By Ray Levy Uyeda for Prism.
Broadcast version by Alex Gonzalez for Utah News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Lola Maldonado grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah’s most populous metro area, nestled into the west side of the Wasatch Mountains, where the range’s highest peak, Mount Nebo, stands nearly 12,000 feet tall. The steep mountains form a canyon below, where Maldonado said particulate matter and air pollutants form a blanket of haze. As the consequences of climate change have ballooned in past decades, air pollution is just one of the downstream effects that Maldonado, 19, and other young Utah residents will be navigating for years to come—unless the government discontinues its support of a fossil fuel-based state economy. 

On March 15, 2022, Maldonado and six other young people sued the state of Utah for denying their state constitutional right to life by politically and economically supporting the fossil fuel industry despite knowing that burning fossil fuels would create environmental conditions that might impede the health and well-being of the state’s residents.

Maldonado isn’t alone. Supported by the legal nonprofit Our Children’s Trust, hundreds of youth across the U.S. have sued their home states for similar reasons. Maldonado is seeking redress from Utah’s governor, various executive departments, and oil and gas industry oversight boards. And while none of these youth climate cases have seen judicial rulings in their favor (with the first case in Montana set to go to trial in June 2023), the lawsuits have had a profound effect on the young people involved in them, as well as other young climate activists growing up in the U.S. in this time of climate chaos. 

Exploring other forms of climate activism 

Prior to her involvement with the lawsuit, Natalie R. v. State of Utah, Maldonado said she wasn’t aware of the power that the courts had. Maldonado signed on to be a plaintiff in the case when she was 18 and in her senior year of high school. But she had years of prior organizing experience, even leading the first student-driven campaign to transition her school district off of fossil fuels. In those years, still a minor and hoping to make a difference, it seemed like the only pathway was through protesting and petitioning. That was, of course, until she learned it was possible to sue state officials. 

There’s no minimum age required to be a plaintiff in a lawsuit, yet children are both most vulnerable to existing environmental harms, like Salt Lake City’s air pollution, and will bear the brunt of future climate disasters. According to the plaintiff’s complaint, children born in 2020 will suffer as much as a “seven-fold increase in overall extreme climate events” than those born in 1960. 

“As a youth, [the judicial system] really was one of the main ways I could express myself and get political action,” Maldonado said.

Drought, flooding, and wildfire all concern Maldonado, but the biggest impediment to her daily life was Utah’s air quality. Chronic exposure to polluted air can cause any number of physical illnesses like asthma or other emotional and cognitive impacts, like anxiety, impacted brain development, or nervous system disorders. Medical experts claim that Utah’s air quality is causing 75% of state’s residents to lose at least one healthy year of life and another 23% to lose five years of healthy life, according to the complaint filed by Our Children’s Trust. 

With polluted air as the norm, it was difficult for Maldonado to see how anything might change at the highest level of Utah’s government; after all, if Utah’s public officials understood that the state consistently suffered some of the worst and most harmful air quality in the country, what right did young people have to push for better living conditions, Maldonado wondered. But as she learned more about the courts and how state legislators set up policy to support fossil fuel interests, her thinking changed. 

“I guess I have the right to these things and to have these demands toward my government,” Maldonado said. “That’s really been a learning experience for me, and I think it’s definitely driving some of my work for the future. It’s made me more open to different forms of climate activism going forward.”

On Nov. 10, a district court judge ruled that the case should be dismissed. Our Children’s Trust plans to appeal the ruling. 

There’s only so much that the individual can do

The crux of the Natalie case, like most other youth climate lawsuits, is that the government knowingly supported a fossil fuel industry despite the numerous and expanding risks associated with the burning of fossil fuels. But Natalie is the most recent iteration of the activism-by-trial method that began in earnest only a decade ago. Alec L. v. Jackson was the first major case to name the head of a federal public agency as a defendant, and a 2015 case, Juliana v. United States, was the first to sue the U.S. federal government, including the office of the president and eight executive branches, for its role in supporting a fossil fuel-based economy. 

What each of the cases filed by Our Children’s Trust on behalf of youth plaintiffs seek to answer are three questions: Is climate change a harm or violation of the Constitution? Can the harm be traced back to the actions of the U.S. government? Does the judicial branch have the authority to hold the government accountable for addressing those harms? 

Isaac Vergun is 20 and a college student in Washington, D.C., now, but he was just 13 when he agreed to be a plaintiff in the Juliana v. United States case. Vergun was born and raised in a suburb along the Columbia River outside of Portland, Oregon. Each fall, increasingly devastating wildfires exacerbated his asthma and claimed larger swaths of the surrounding natural landscapes, like the Mount Hood National Forest. 

Vergun grew up in an activist family, and as an elementary and middle school student, he would speak in front of city officials and encourage other youth to get involved in grassroots climate action. Making direct appeals to council members or regional organizations was working to stave off some climate impacts, but the real root of the problem was not in Oregon, but in Washington, D.C., Vergun said.

“There’s only so much that the individual can do to fix their own carbon footprint and reduce their own emissions,” Vergun said. “But the federal government has, obviously, the biggest carbon footprint, and so we got to really take it to them.”

The case has been in legal limbo since it was first filed, with industry stakeholders, Department of Justice officials, and heads of state offices all working to push back against the case. Working to sue the government has changed Vergun’s perspective, though. 

“Getting involved with the federal climate suit shifted my efforts toward solving the climate crisis by making the courts hold our federal government accountable,” Vergun said.

At least in the case of Juliana, judges have found in favor of the young people’s claims: that the U.S. government knowingly and intentionally suppressed climate information, offered enormous subsidies to the oil and gas industry, and perpetuated an economy that prioritizes economic gain over the health of its citizens. However, the court has never found these actions violate the Constitution, or that its job should consist of acting as a judicial watchdog. 

What the government knew

Scientists have known since the late 1800s of what was then dubbed the “greenhouse effect,” which predicted that increased greenhouse gas emissions, like carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide that come from burning fossil fuels, were trapping heat within the earth’s atmosphere. The trapped heat was predicted to raise the earth’s temperature and throw entire ecosystems out of balance. In the mid-20th-century, there was a resurgence of emissions-related research, but the continued reluctance of government officials to implement policies curtailing emissions over the ensuing decades has led to those initial scientific predictions coming to pass. Safe levels of carbon dioxide should be limited to a concentration of 350 ppm. In 2021, the global average concentration was 416.45 ppm. 

While scientists would continue to present climate-change related concerns to congressional subcommittees throughout the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, presidential administrations worked to promote the use of fossil fuels by offering extractive industries vast subsidies and market-based incentives. Republican administrations waged outright campaigns to dissuade the public from believing that climate change was real, happening, or of concern. Democratic administrations, on the other hand, acknowledged the threat of climate change while continuing to approve leases for drilling, laud the importance of developing domestic oil reserves, and offer public funding to support the oil and gas industry.

In 2020, the U.S. federal government offered $660 billion in subsidies—public taxpayer dollars—to the fossil fuel industry. A White House report released earlier this year estimated that climate change will cost the U.S. $2 trillion annually on mitigation, repair, and relief. For comparison, in 2017, the federal government allocated $13.2 billion for climate change-related projects, with the vast majority of that funding going to programs that “touch on” climate change research, according to the Government Accountability Office. The Biden administration has proposed a 2023 budget of $44.9 billion to address climate change and mitigation. 

Many of the people approving policies to invest in the oil and gas industry won’t live to see the impacts of their decisions—but the young plaintiffs will. This is a primary reason why young people’s voices should be at the forefront of the climate fight, said Andrew Welle, co-counsel for youth plaintiffs named in Natalie and a senior staff attorney at Our Children’s Trust. To Welle, the relationship between lawyers and plaintiffs “feels like a partnership.” 

“[The plaintiffs] have very sophisticated perspectives on issues of social justice, on their fundamental rights, a keen understanding of the science, [and] a keen understanding of the technological issues,” Welle said. “One thing that I think young people bring from a very young age is a really keen understanding of fairness.”

Those questions of fairness and responsibility will ultimately be decided by the courts, but it’s undeniable that climate change is having an outsized impact on the lives of young people. However, that lack of action to mitigate climate change is also impacting young people—by motivating them to take a different kind of action.


Ray Levy Uyeda wrote this article for Prism.


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Federal grant money is supporting an Oregon organization rehabilitating the land and training tribal youth.

The Interior Department's Indian Youth Service Corps has awarded the Lomakatsi Restoration Project two grants of $300,000 and $400,000. The funds will support the organization's Tribal Youth Ecological Stewardship Training and Employment program.

Marko Bey, executive director of the project, said the Indian Youth Service Corps supports tribal young people age 18 to 30, and up to 35 if they are veterans.

"What it's focused on is providing paid to train opportunities for tribal members to work on their ancestral lands or neighboring ancestral lands," Bey explained. "Engaged in ecosystem restoration or eco-culture restoration work."

The Lomakatsi Restoration Project has been around since 1995 and is based in Ashland. Bey noted the focus is on ecosystem resilience and reducing large wildfires that have become more prevalent and destructive in recent decades. The organization works in Oregon and northern California.

The goal of the Indian Youth Service Corps grant is for the organization to train 12 tribal youth from seven tribal communities on restoration in southern Oregon.

Belinda Brown, director of tribal partnerships for the group, said the program will prepare the young people for careers in forestry work.

"The success is the youth having family wage jobs, of them being able to contribute and help their family, of them being able to be successful in their community," Brown outlined. "Which elevates them to the mentors for that next generation."

Bey added the goal is also to include tribes in restoration and management work.

"This gives an opportunity to get the lands treated in an ecological way," Bey emphasized. "And to get cultural fire ultimately back on the ground, incorporating indigenous, traditional ecological knowledge with Western science into the work."


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Coastal tribes in the Northwest are on the front lines of the changing climate but face barriers to responding to its effects.

A new report collected testimony directly from tribal members to hear what their biggest hurdles are. Sea level rise is already pushing some tribes from the coast of Washington.

Meade Krosby, senior scientist in the Climate Impacts Group at the University of Washington, one of the organizations behind the report, said tribes have been at the forefront of adapting to climate change but their biggest barriers stem from accessing funds to address the scale of the issue.

"The tribes are having to navigate really a maze of different pots of money that are spread out across different agencies and departments and units within federal government agencies," Krosby explained. "They're having to chase down these funds."

The report was compiled with input from listening sessions with members from 13 tribal nations on the Washington and Oregon coasts. It identified five key barriers to greater adaptation to climate change, including funding, staffing and technical expertise.

Funds from the Inflation Reduction Act, the 2022 federal climate action law, could help speed up tribes' responses. The Tribal Coastal Resilience program associated with the University of Washington recently received $3.4 million for coastal readiness projects.

Amelia Marchand, senior tribal climate resilience liaison for the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians, also worked on the report.

"We're hoping that those funding opportunities will be less of a burden, a little bit more supportive to the flexible and timely needs that tribes have," Marchand noted.

Even with the funding, Marchand stressed climate change is accelerating, worsening the conditions for tribes.

"Swift action is really needed to ramp up the response and to have it occur in a manner that's coordinated and respectful of tribal sovereignty, tribal self-determination and tribal rights," Marchand emphasized.



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A rural Mississippi community is fighting to protect the health of some Cherokee residents threatened by industrial pollution.

Barbara Weckesser, treasurer of the group Cherokee Concerned Citizens, and some of her neighbors formed the group in 2013 to address noise, dust and odor stemming from the Bollinger shipyard and Chevron refinery, just a few miles from the Gulf of Mexico community.

Weckesser explained about 120 families there have experienced high pollution levels, which she believes has created health issues, including elevated levels of heavy metals in children.

"We have lost 30 residents in the last six years, none from COVID," Weckesser pointed out. "They've either been heart or lung, or cancer deaths. We currently have about eight to nine active cases, most of them within the 40-60 age range."

Weckesser contended they have not received adequate responses from state agencies to their multiple complaints about the problem but noted some progress has been made. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency installed an air monitoring system and provided grant funding to the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality to follow through with the results.

Jennifer Crosslin, president of the group, said they are advocating for the local government to buy out the Cherokee Forest subdivision. She added the national organization "Buy In" has applied for federal funding on their behalf to implement relocation and restoration plans.

"We would like for anyone in Cherokee Forest Subdivision who wants to be relocated, to be relocated," Crosslin emphasized. "And for their property to be turned into a buffer zone that can protect nearby residents from industrial pollution and flooding, and improve the climate resiliency for the rest of the city."

The National Coastal Resilience Fund provided a $300,000 grant from the Inflation Reduction Act for community-led habitat restoration planning to the "Buy-In" organization for Mississippi. The grant aims to improve wetland habitat in high-risk residential neighborhoods in Pascagoula.

This story is based on original reporting by Lisa Abelar for the Mississippi Free Press.