The kids’ climate case was a class-action lawsuit. The idea was to get the courts to force the government into action on catastrophic climate change. Failing or refusing to do so violates the kid’s rights to life, liberty, and property.
Related: The Kids ‘Climate Case’ Is Not Alright
All the evidence suggested failure. But not because you can’t find sympathetic judges for the cause. There are plenty of those. But lacking any evidence of actual harm, it is difficult for a court to calculate a remedy. Then, believe it or not, there’s the US Constitution.
The plaintiffs thus seek not only to enjoin the Executive from exercising discretionary authority expressly granted by Congress, see, e.g., 30 U.S.C. § 201 (authorizing the Secretary of the Interior to lease land for coal mining), but also to enjoin Congress from exercising power expressly granted by the Constitution over public lands…
This panel, all Obama appointed judges, went deep on the need to do something but, in the end, had to accept that in this case (believe it or not), it was not their job.
Hurwitz said the case left “little basis for denying that climate change is occurring at an increasingly rapid pace,” but that addressing it required “complex policy decisions entrusted, for better or worse, to the wisdom and discretion” of the White House and Congress.
The case has been stewing since 2015 in search of a recipe for success that is hard to find. Climate change, as either science or religion, has failed to predict anything properly. Even if the courts were willing and the 9th Circuit appeared to be until SCOTUS sent them a rebuke, how do you calculate a course of remedy for injuries that have not happened?
We’re not beyond that. The NH Supreme Court willingly precipitated likely damages in the context of adequacy in education and told the state to fix it. To its credit, it did not try to fix it itself but there is a commonality.
There is no way to define adequate until after the fact, yet our courts were happy to tell New Hampshire’s legislative and executive branches to fix it even though no two students are the same, nor are two classrooms, or curriculums, or teachers, or learning environments, or anything else relating to the intersection of these elements in pursuit of a remedy.
To a Hammer, Everything Looks Like…
Governments never assume the problem is the government, so the first order of business, whatever the business, is to throw more money at it. Democrats seized on this as an opportunity to launder money through school districts into their political campaigns. Decades along, and we’ve seen how this plays out. School spending is never adequate, while education adequacy flatlines.
If you have note followed Ian underwood’s great work here on education funding and outcomes, you should because no amount of money can be proven to have addressed the question of adequacy. A matter the courts in the Kids Climate Case never had to address because a higher court put a hand on their shoulder and gave them a big judicial side-eye.
Wouldn’t it be grand if, as New Hampshire Democrats wind their way around for another bite at the education adequacy apple (with new and higher taxes) someone had the sense to say, we can’t tell the state to spend more to alleviate a harm that does not yet exist and that more money has demonstrated any ability to alleviate.
Until we break the government’s monopoly on education, adequacy will be about spending and not facts, evidence, or results. Just like Climate change.
