These Kids Fought the Climate Crisis in Court. Now They’re Taking on Trump

Inside a packed arena at the University of Montana in April, 20-year-old Lander Busse stepped onto the stage to thunderous applause. More than 9,000 people had turned out here in Missoula for the Fighting Oligarchy rally organized by Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — a remarkable crowd in a state that went to Donald Trump by nearly 20 points and ousted longtime Democratic Senator Jon Tester in favor of a novice MAGA Republican.

Busse was here at the request of Senator Sanders, who had invited on stage plaintiffs from the Held v. Montana case — the landmark verdict in which a group of youth won against the state for violating their Constitutional right to a healthy environment by knowingly contributing to climate change. Busse was quick to accept. Standing at the lectern alongside fellow plaintiff 21-year-old Olivia Vesovich to amp up the crowd before Sanders and AOC took the floor, emanating confidence from his six-foot-four frame, Busse appeared made for the stage.

“Governor Gianforte and the Attorney General threw everything they had at us,” he boomed into the microphone, re-capping the Montana court victory. “But just like all of you here today, we would not be silenced. They thought we wouldn’t put up a fight. But they were wrong.”

People in the bleachers rose for a standing ovation. After the approving roar died down, Busse hinted at what was to come. “Very soon, we will be taking the fight from Montana to D.C.,” he said. He ended his speech with a call to the attendees. “Have the courage to believe in something better. Do what we did. Roll up your sleeves, get dirty, and have the courage to join us to take our nation back.” As the crowd erupted, Busse raised his fist in the air.

“They thought we wouldn’t put up a fight. But they were wrong.”

Lander Busse

Less than a month and a half later, Busse, along with 21 other youths, including Busse’s younger brother Badge, sued the Trump administration for violating their Fifth Amendment rights to life, liberty, and property with a suite of executive orders aimed at increasing America’s fossil fuel production. Just like the Held case was, this federal case has the potential to be precedent-setting as one of the most important for the health of future generations — if the youth win. And in the center of the photo widely circulated to media by Our Children’s Trust, the non-profit public interest law firm which filed Lighthiser v. Trump on behalf of the youth plaintiffs, holding a microphone to his lips and looking more like a budding rock star than an activist, was Lander Busse.

BUSSE SPOKE TO ME LAST WEEK FROM A ranch outside Missoula where he’s working for the summer. Crickets chirped in the background as he told me that he essentially grew up with the Held case. He was 15 years old when he signed on to it, alarmed at how climate change was affecting fly fishing, hunting, and other characteristics of his lifestyle here that are deeply connected to the land and the health of that land. “With the propaganda produced by both the federal and state [of Montana] level, people have been brainwashed into believing that the degradation of the places they love is just a way of life. But it doesn’t have to be this way,” he tells me.

Busse was 18 when the case finally went to trial, and 20 by the time the Montana Supreme Court upheld the verdict last December. Living in ultra-conservative Kalispell, he and his brother Badge had minimal local support for their involvement in the case. Both lost friends over it, and Badge worried about possible armed intimidation outside the Helena courtroom where the youth plaintiffs testified two summers ago after he’d had an AK-47 aimed at him during a 2020 Black Lives Matter rally in nearby Whitefish (no armed protestors popped up in Helena).

“We knew when we filed the Held case that it would be a long fight and it would be hard. We knew that the state would beat us down. Or that they would try to beat us down,” Busse says. To be met with such wild applause at the April rally took his breath away. “It was this feeling of elation that we’re part of progress, of helping fix this thing. We’re more driven than ever to keep fighting.”

Back in December, around the time the state Supreme Court upheld Held v. Montana, Busse got word that a similar federal case — Juliana v. United States, which had launched a wave of youth-led climate lawsuits around the country — would be dismissed after languishing unsuccessfully for nearly a decade. That case had argued that the government’s policies promoting the production and export of fossil fuel use over many decades violated young people’s Fifth Amendment rights. A Ninth Circuit of Appeals Court dismissed the case back in 2020, saying courts were not the right venue to address climate change. Although the Held case had since set precedent for courts to address climate change, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal. Within weeks after the dismissal, Busse was on the phone with Our Children’s Trust attorneys as Trump began to make good on his campaign promises to prop up America’s fossil fuel industry. A new opportunity was brewing, this time with clear and shorter-term legal targets.

Lighthiser v. Trump takes aim at three of President Trump’s executive orders: Unleash American Energy, specific to developing fossil fuel energy and rolling back renewable energy; Declaring a National Energy Emergency, which accelerates the identification, leasing, production, and transportation of domestic crude oil, gas and coal; and Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Energy. This last smacks of retaliation for the Held victory, since Montana is one of the top five coal producers in the U.S.; its extraction levels are higher than that of entire countries, including Brazil, with total annual fossil fuel emissions on the order of 160 tons of CO2. In addition, the Colstrip power plant in eastern Montana, the only coal plant in the nation without modern pollution controls and which emits more harmful soot than any other American power plant, received a Trump exemption from a Biden administration rule that compelled it to install new equipment.

The Lighthiser lawsuit alleges that these orders are unconstitutional. Under the Fifth Amendment that protects our rights to life, liberty, or property, “government can’t intentionally and knowingly put us in harm’s way or enhance a dangerous situation we’re already in — which is what these executive orders do to our plaintiffs,” explains Julia Olson, an attorney with Our Children’s Trust, which filed the suit. “They’re already living in a climate emergency, and have severe health injuries, and injuries to their homes, family businesses, and ways of life.”

In a statement to Rolling Stone, White House representative Taylor Rogers says, “The American people are more concerned with the future generations’ economic and national security, which is why they elected President Trump in a landslide victory to restore America’s energy dominance. Future generations should not have to foot the bill of the left’s radical climate agenda.” (Trump actually pulled in less than 50% of the popular vote, making the 2024 presidential election the second-closest since 1968.)

The executive orders state that they’re intended to protect American prosperity and energy security. “But if there’s an energy emergency, you don’t shut down wind, solar efficiency measures, and energy storage measures,” Olson points out. “You want to expand those because they create energy security. If you want American prosperity, you want people to pay the least amount for energy, and you want the energy to be safe and not cause trillions of dollars in economic harm and damage to the nation because of all the extreme disasters we’re facing.

“This is about the health of children and their opportunity for a prosperous and healthy and joyful future.”

Julia Olson, Our Children’s Trust attorney

“The government is saying, very bluntly, that it’s going to unleash fossil fuels, block clean renewable energy that would avoid pollution, and take down all the climate science and information that helps people stay safe, or at least to know when the danger is coming.”

Although the Held case took years to go to trial and the Juliana case stalled out in legal purgatory for even longer, Olson believes this lawsuit will move quickly. “A lot of the cases challenging other executive orders are moving on fast tracks. I expect that we’ll have a decision before this administration is over.”

But even before the case goes to trial, Our Children’s Trust is asking the court to freeze implementation of the orders pending a full decision, in hopes of stopping more fossil fuel emissions (which the plaintiffs, and the next generation after them, will have to live with, Olson says) from entering the atmosphere while the case is heard.

Olson wants people to know that this lawsuit isn’t about politics; she grew up in a Republican family herself, she says. “This is about science and listening to doctors. It’s about the health of children and their opportunity for a prosperous and healthy and joyful future. If you talk to young people today, they don’t see those opportunities. They see a world of harm and devastation and loss. And we need to change that for them.”

RIPLEY, AN 18-YEAR-OLD PLAINTIFF in the Lighthiser case, just graduated from high school in Livingston, Montana. She requests that I not use her last name or disclose where she plans to go college. When I ask if she’s worried about retaliation, she says, “Well, yeah. We’re suing the President of the United States, arguably the most powerful man on the planet. And we’ve seen again and again throughout this administration, and the last one he had, that he’s not too keen on people who try to push back against him.”

Determination outweighs Ripley’s worry, though. She’s one of those youth who don’t see a bright future ahead. She grew up fishing the Yellowstone River with her father, backpacking, hiking, and skiing. She wanted to pass on those outdoor traditions to her own children. But she’s not sure she wants to have a family in an environment that, as she hears constantly, is dying around her. She’s also experienced it, she says. “I’ve seen awful things in my day-to-day life that have affected me personally.”

In 2020, the county sheriff knocked on her family’s door and told them to start packing their things; the Bridger Foothills Fire was raging fast over Bozeman Pass. She could see the flames. Her home ended up unscathed, but 28 others burned. The EPA states that “higher temperatures and drought are likely to increase the severity, frequency, and extent of wildfires in Montana.”

Two years later, the Yellowstone River flooded catastrophically after an atmospheric river dropped unprecedented amounts of rain, which experts say was an extreme weather event exacerbated by climate change. Ripley joined other community members at the fairgrounds to fill sandbags to keep levees from breaking. The flood damaged homes and ranches, demolished bridges and parts of roads, and devastated Yellowstone tourism and the income of the people who relied on it.

When Ripley heard about the Held case, she asked her teacher if the Green Initiative group she was part of in high school could go up to Helena to watch the trial. “I watched multiple testimonies, people on the stand, and it was really inspirational. These were kids my age, from my state, and they were changing the world. They were taking their state to court. And they won. That was hugely moving for me. I realized that just because I’m from the middle of nowhere, that doesn’t mean I can’t create change.”

Ripley’s Green Initiative group worked hard last year to convince the school board to switch over to electric school buses, and to secure an EPA grant to buy them. But then that funding was frozen this year by the Trump administration. So when the opportunity came to be involved in the Lighthiser case, Ripley jumped at it. “It was obvious,” she says. “There was no other choice.”

GIVEN THAT WE’RE IN AN UNPRECEDENTED moment in which a presidential administration has signaled its willingness to ignore the rulings of courts, one of three co-equal branches of government, I ask Olson for her perspective on the current weight of lawsuits — especially one as precedent-setting as Lighthiser.

The thing about the courts and the Constitution, she says, “is that we have to use them. Or we’ll lose them both. But I also believe that our institutions and the people of the United States won’t tolerate a president who is going to disregard court orders and continue to consolidate power and wealth at the expense of ordinary Americans,”

Busse says he’s not worried about any strong-arming from the Trump administration. After his experiences with the Held case, nothing surprises him anymore. Maybe there was an era when there was decorum in these processes, he says, but he’s never seen it in his lifetime. He holds fast to the belief that the science and the body of evidence upon which the youth rest their case will be vindicated by history.

“We know we’re on the right side of things,” he says. “And we know the importance of this. We’re going for the throat with this one.”