A message from Our Children’s Trust:

As we approach the longest night of the year, this year-end seems darker than years past with White House Cabinet nominations that include multi-millionaire heads of  fossil fuel and fast food companies and an attorney general who has fought against environmental protection for a living seeking to head our “Environmental Protection” Agency. Perhaps it’s the audacity of the process, the incessant media coverage, and the flippant remarks on Twitter of our President-Elect that make it all so surreal.

I know 21 bright lights, who keep shining through all the negativity. With a powerful movement behind them, they will stop the threatened Trump assault on human rights and on our climate system with their landmark climate lawsuit.

Legal scholars from across the country call this the “biggest trial of the century.“

Mere months after his inauguration, youth will go head-to-head with Donald Trump and his administration, in a court of law, challenging his disastrous climate policies.

In the lawsuit, youth have already secured, for the first time in history, a federal court ruling that declares there is a fundamental and constitutional right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life.

At trial, the youth will present powerful evidence:

• That the government has known for decades of the cataclysmic consequences of its ongoing fossil fuel policies.
• That the government recklessly, knowingly and with disregard for the sustainability of  human life, subsidized and advanced the fossil fuel industry, while poisoning our atmosphere and destabilizing our climate system.
• That our federal government can implement a plan that will ensure a climate system capable of sustaining human life from this point forward.

We know that the Trump administration and their fellow fossil fuel industry defendants will fight our youth tooth and nail. We need your help, at the highest level you can muster right now, to beat the deep-pocketed fossil fuel industry giants and the Trump administration we are up against. We need to keep winning.

We are extremely grateful to all who have supported us so far and we ask all of you to make your tax deductible donation now.

Our children’s futures, and their children’s futures, depend on the outcome of this case. Your gift truly will be the gift that keeps on giving for generations to come and we thank you for it.

Reflecting in darkness, with great vision for the power and light 2017 holds for us all,

Julia Olson
Executive Director and Chief Legal Counsel
www.ourchildrenstrust.org

Photo: Levi, Avery, and Hazel, three of the 21 federal plaintiffs after a court hearing earlier this year. Photo credit: Andrea Willingham.