The young Montanans who scored a landmark triumph in the lawsuit Held v Montana are calling on the state’s highest court to enforce that victory.
In a groundbreaking legal decision in August 2023, a Montana judge ruled in favor of 16 youth plaintiffs who had accused state officials of violating their constitutional rights by promoting fossil fuels. The state’s supreme court affirmed the judge’s findings in late 2024. But state lawmakers have since violated her ruling, enshrining new laws this year that contradict it, argue 13 of the 16 plaintiffs in a petition filed on Wednesday.
“These new policies mean the state is going to just continue to act in a way that will increase greenhouse gasses which during the Held case were shown to be disproportionately harming youth,” said Rikki Held, the 24-year-old lead petitioner who was also the named plaintiff in the earlier lawsuit. “It means we’ll continue down a path we already know and have proven is detrimental.”
The Held decision stated that state laws limiting state agencies’ ability to consider greenhouse gas emissions and climate impacts during environmental reviews are unconstitutional. It also said that though the climate crisis is a global issue, Montana bears responsibility to address the harms that are being caused by greenhouse gas emissions within the state.
“The decision confirmed that laws which put blinders on agencies during environmental reviews are unconstitutional,” said Nate Bellinger, supervising staff attorney at Our Children’s Trust, the non-profit law firm that filed the petition and Held v Montana. “But now the state is essentially re-blindering agencies.”
During the 2025 Montana legislative session, the new challenge says, elected leaders passed a law prohibiting the state from adopting air quality standards more stringent than those incorporated in the federal Clean Air Act. It’s a “complete inversion” where the federal standards will serve as a cap on regulation instead of a floor, Bellinger said.
The legislature also amended the state’s Environmental Policy Act, naming just six climate warming gases for the state to inventory while conducting environmental reviews of energy projects. It also dictated that upstream and downstream emissions – or those resulting from transporting fossil fuels or out-of-state combustion of the fuels produced in Montana – should not to be incorporated in the analysis, even though agencies used to consider these impacts.
In an “even more egregious” provision, said Bellinger, lawmakers explicitly barred state agencies from using the resulting information about pollution to condition or deny permits for those proposals.
“Those provisions are unconstitutional,” Bellinger said.
The petition names the state of Montana, as well as its governor Greg Gianforte and department of environmental quality, as defendants. The agency declined to comment on the challenge. The state of Montana was not immediately available for comment.
Lawmakers behind the new policies made it “pretty clear” that their proposals were a response to the youth challengers’ 2023 victory, said Bellinger. Late last year, the incoming state senate president and house speaker even issued a joint statement telling the court to “buckle up” for the following session.
In the new petition, challengers are asking the Montana’s supreme court to strike down these new laws. They say that is a necessary step to ensure the state is upholding duties laid out in its constitution, which guarantees the right to a “clean and healthful environment”.
The challenge comes amid an assault on climate and environmental regulations from the Trump administration. Those attacks make it all the more important for states to protect their citizens, said the youth activist Held.
“It’s a time when we really should be seeing more action from our government on greenhouse gas emissions,” said Held.
Montana has moved in the opposite direction, said Bellinger, with the state’s governor creating a taskforce to provide recommendations to “unleash” fossil fuel output, echoing an executive order Trump signed in January. State officials are actively evaluating proposals to expand coal, oil, and gas in compliance with Trump’s pro-fossil fuel agenda, he said.
“We need to get these laws off the books as quick as possible so they can have all the tools they need before them to deny those permits and not feel like they have to approve,” Bellinger said.
Held says she has directly felt the impacts of the climate crisis, caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. On her family’s ranch where she grew up, drought has taken a toll on the health of livestock and crops, while extreme weather limited her ability to spend time outside. Between the filing of Held v Montana in 2020 and plaintiffs’ victory in the case three years later, global warming became worse, she said.
“We don’t have another five years to wait for protections while the state keeps using fossil fuels,” she said. “This is really urgent.”
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