📝 What are green amendments?

Green amendments are amendments to a state’s constitution that give citizens a constitutionally protected right to a clean environment.

While green amendments have been in place in some U.S. states for over fifty years, concerns about climate change have prompted several new states to consider creating green amendments in recent years.

The best-known green amendment was added to Montana’s constitution in 1972.

It reads:

Pennsylvania became the first state to add a green amendment in 1971, one year before Montana.

In 2021, New Yorkers voted overwhelmingly to add an Environmental Rights Amendment to their state constitution that created a right to:

Last year, Democratic legislators in Connecticut proposed adding their own green amendment known as the Environmental Rights Amendment.

The amendment would create an:

What is Held v. Montana?

If green amendments create a legal right to a clean environment, how are these rights enforced?

The answer: through the court system.

A legal case in Montana shows what the enforcement of this right to a clean environment might actually look like for state governments and the fossil fuel industry in the states where green amendments are law.

In 2020, a group of young Montanans filed a lawsuit against their state.

They alleged that their Republican-led state government was failing to preserve their right to a “clean and healthful environment” by supporting the fossil fuel industry.

The plaintiffs also wanted Montana to do more to limit carbon emissions in the state and for the state government to stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry in the state.

The Held v. Montana case went to trial during the summer of 2023, with Montana’s lawyers arguing that the state itself could do little to halt climate change worldwide.

The judge ruled in favor of the young litigants, finding that Montana's failure to consider climate change when approving fossil fuel projects violated the litigants' constitutional rights.

Michael Burger of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Litigation at Columbia said:

The state appealed the decision, and the Montana Supreme Court is currently weighing whether to uphold the judge’s decision or rule in favor of the state government.

No matter how the court decides, we should expect to hear more about these sorts of lawsuits in the dozen-plus states that now have green amendments on the books.

ART OF THE DAY

Flowers by Salvador Dalí. 1948.