Trust case and julia olson, executive director, our Childrens Trust. So please welcome our wonderful panel and greet them for us. [applause] and well ask bill to begin. Well, we just saw, for those of you who havent heard, an amazing judicial feat today where the ninth circuit in a30 in a 30 opinion kept the temporary restraining order nationwide in place over the travel ban. And that is [cheers and applause] its wonderful news, and its an excellent example about how our courts who serve as the third branch of government check the other two branches, the congress and the executive, when they overstep their bounds. But courts dont just stop actions, courts can cause actions, courts can cause the executive branch to take steps. And thats the basis of our suit. And with that, im going to turn it over to julia olson, executive directer of our Childrens Trust and colead counsel on our case. Thanks, phil. And thanks, everyone, for being here tonight. Thanks to ann and the Commonwealth Club for organizing the event, and its great to see such support here for the young people this involved in this case. So the last case that you about to hear about for the next hour or so is really a case for everybody, and its a case for all the children in your lives who you love. And so i want to start by telling you the story of one child whos a plaintiff in the case. Shes 13 years old, her name is jaden, and she lives in louisiana. And for those of you in the audience, you can see the picture of her on the screen. And on august 15th at five a. M. , she stepped out of her bed and stepped into water that was up to her ankles in her home. This was during the storms you might remember last august in the south. And this her words, she in her words, she stepped out of bed and stepped right into Climate Change. The waters are flowing in, theyre coming up through the floors of her home, through the roof, pouring this. There also is sewage water thats flowing out of the tubs and the sinks and the toilets in her home. So shes at home with her siblings. Her mom was trying to help neighbors and friends who were struggling with flooding from the day before. Took her 13 hours to go several miles to get home to her children. She was thighdeep in water, and her car was flooded. So jadens family survived the flood. Thirteen people in the region died. And our federal government said that this is a 1,000year storm event, but the problem is they arent coming every 1,000 years anymore, theyre coming with increased frequency and severity. On whose behalf they stand. So we connect them with lawyers and bill gregory who donates all his time pro bono. Hes been doing that for six years along with other people. [applause] and he truly is a hero. He has been in it from the beginning and there are many lawyers like him around the country and around the world who are doing the same thing on the half of youth everywhere. Its Global Action that we support. So the laws that they really turn to in this effort are foundational laws. They are laws that explain why we have government in the first place and what our views basic human rights are in one of those is the public trust factor. This goes back to nature roman times and the code. Its the baseline, the bedrock of Legal Systems around the world and its simple. Says the government as a sovereign trustee holds vital resources that we depend upon ensuring comments like air and water in trust for the benefit of future and present generations. The citizens all of you out there that we represent are they beneficiaries as our future generations. Those resources need to be good so they can be there or everyones benefit and not just for the exploitation by the fossil fuel industry. So another thing thats clear about what our throat as Childrens Trust as we are not willing to compromise the stability for climate system and the longevity of the resources we need for survival. So we look to scientists and experts from around the globe who are doing the most incredible research to identify what needs to happen to protect the climate system for great, great, great grandchildren what they say the two degrees celsius rise in temperatures is actually catastrophic rate humans have ever lived in that kind of world and we will see catastrophic Sea Level Rise and storms beyond belief. We will see trout and chaos and destruction through what we really need to do and we can do it is for me to return to an atmosphere of Carbon Dioxide level of three and 50 parts per million and we need to stabilize temperatures in the longterm warming of one degree celsius. All of our actions of the half of youth are uncompromising in based on science. I hope you are seeing the rise library. The other thing before i turned over to bill to talk more about this movement and its campaign is really strategic litigation that is coordinated and based on the campaign so we do a lot of media work and to get a platform to speak and they look to other improvements to inform the work that we are doing and i will let bill talk about some of those. Im going to use three expressions. One is unprecedented, another a novel theory, third this is no ordinary lawsuit. To think these would be coming from press but in fact they are from the opinions, judges have written about our case. But we are really not a new theory. This has been going on for decades. When we first started formulating these cases we focused on the sofa rights cases and we said its the youth that were put front and center, not only through high school antisegregation rallies but the naacp put kids on trial as well as the science showing the harm that separate but equal was causing to the kids in the south. An excellent book on this if you havent read it is richard klugers book simple justice. Its on the history of brown verses board of education and how they got to the decision but essentially what the naacp was doing his putting civil rights on trial by having the youth as well as scientists from around the nation testify about the harms that were occurring so if you read the brown decision it really talks about the science that was put before the courts. Another thing, a book that i want to commend to you that i handed out my last copy is called unlikely heroes by a guy named jack bass and what it is, its about the judges in the fifth circuit in the south who had to implement these decisions judges who would courageously trip on the entire ingrained segregated world and we thought there were judges in the south that can do that, are there judges nowadays who are prepared to take on the fossil fuel industry. The other cases we look at root the tobacco cases and we all know that the Tobacco Industry was very vague doubt it is their product and thats a book by david michaels. The whole theme for the Tobacco Industry is sowing uncertainty and based on the documents we have gathered and we have received from independent sources, the same Public Relations folks, the same lobbying outfits that were dealing with tobacco or in parallel dealing with loyal companies. So the other cases we have been looking at to track tracker the cases involving wall street. My partner just wrote a book people verses greed and that is what is really going on out there. We are trying to address problems that wall street wants to continue to exist so how do we do that . How do we go after these groups of people . Recently california had a major line of cases involving its prison system and the prisoners went after the prison system and said what we are enduring, the conditions we are enduring, overcrowding, poor medical treatment, those violate the eighth amendment cruel and unusual punishment clause. So they went after the california prison system. Those of you who dont know about this line of cases its fascinating because the prison system was found to be so overcrowded that the target the court set for the prison system to achieve that said okay you will be okay if you hit a target is 135 occupancy. So they tend to bring it down in the court said we are going to start releasing prisoners until you get to that target and thats a very important for our case when we talk about later. The Court Setting a target and requiring the governmental body to reach that target, to come up with a plan and if the governmental body cant come up with a plan, nice person cases they say we will have that prisoners set up a plan to come up with the target and lo and behold the prison system came up with that target. Finally i just want to say the last things we focused in on is who is going to be the most harmed by what the government has known historic way about whats going on with Climate Change and obviously the people who are going to be the most harmed our youth and future generations. That is how we came to determine that kids might be an Excellent Group to bring this case. Why do you talk about how you became a plaintiff here . Im one of the 21 youth. It was the spring of my senior year so in 2015 before august of 2015 when we filed the lawsuit and i was in bend oregon, my hometown. We were with a group of highschoolers trying to bring bring basically we were trying to go to City Council Meetings to get lie action plan to cut carbon emissions. This was because eugene had just passed a similar plan and how they did that was youth have consistently gone to City Council Meetings telling them that their rights were being infringed upon and eugene needed to be responsible to cut carbon emissions. A group of us in bend were trying to do that as well. Through that, i got connected with kelsey and eugene who had previously been on the oregon state case and she contacted me asking if i want to be part of meaningful Climate Change. By meaningful she meant going to the root of the issue which was suing the federal government. I was intrigued of course. My parents were and it was intriguing to me because ive always been interested in environmental law. I was interested in this area than by then i was deeply concerned about the place that i love. It was more than just the fact that past winter i had seen my favorite ski trail being closed down because of lack of snow. It was the places that id love to the people that i loved were being threatened because water is central to life. It begins as the small things and it grows and grows and once you realize the impact that chuck Climate Change he relies how expensive it is and how its affecting everyone. Its kind of a nobrainer to jump on Something Like that. I can honestly say i didnt realize exactly what was going to be like and im so excited that it has grown to be this big. I dont think i knew it was going to be this big. Each of us, each of the plaintiffs we all have a background in Environmental Activism and we all have our own injuries listed in our complaint against the federal government is their own injuries. As you can see and what julia talk about is there are 20 plaintiffs and two of my good friends in roseburg and farms in roseburg that are being threatened in the list really goes on. We each have our own stories and julia gets in court until some very eloquently. She is against the federal government which is really what our case is alleging, against the federal government. She is going to explain why we have gone against the federal government and not just the fossil fuel industry which is something that is important to distinguish. Thanks kia. [applause] one theme i think you will see as we talked tonight is storytelling is really important and bringing out the Human Element and how Climate Change is impacting people so we will share a few more of the youth stories as we go along tonight. I want to talk about the claims in the complaint. We filed in august of 2015. We filed against the United States, the president the departments and agencies that are responsible for our fossil fuelbased Energy System and also responsible for not controlling the pollution thats coming out of that. I will tell you the claims and make it as simple and understandable as possible. This is a constitutional case which protects our rights through life liberty and property. The fifth amendment is a substantive due process of our constitution. What it means is that government cant do things that infringe on our rights to life liberty and property. In this case the personal limo security of these young people, their very lives and their future and for many of them who live in coastal regions their property is being threatened by the actions of the federal government. I will go into that a little bit more but one part of the claim is when the government knows that its putting citizens in danger it creates a duty on government because im asked to prevent that danger or if the danger exists for them to do something about it. They cant act with in difference to the harm they have created so a really important part of our cases looking back at for just how long the United States has known that if we keep burning fossil fuels that would cause catastrophic Climate Change. When we started doing research for that case we were shocked to find the knowledge of the facts in the 40s and 50s and perhaps earlier in the early part of the 1900s. There was a moment in 1965 when lyndon b. Johnson issued a report out of the white house and there was an entire chapter on atmospheric change in Climate Change. They predicted with unbelievable accuracy what was going to happen if we kept digging up and burning fossil fuels. They know it would cause ocean gasification and climate destabilization and they knew the impact would be catastrophic. This is a letter from 1969 and you can see on the screen the letter refers to the potential for apocalyptic change. In terms of talking about Sea Level Rise they wrote this in turn could raise the level of the sea by 10 feet, goodbye new york and goodbye washington for that matter. This is 1965 knowledge. During the Nixon White House in 1970 another report came out that said in the longer term the quality of the atmosphere will may well determine whether man survives or parishes. So i want everyone who is listening to this to really understand the longlasting knowledge that Climate Change poses to our survival. And the question and i was showing another chart for this but this is going back to 1975 all the way to the present. The various key moments in time when our government issued reports and made critical findings by the top scientists around the world and by the highest levels of our government although as to the presidency about the need to act on Climate Change. This is repeated every decade. Every administration. We need to act on Climate Change and transition off of fossil fuels but instead what we did is we committed more development, more production, more leasing of our public lands for oil and gas extraction and kole extraction and we kept the fossil fuelbased Energy System in place so that no citizen could do anything about this. This truly is a government embedded system that we all depend upon. So just for a little comic relief there have been a lot of international processes that you all probably know about this climate talks going back 22 years. United states initiated those to defer taking action on Climate Change. The whole United Nations convention was orchestrated by the United States to avoid setting limits on Climate Solutions and to keep talking and talking and talking. We agreed to sign a pledge to hold another meeting to consider changing course at a date yet to be determined. Thats what our World Leaders have been doing. So this is levi. He is nine and his island is seeing a Sea Level Rise right now. He has ordered lost a playground he is played on all of his life in his home will will be underwater but we are doing. They bring him up because one part of the case is about discrimination against young people and their right for protection under the law. If you think of the decision saying that everyone has a right to marry, that case was about protecting a group of people who are being discriminated against with respect to the exercise of a fundamental right. These children are being discriminated against with their ability to exercise their sentimental ride not have their security threatened. I just want to show you to mark quick slides and for those listening, this slide shows under president obamas Clean Power Plan which was in his words the single most important thing to United States has ever done on Climate Change would essentially sidelined our admissions, our climate solution all the way to 2040. When we lose coalfired power plants we reduce emissions and this is one of the biggest threats perpetrated on the american public, to lead them to believe that the Clean Power Plan is going to solve Climate Change and it was never intended to do so. Conversely this shows how steep our emission cuts really need to be to get back to safe levels of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere theres a blue dotted line that shows if we started when the epa said we should have started it would have been a 19 year transition but now this steep decline is significant and thats why we aim to achieve in this case. Joe is going to tell you about the def