A federal judge for a second — and final — time has scrapped a lawsuit launched by California youth to hold EPA accountable for planet-warming emissions.
Judge Michael Fitzgerald of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California on Tuesday found that the young climate activists lacked standing to bring their lawsuit against the agency because they had failed to show that they had been injured by federal environmental regulators.
“These climate related harms will be experienced relatively equally by all people — both in the United States and around the world — who are alive at the time of their impacts,” Fitzgerald wrote. “The stigmatic harms here are therefore abstract in nature.”
And underlying the “technical analysis of standing,” Fitzgerald wrote, is a “common-sense proposition that the President and Congress — not unelected judges — have the obligation to make decisions so fundamental to the economy.”
