Climate Law

In August of 2023, a group of young people won a lawsuit against the state of Montana. The plantiffs argued that by failing to consider climate change when issuing permits for fossil fuel projects, Montana had violated their “right to a clean and healthful environment,” which is enshrined in the Montana state constitution.

The Montana case is one of thousands filed around the world attempting to force governments to take action on climate change and to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for the climate harms they have caused. These cases give a voice to youth, to indigenous people and people of color, to women, to old people, and to other marginalized groups who usually do not have a seat at the table.

• To understand the full breadth and power of these cases, read this UN Report on Global Climate Litigation.

Litigating in court is not the only way that a climate lawyer can effect change. When climate and environmental justice advocates wanted to push the state of New York to enact a strong climate law with environmental justice at its center, they turned to lawyers like Raya Salter to help craft a bill that would work, and that would stand up in court to challenges from the fossil fuel industry. When New York passed the bill as the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) in 2019, it became the first state in the US to require that at least 35% of the benefits from the state’s climate investments go to frontline and disadvantaged communities (mostly communities of color) – communities that bear disproportionate environmental burdens. (President Biden brought this idea from New York to the federal government in 2020, when he adopted the Justice40 Initiative through an executive order, and later enacted related provisions in the federal climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act.) In New York, Raya Salter was tapped to serve on the state’s Climate Action Council during the two year period in which it wrote the Scoping Plan that determined how the CLCPA should be implemented.

Watch our interview with Raya Salter about what it is like to work as a climate lawyer enacting a climate law that centers environmental justice.

Resources

Here are a few more places to look, to understand how a career in law can be a climate career.

• Abigail Dillen, “Litigating in a Time of Crisis,” in All We Can Save, pp. 51-59
• My Climate Journey podcast interview with Jill Tauber, Earthjustice
• Amy E. Turner and Michael Burger, Cities and Climate Law: A Framework for Local Action in the U.S.
• Thousands of non-profit organizations around the world employ lawyers to fight against climate change and for climate justice. You can get a sense of some of this work by looking at the websites of organizations like Earthjustice, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and Environmental Defense Fund (EDF).