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Comment by voisin | Hacker News Reader

It is sad that this kind of language would never be approved in today’s political climate. The GOP passed some historic environmental bills in the past and today it is unthinkable that they would even consider it.

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Because the clear intention of the law is not what the courts are enforcing today. This is common in modern times where by original intent has no bearing to current "modern" interpretation of old laws.

Sadly our founders predicted this would happen in away, Jefferson famously wanted all laws even the constitution to have a sunset of 19 years, requiring them to be debated and passed a new every generation.

What is the clear intention of the law?

Clearly not the abstract "harms" asserted in the case, where by one plaintiff has a medical aliment that was acerbated by COVID and because of that MT did not due enough for climate change.

Also the case was largely about individual "extreme weather" events that have no clear, direct link to MT pollution, and there is zero evidence to suggest that should MT suspend all their pollution today, right now, it would change anything for these young people.

The clear intention of the law was to preserve the land from direct, articulable harm such as chemical dumping, clear cut mining, deforestation, etc etc etc

Where does it specify what you claim?

> The legislature shall provide adequate remedies for the protection of the environmental life support system from degradation and provide adequate remedies to prevent unreasonable depletion and degradation of natural resources.

https://leg.mt.gov/bills/mca/Constitution/IX/1.htm#

Where does that sentence specify the legislature shall ignore indirect or shared harms?

The defendant declared Montana air unhealthy or very unhealthy every year since 2020 or before. And people with medical ailments are part of current and future generations.

Was the clear intention of the law to allow dumping DDT into a river contaminated outside Montana?

An author of the constitutional article was a witness. The judge cited the constitutional convention transcripts also. Did you read them?

> Clearly not the abstract "harms" asserted in the case

...

> The clear intention of the law was to preserve the land from direct, articulable harm such as chemical dumping, clear cut mining, deforestation, etc etc etc

I've read the Montana constitution and read up on the case. The points above are not clear to me. Is there something else your looking at that makes it clear to you?

I think this law/provision was passed at a time before there was a clear notion of CO2 from burning fossil fuels being connected to climate change, and they were thinking about more traditional pollutants/harms like logging and drilling oil.

(In my opinion) This historic law/provision is not specific enough (or it does not create a novel enough kind of cause of action) for the climate change type of problem, to be enforceable as it gets tested up the judicial chain. (see my other comment in this story)

The connection between atmospheric CO2 and warming was actually identified as early as around the year 1900.

I wasn't around then to have a sense of the broad social awareness of things, but I've gotten the impression that the science was fairly obvious before the 1970s.

To me it reads of the kind of Rachel Carson types of environmental damages that were getting much more attention at that time. (Acid rain, pollutants, runoff, etc)

If they had anticipated CO2 (and yes, I agree it was known by some well before this time), they should have / would have made it much more specific to include that kind of slow, "who is responsible" kind of harm.

I assume that the year 1900 "identification" you refer to is the work from Svante Arrhenius, which was later disproved.

https://www.climate-debate.com/forum/so-if-angstrom-already-...

If the law had been intended to apply to oil drilling and specific pollutants, it would have named them. Or at least named specific types of pollution. Instead it appears to have been deliberately written broadly to capture a wide variety of forms of environmental degradation, perhaps including some not discovered at the time of writing.

Except it literally was just tested.

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