OPINION:
At the annual World Economic Forum conference in Davos, Switzerland, last week, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin put self-appointed teenage climate-doom prophet Greta Thunberg in her place. After the Swedish 17-year-old’s hectoring Jan. 21 speech in Davos demanding that world leaders wreck their countries’ economies, putatively to save the planet, Mr. Mnuchin might well have been channeling a 1967 hit song whose lyrics included the line “Come back when you grow up, girl. You’re still living in a paper-doll world.”
Miss Thunberg has called on government and corporate leaders to combat the climate crisis by divesting from fossil fuels, the burning of which is supposedly contributing to global warming. When asked how such divestment would affect the American economy, Mr. Mnuchin was rightly dismissive of her unrealistic and impractical demands.
“Is she the chief economist? Who is she? I’m confused,” Mr. Mnuchin said Jan. 23. “After she goes and studies economics in college, she can come back and explain that to us.”
It was the second such snub in a week for youthful climate doomsayers. A three-judge federal appeals court panel on Jan. 17 rightly threw out a grandstanding climate-change lawsuit that had recruited 21 children and teens as “plaintiffs.” The lawsuit — claiming the youths’ futures were imperiled by climate change — had sought to have the court act as an unelected legislature and order the federal government to take action against global warming. Proving that even a broken clock is right twice a day, the ruling by judges of the notoriously liberal and often-overturned 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals correctly held that the youths didn’t have legal standing to bring the suit.
Making it even more remarkable was the fact that the 2-to-1 ruling in Juliana v. United States was handed down by a three-judge panel made up entirely of appointees of President Obama, and that it overturned a lower-court ruling by a federal judge appointed by another liberal Democratic president, Bill Clinton.
The majority’s opinion correctly held not only that the children (cynically exploited as a sympathetic front group by an Oregon-based nonprofit law firm calling itself Our Children’s Trust) didn’t have standing, it also recognized that the court necessarily must defer to the legislative and executive branches of government on the issue. The lawsuit was predicated on a novel, albeit ludicrous, legal theory; namely, that a safe climate and clean environment are somehow constitutional and civil rights. What Our Children’s Trust was demanding — a government plan to phase out fossil fuels — was far beyond the purview of the judiciary.
Writing for the majority, Judge Andrew Hurwitz (perhaps channeling Mr. Mnuchin) cited the lyrics of another golden oldie. “In the mid-1960s, a popular song warned that we were ’on the eve of destruction,’” he wrote. “The plaintiffs in this case have presented compelling evidence that climate change has brought that eve nearer.”
That’s debatable, but Judge Hurwitz is to be commended for reining in the judges’ apparent judicial-activist impulses. Although agreeing that the lawsuit had “made a compelling case that action is needed,” he wrote, “We reluctantly conclude that the plaintiffs’ cases must be made to the political branches or to the electorate at large, the latter of which can change the composition of the political branches through the ballot box.” That formulation could just as easily have come from the pen of a strict-constructionist, constitutional conservative judicial appointee of a Republican president.
But Judge Josephine Staton was having none of it. In a hyperbolic dissent, she ratcheted up the apocalyptic rhetoric of the climate Chicken Littles. In her telling, however, it isn’t the sky that’s falling. “It is as if an asteroid were barreling toward Earth, and the government decided to shut down our only defenses,” she wrote. “Seeking to quash this suit, the government bluntly insists that it has the absolute and unreviewable power to destroy the Nation. My colleagues throw up their hands, concluding that this case presents nothing fit for the Judiciary.”
Judge Staton’s dissent vividly demonstrates how dangerously flawed premises invariably lead to wrongheaded conclusions. Even if you accept the notion that global warming is an imminent threat, refusing to accede to the lawsuit’s preposterous demands — or to Miss Thunberg’s, for that matter — is hardly akin to “shutting down our only defenses.” It takes profound hubris not only on Judge Staton’s part, but on the part of Miss Thunberg and Our Children’s Trust, to think that anyone who disagrees with them on the threat posed by climate change is out to “destroy the nation” (or planet) and that they alone are standing in the breach.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.