Montana climate ruling could shape future action to curb greenhouse gases

A victory in ‘the fight of our lives’

“It’s one of the strongest judicial decisions ever rendered on climate change, and it will be helpful to litigants around the world,” Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, said in an interview last week.

Only five states have a higher per-capita level of greenhouse gas emissions than Montana, the judge wrote in her order. In 2019, the state extracted enough coal, oil and gas to produce about 70 million tons of carbon dioxide, while its fossil fuel consumption resulted in 32 million tons of CO2 being produced. By way of comparison, the EPA estimates the United States as a whole produced more than 5,000 million tons of CO2 in 2019.

Sam Wilson