
The plaintiffs, most of them, are of course here, wearing the combined expressions of excitement and composure that are typical in court. They are catching up, many not having seen one another in the months since trial was canceled. Miko and Jayden are in intermittent confab, Jayden having left Louisiana for New Mexico, leaving behind the oil politics for good. Jacob took a day off the farm and off school, having been admitted to a prestigious online program that MIT has begun to combat problems like poverty and hunger, geared toward nontraditional learners like young farmers. The Eugene high schoolers are seated together, having made it through their freshman year. And Kelsey, also back to school at the University of Oregon, is center stage, turning in her seat to face Vic and the plaintiffs behind her to check in. Everyone is in their finery, Isaac especially crisp in a black button-down, gray suit jacket. Nick, who has just finished high school and is about to begin studying theoretical math, confesses that he failed to pack appropriate socks, then comically flashes his ankles.
In these moments before the hearing begins—long before the plaintiffs emerge from the courthouse to the flash of cameras and a parade that will march them to the park, Levi riding on Nathan’s shoulders and Kelsey screaming the news that today’s hearing has just become a Snapchat filter—the courtroom is quiet, the tension thick. The Department of Justice has assembled its team of four attorneys, and Jeffrey Bossert Clark, clad in a gray suit, is poised to argue the government’s case.
The room grows quiet. And in these last few moments, a courthouse staffer begins reciting “Jabberwocky” for a final sound check of the microphones: “So rested he by the Tumtum tree, and stood awhile in thought.”
There is a soft, collective giggle from the youngest people in the room.
When it begins, Clark argues that the Juliana case is an attack on the separation of powers because it circumvents a lot of things. A bunch of statutes. Public comment periods. The Constitution, arguably, by not letting Congress solve the problem of climate change. If the case were allowed to go forward, he says, it would mean that any situation in which someone made a claim that their health and safety was in peril could be made into a constitutional case, skirting the usual administrative appeals and other required processes, the ones that Mary Christina Wood said were not working in the first place.
Judge Andrew Hurwitz frowns with his forehead, leans across the bench toward where Clark stands, and gives Clark a hypothetical: Say rogue raiders are coming across the Canadian border into the Northwest, kidnapping children of a certain age and murdering them. Say the White House refuses to do anything. Say Congress doesn’t act. Can those people go to court to make it stop?
“No,” Clark says. It just isn’t what the judicial branch is there for, to deal with these kinds of exigent threats. That’s why we have a president. Why the president can take the nation to war. The remedy in the murderous kidnapper scenario, Clark says, if the president and local governors aren’t doing anything about it, would be to vote the president and the governors out of office. “It’s not for the judiciary to take over,” he says. However painful, to preserve the constitutional design of America, a few unlucky kids would have to die by the hand of rogue Canadian kidnappers.
Julia Olson challenges all of this. Next at the podium in a stiff dark blazer, wide collar and glasses, tiny by comparison, she casts the plaintiffs—casts all youth—as a class of citizens denied equal rights. They have a constitutional right to life, liberty, and property, she says. And because of the government’s dependence on fossil fuels, the subsidies and permits it provides to industry, the policies that promote a fossil fuel economy in spite of science showing it is harmful, American youth have been denied these basics.
She clarifies she isn’t saying that the government hasn’t done enough. But that the government has caused this very harm. It has created a danger, the same way an errant cone on the highway can cause a car crash. The government has to administer the energy system, sure, she says. But it has been given the discretion to do that in everyone’s best interest and, essentially, has screwed it up. “The scale of the problem is so big because of the systemic conduct of the government,” she says. And when the government’s conduct is shocking, when people are hurt, they are entitled to ask the courts for help.
When the judges ask whether the courts have ever done anything of this scale, have the authority to order the government what to do, Olson gives the legal answer first. She reminds them of the school districts that were ordered to desegregate—whole systems in whole states—and other cases like the prison releases that eased crowding in California.
Then she makes the moral argument. She says, “When our great-grandchildren look back . . . they will see that government-sanctioned climate destruction was the constitutional question of this century.”