Julia Olson, co-executive director and chief legal counsel of Our Children's Trust, a nonprofit law firm she founded in 2010 to empower young people to secure their climate rights, delivered an empowering environmental honorary degree lecture at Vermont Law and Graduate School.
Narrator
This podcast is in production at the Maverick Lloyd School for the Environment at Vermont Law and Graduate School. Hello and welcome to the Hothouse Earth Podcast. I'm Christoph Courchesne, associate professor of law and director of the Environmental Advocacy Clinic and associate dean for environmental and experiential programs here at Vermont Law and Graduate School. For today's episode, I could not be more delighted to share with you all the remarks of our 2025 honorary degree recipient, Julia Olsen.
Christophe Courchesne
In May, we welcome Julia to campus, where she received an honorary degree at commencement and also delivered an inspiring lecture on children's climate threats to a standing only crowd in South Royalton. Today, we'll bring you our Hothouse Earth listeners into the room for her talk. Let's listen. Julia is the co-executive director and chief legal counsel of Our Children's Trust, a nonprofit law firm she founded in 2010 to empower young people to secure their climate rights, protect their futures, and save our planet.
Julia received her law degree from IS now the University of California College of Law, San Francisco, and her B.A. from the University of Colorado. She has a long list of litigation accomplishments across the country as she has led her team and indeed a movement for recognizing society's constitutional obligations to this and future generations of young people. In my own clinic, I have worked with students learning from our children's trust litigation strategies, and I have watched as those students take deep inspiration from this work.
The children's climate, constitutional rights litigation work that Julia has pioneered is one of the best examples of how legal scholarship, the things that a lot of our law professors at places like this do every day can drive the law in new, innovative directions. Our children's trust has been fearless in the face of pushback. This is so key, especially today.
Julia's team has fought doggedly with a hostile judiciary and completely unscrupulous government defendants who have used every legal tool in the toolbox to deny our children's trust access to the courts to press their case. While Julia's team has sometimes lost motions and cases, that does not mean they have lost the fight. Indeed, as I'm sure Julia will talk about, they have moved the needle against incredible odds.
Please join me in welcoming to the podium. Julia.
Julia Olson
Thank you, Christophe. That was amazing. I want to thank the entire Vermont law and graduate school community for having me here. So I did found our children's trust in order to really elevate the voices of youth and help them claim their climate rights. And I'm really excited to have some young folks in the room today. And anything short of uncomfortable or disturbing I say about climate change.
It's aimed at the adults in the room, especially the older ones. So just know that and also believe I have so much hope for your future. So I want you to know that as you listen today. All right. So one of the things that inspired me when I was starting our children's trust, it was my own children. It was also the work of Dr. James Hansen, who's one of the most incredible climate scientists on the planet, and was raising alarm bells in the 1980s and beyond.
And then also it was my work as an environmental lawyer. I started my career as a public interest environmental lawyer. I had my own practice for a long time, and I really saw some of the holes in environmental statutory law. And and I'll just speak to a couple of them. One is environmental laws are really good tool for playing defense.
And so I was able to stop a lot of bad projects and stop polluters from polluting. But I didn't see it as a really effective tool to address the systemic problem of our fossil fuel reliance and the time frame we needed. Also, storytelling is really, really important as litigators and sometimes environmental law is so complex that we lose the human element in it.
And it didn't always give us as lawyers, a way to connect with the movements that were growing, including from organizations like 350 Dawg that comes out of Vermont at a time when the media wasn't really covering climate in a human centric way. And so I think it's so important on climate that the mascot is not the polar bear, but it's the children in our lives, your own children, your grandchildren, your nieces and nephews, because that's what's going to get us to really pay attention.
And so our children's trust really set out to change the narrative so that people could understand that the ability to breathe clean air and drink pure water and to gather or grow or hunt your food or to practice your cultural traditions that are rooted in nature, that those things are fundamental human rights, and that those are things we need to pass down to the young people and our next generation, and that those rights actually root from our founding documents, both at the state and the federal level.
And so for founding documents, I mean, our constitutions, our Declaration of Independence, the things that make us a democracy, they don't just come from the 1960s and seventies, an environmental statutory law. It is an obligation that government has to care for those things we all share in common and need for our lives. And so just to think about there is no life without air, right?
There is no liberty without water. There is no property rights without land. And so just trying to rethink about our constitutions and what they stand for was one of our really central goals. So when you step into the world of constitutional law and civil rights, you look back to the civil rights movement, you look back to the women's rights movement, you look to the marriage equality movements, because people have done this before.
And so the work we're doing is really building on like just the lions work that has been done before us by so many social justice activists. And the next step is to realize equal justice for young people and for generations to come and their equal rights. So one thing I've learned, you know, I started as an environmental lawyer, and then I started to think of myself as a human rights lawyer.
And now I really think of myself as a children's rights lawyer. And I've worked with some incredible children's rights scholars and law professors across the country. And what they have taught me is that the law centers, adults. And so it's one of the things I'll just ask you to carry as we go through this this talk together today that both children's rights law and climate rights are really in their nascent sea and they need a lot of cultivation and growth.
And so how do we do that? How do we develop constitutional law? Well, it's through conversations. It's the conversations that lawyers and clients have with judges. It's the conversation we have with legislators and policymakers. It's the conversations we have in churches and in living rooms. And it's conversations we have and academic institutions and really in law schools. And I will tell you where the law evolves.
The quickest is with young law students and young people, because they can see it so much more clearly than often older people. So when we launched our children's trust, it was the Obama administration. And we are in such a different world now. And I think you know, we have this multifaceted strategic attack on our democracy happening on all levels.
And you just pick up the paper and there's a new thing every day. And the goal is to install more of an autocratic leader and lift up a bunch of oligarchs. Right. All at the expense of our democracy. And I think how we address children's climate rights and our dependency on fossil energy will make or break our democracy.
And the reason I say that is in part, it's the life support system. Without climate stability, everything else falls. We can't have a stable anything without climate stability, but also without young people to carry the torch of democracy forward and believe that it can actually create a just world for them. We lose democracy, and if young people know one thing, it's that there is no justice without climate justice.
And so it is critical that we address these issues. So how do we invigorate in our legal system an appreciation for childhood and children's rights? I'm going to share a story of the way we're doing that at our children's trust and walk through a couple of our campaigns and our successes and talk about where we're heading. And before I do that, I would love for especially the older crowd in the room to do is to take a minute and you can close your eyes if you want, and go back to childhood when you're young and remember a place in nature where you felt joy and you felt safe and you felt held.
And if you can conjure up a memory and notice what you may have felt, I remember feeling as a child, I hope you hold some of that as we go through the time, because I think this problem of the law centering adults is the even cases that are framed as this is a children's case. Judges automatically revert to an adult lens and forget that for what it is to be a child, which is not just a small adult, right?
It's a developing human being. And that's growing and changing. And so for me, I have that place like I remember the snow piles up to my roofline in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where I grew up, and being warm in my snowsuit but cold in my extremities, and then going inside and drinking hot chocolate and just that total joy of snow.
Today in Colorado Springs, the snowpack is 2 to 8% of historic levels. They're already in drought and water restrictions are in place. And probably there will be significant fire this summer. Right. So these places that we can remember as adults are already so different. And that's some of what is really at stake here. All right. So Lisa Patel is a pediatrician and she sits on our board and she says that the single biggest driver of the health of every child born today is climate change.
And there are 2 billion children who live on the planet and there are 2 billion children without political power. Okay. And just to put that into context, locally here in Vermont, you have about 115,0 children under the age of 18. And just a few thousand more than that voted to elect President Trump. So that gives you a perspective of how much political power is not realized by young people, nor do they have the economic power to decide, are we going to burn fossil fuels for energy or are we going to power everything with wind and the sun?
They don't get to make that choice in our system and they don't get to go to the polls. So remember that as we get further along, we are really focused on bringing the best science into the courtroom and our work and the best science that pro-bono services can buy, which which turns out is a lot. We have we have Nobel laureates, we have people like Spieth, we have top experts in their field.
And the reason we do is because these climate experts and energy experts and doctors and historians, they are aching to have someone in power listen to them, and they are so deeply honored and excited to stand with young people and help validate the stories of what they're experiencing and what the action that they're calling for. And that before I talk about Health versus Montana, I want us all just to remember that 15 years ago in 2010, when we started this work, there had not been a single youth led children's rights climate case filed on the planet.
And today, the numbers keep rising, but it's about 90 cases against 50 countries where you are suing to protect their climate rights. And that and then there's a lot of state cases that our children's trust is bringing. So this is a new, just burgeoning field. There's so much hope and the young people are starting to really win and win big.
So health versus state of Montana was our first trial, and we knew if we could get to trial that we could win a case. But governments kept blocking us every step of the way. And their their primary arguments were, you know, this is a global problem and we're just a small piece of it or everyone's harmed by climate change.
Therefore, no one can bring a case which is called the generalized grievance theory. In law. And the third big argument was it's not our pollution, it's the fossil fuel industry is it's all of us consumers. Everyone else is causing this problem, not us. And really, it is a government problem because every fossil fuel activity that occurs in our country and in every country is permitted.
It's based on R&D. The government does it subsidize? It Is a government empowered system. All right. So in Healthy Montana, it was the first children's constitutional climate trial of its kind. It lasted seven days and the 16 plaintiffs, they come from all over the state. They have a variety of injuries. And what was incredible is it was the first time that 12 young people took the stand and were able to tell a judge how they were being harmed.
We really try to bring the stories that can touch different people because you never know where your judge is going to be really captured. And so badge told stories of hunting and fishing being impacted. Grace told stories of playing soccer in heat and watching glaciers melt and losing glaciers in just her short lifetime in Montana. Surreal. She's an indigenous she.
She comes from the Confederated Salish and United Tribes of the Flathead Indian Reservation. And one of her powerful stories was the creation stories that are passed down from the elders to the young in her tradition can only be told when the snow falls and the ground is light at a certain elevation that is a sacred place for their tribe.
And so when the snow doesn't fall at that elevation anymore, they can't pass down their creation story is and it was those deeply personal stories these plaintiffs told that really illuminated why this is such a catastrophic issue happening and why judges and governments need to step in. And then Ricki held the first name plaintiff. She's been a rancher her whole life, and they've had cattle die.
She's worked in 105 degree temperatures with smoke and fire burning across the river. Their family's economic livelihood was affected and is affected increasingly by climate change. And every single one of the plaintiffs, I think it was one of the the most heart wrenching moments for those of us who live out west. They talked about smoke season. And when I was growing up, there was no smoke season.
And now the best part of Montana's summer is often covered in smoke. And some of the kids have severe respiratory illnesses. Two of the youngest boys actually had to leave the state because of the smoke conditions. They are climate scientists, energy experts, health experts, indigenous experts, water tower experts, and then an expert on the fossil fuel conduct of the state.
They all donated their time so and Hedges, she runs an organization and has tracked for decades the state's fossil fuel activities and she testified they had never once denied a fossil fuel permit, despite the historical evidence we put on that that we found in the Montana Historical Society that in 1968, the government had a report that said, if we keep burning fossil fuels and carbon dioxide emissions, keep going up, it's going to have catastrophic consequences for our state.
Right? So it's this disconnect between knowing how bad burning fossil fuels is but then continuing to do it. And the law we challenged we challenge a couple of laws. But the the thrust of the case was they're permitting all of this fossil fuel activity and they had a law that said you have to put blinders on. You can't even consider climate change in your decision making.
And so that was the fundamental law that the court ultimately held was unconstitutional. One of the key pieces that we establish in the case that's important for all climate litigation is really based on the testimony of Dr. Steve running and this very important Keeling Curve. So Charles Keeling started measuring CO2 back in the 1950s, and this is an ongoing measurement taken at Mauna Loa in other places around the world.
And by the way, our president wants to cancel the lease for Mauna Loa. And I don't know what the status is, but that's the kind of science that's at jeopardy right now. So, Dr. Running established and the court found that when we crossed this threshold of 350 parts per million, that that's where climate stability we lost it. Right up until that point, it was still more CO2 and more heat than humans had ever lived in on the planet.
But there was still enough stability in the system. So since the late eighties, when I when I went to college, we've had climate instability. And so the testimony showed that every ton of carbon dioxide emissions, greenhouse gas pollution is adding to global warming. And this has been confirmed by the international body that compiles all the climate change science.
And the court found that which was really critical. So the other thing that was really important in the case was the the medical testimony. I think it's the physicians and the psychiatrists, pediatricians, pulmonologists, people who help us with that expertise are some of the most powerful experts that we bring forward, because they're really linking not both the pollution from fossil fuel industry and infrastructure that's already occurring in local communities, but also the broader pollution that then comes from climate change and the effect of heat on young developing bodies and the increase in infectious disease that really just this body burden that young people bear their whole lives long.
And so that is, you know, for anyone doing environmental work, I just really encourage you to look at the health implications of what you're working on, because it does speak to judges in a really powerful way. So after this trial, Judge Sealey issued her findings of fact and her conclusions of law. And I know some of you have studied this case and law school in depth, and I'm not going to go that in-depth about it, but I want to highlight a few things.
These are three really important findings. One is that until atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrates are reduced, extreme weather events and other climactic events such as droughts and heat waves will occur more frequently and in greater magnitude and plaintiffs will be unable to live and clean and healthy lives in Montana. And then again, that every ton of fossil fuel emissions is contributing to global warming and causing constitutional injuries.
Right. So just take that. In Every ton of pollution the government continues to allow is causing constitutional injury. So after and she it's a 1 plus page document. So she just really walks through all of the evidence we presented. And then we went up to the Montana Supreme Court and the Montana Supreme Court affirmed her findings. So didn't find that there was anything flawed about her factual analysis.
And then they dealt with these questions that I mentioned that governments keep raising, and they said that global emissions don't insulate a state from its own affirmative constitutional obligations, and the state does not have a free pass to pollute the Montana environment just because the rest of the world insists on doing so. So really shut down that argument, which is starting to happen around the world by courts in other countries and then they also addressed an issue that has been a big hurdle for us, which is redress ability.
Can the court do anything about this? And the court said, yes, plaintiffs can enforce these rights and declaring that the law is unconstitutional and joining the state from acting in accordance with that law will alleviate that constitutional injury even if other things are continuing to cause harm. So really, really important redress ability ruling. So the plaintiffs had this incredible win and we just won in the Supreme Court in December.
It was a 6 to 1 decision and it's really the first of its kind in the world. And our plan is to replicate this and this was some people are surprised what's happened in Montana, because it's known to be a red state. And there are some special things about the Montana Constitution that I'll just mention. One is in the early 70, they had a constitutional convention that young people had a lot of power.
And so early 20 somethings were part of this and they were able to codify the rights to a clean and healthful environment in the Montana Constitution. They also codified the right of people under the age of 18 to have full equal rights as adults. So we use both of those provisions. But it's also really important to know we use traditional substantive due process rights.
So the right to life, liberty, health, safety, dignity and the right to equal protection under the law. And the judge found that all of those rights have been violated, not just the right to a clean and healthful environment. And so even for constitutions that don't have that right, these cases are still very viable. And we have a trial website.
One of the beautiful things about this case and this judge, she opened her courtroom to cameras, to video, to the press. And so the entire trial is on film and it's on our website. You can watch experts testify or plaintiffs testify, and there's a lot of other materials. And so our hope is, is that law professors will really use this in their classes to help teach students about how to put a constitutional rights case together.
There's a lot to learn. So I encourage you to check it out. And even if you're not a lawyer, really interesting testimony in here. Our next trial is our Canadian case. So a group of young people sued the federal government in Canada, and this case was modeled a lot after the Juliana versus United States case. This case went up and down through appeals.
And we now have a clear path to trial. Nothing can stop it. So we are in the process of doing discovery and preparing the expert reports right now. And the plaintiffs are getting ready with all of their evidence and testimony. So it really exciting to see that case moving forward under the Canadian charter. All right. Now, Bikini. So this is a different kind of success and really an unexpected one.
So this case against the Hawaii Department of Transportation challenges the whole transportation system in Hawaii. Hawaii is a state that is leading in terms of its laws that require it to get to zero emissions by 2045. They have just incredible laws on their books. They have an incredible constitution and their transportation emissions were going up. And so we challenged that sector specifically because if you can get a clean mandate for transportation, transportation has to electrify everything Going into that also has to be clean.
So transportation is a really good hook. And to cut off petroleum. In fact, I had someone say to me that if you can totally electrify transportation, you cut the fossil fuel industry off at its knees because it makes it the most money you buy in gas at the gas station. Petroleum is like their biggest cash cow. Okay, So we go after the system, we get all of our experts lined up.
All the plaintiffs had depositions taken. All the experts were deposed. We depose their experts. They were working with a mainland firm in California. They they were, you know, hardcore going after us. And the state was spending millions and millions of dollars to pay this firm until the guy in the green shirt, director Ed Smith, and of the Department of Transportation, who's native Hawaiian and has kids, said, I don't want to fight the kids anymore.
And he went to Josh Green, Governor Josh Green, he's in the middle with DeLay. And Governor Green gave him the green light to meaningfully come to the settlement table. So after weeks of settlement negotiation and we had an agreement and it is the first of its kind in the world. So one of the things that was just absolutely a non-negotiable for us was they had to get to zero emissions by 2045 and we needed court supervision and they agreed to it.
So we have a court ordered settlement agreement and the young plaintiffs are essentially in a marriage with their state for the next 20 years, and we can go to the court. We have a process if there's noncompliance with the agreement that will go through. But ultimately, we have the court to back us, which is really important. And one of the things they had to do in Hawaii, and I think this is true in many states, is when you enter into a settlement agreement involving children, the court has to find that the agreement is in the best interests of the child.
And so the court did that here and found that zero emissions and a transportation sector were in the best interests of a child, which we love. And it's really the first time that you have all three branches of government in any government that I'm aware of really working together, which is the best of what democracy has to offer.
So there's a lot of components to the settlement agreement. It's on our website. You can check it out. They have to hit certain benchmarks. And this is about ground transportation. It's also about inter-island sea and air transportation and getting their ports set up for the long haul transition. And there's a lot of other really cool stuff that you should check out.
But the Use Advisory Council is one of our favorite pieces. So some of the plaintiffs and then other youth from across the island sit on this council and it will rotate to new use. Over the course of the 20 years the Department of Transportation has to report to these youth on a quarterly basis. Right now they're meeting monthly and they get to help shape the policy in a really meaningful way.
So not just as sort of an honorary thing, but they're actually in conversation. And one of the new leadership positions that oversees the settlement agreement in the first meeting with I think there were hundreds of Department of Transportation staff and the plaintiffs, she stood up and said, these are our new bosses. And so there really is a deep appreciation for the Keiki, which is children in in Hawaii.
And they're really embodying that and living up to it in the settlement agreement. All right. So I'm just going to say a few words about Juliana. It's been an honor of a lifetime to represent these plaintiffs. They were in litigation against the United States government, the country most responsible for the climate crisis for ten years, just trying to get to trial.
And this case is a children's Fifth Amendment case about their right to life, liberty, personal security and access to public trust, resources like air and water, ocean and shorelines. The United States in new sense, really the fifties. But by 1965, there was a White House report from Lyndon Johnson about the fact that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels would cause climate change and really be deleterious for human beings even by the year 20.
And they were really their science was really quite good even back in the sixties in terms of the general impacts that they saw coming. And despite that, in a nonpartisan way, really across Democratic and Republican administrations, fossil fuel production and use in the United States just went up even today. And we are the largest oil and gas producer in the world.
So even though the Biden administration made efforts to increase a transition in our electricity sectors and in our transportation sectors, we were still producing so much, even if it was being exported. This is the hardest case over ten years I know of in U.S. history. They made 13 attempts to dismiss our case. They did seven petitions for writ of mandamus, which is massive.
You don't know what that means. I didn't know what it meant until they served one on us. It's a rarely used tool. I think there were two petitions for a writ of mandamus during the entire Obama administration. In two different cases, we had seven just in this case. So one of the things that Juliana accomplished, it had so many successes along the way, even though it ultimately lost.
And one was this November 2016 ruling days after President Trump was elected to the first term where Judge Anik and said, I have no doubt that the right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life is fundamental to a free and ordered society. And that was the first time a judge anywhere in the world had said that, and it inspired courts around the world to really start establishing climate rights.
The ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that shut us down the first time told the kids to go to the polls. They literally told kids to go to the polls. Remember what I said in the beginning right. And the dissent said fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote. They depend on the outcome of no elections. They are beyond the reach of majorities and officials.
So any time you hear someone say, well, isn't this a policy issue, isn't this a political issue? Shouldn't people just go vote? Remember, children can't. And it when fundamental rights to life are at stake, they deserve more consideration than that. So a lot of people ask me how do I stay hopeful when the Hill seemed so big before Rosa Parks, Claudette Colvin she took a seat on a bus displacing a white person, and she was arrested and she became one of four plaintiffs in the Browder versus Gayle litigation that went up to the Supreme Court.
And it was the ruling that said segregation on busses is unconstitutional. She testified in court at the age of 16 and in her elder years, Miss Colvin said history had me glued to the seat. It felt as if Harriet Tubman's hand was pushing me down on the one shoulder, and Sojourner Truth hand was pushing me down. On the other.
Learning about those two women gave me the courage to remain seated that day. So the youth we work with, they feel the hand of history on their shoulder, and they also feel the hand of the future on their shoulder they see beyond their own time and they see a world of intergenerational justice and justice for all, no matter who you are.
So I think this is about the presence that our lineage to the past. It's about our legacy for the future. It's just about standing up and remembering like people have done such hard work before us. So that's what I do. And the judges and lawyers stand up and please center children's rights in your work. If you are a law professor, if you are a lawyer, or if you're a law student, remember to think about children and every area of law that you're learning.
Because if we're not bringing their cases and stories forward, then we're not going to address the fundamental problems in our society, including climate change. So a message to leave all of the law students and the graduates. In 2010, when I launched our Children's Trust, everyone said I couldn't do it. They said it would never work. There would never be these constitutional rights.
And so don't let them tell you, you can't do it. Because imagine where we will be today. Right now in the climate movement, if we didn't know Kelsey, Juliana or Vic Barrett or Rikki Held or Nava Heaney and all of these names, he will go down in history and be read by children in the books for decades and decades to come.
Thank you for having me.
Christophe Courchesne
Thank you so much, Julia.
Thank you, listeners, for tuning in to Hothouse Earth to watch Julia Olsen's full lecture, including the Q&A that followed, please visit the Vermont law and graduate school YouTube channel
Narrator
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