Attorneys for 18 California youths are asking the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco to allow them to go forward with claims that climate change is already affecting them disproportionately.
The youths, now 10 to 19 years old, argue that the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency discriminates against children by giving more weight to current economic concerns than to long-term health benefits of regulations when it considers policies. The legal nonprofit Our Children’s Trust filed the original case in 2023 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.
In February 2025, federal Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald dismissed that case, ruling the children had failed to show they were being discriminated against. “Climate-related harms will be experienced relatively equally by all people — both in the United States and around the world — who are alive at the time of their impacts,” he wrote in his decision.
Before a three-judge panel in San Francisco on Thursday, the children’s attorney, Brianna Rosier Kabwika, argued the lower court shouldn’t have dismissed it without letting the plaintiffs present evidence of how they are being harmed.
“When EPA allows climate pollution, that is unequal treatment in and of itself because children are not the same as adults,” Rosier Kabwika said. “The pollution that is in the air right now will impact whether they develop certain health conditions, and how those health conditions manifest themselves in the future.”
Carbon dioxide, the most important gas changing the climate, stays in the atmosphere, absorbing heat for at least a century. Studies have also shown that children’s bodies are more vulnerable to pollution, heat and trauma. Injuries that occur while they’re developing can have different long-term effects than if they happened to them as adults.
Christopher Anderson, the Department of Justice lawyer representing the EPA, argued that while the agency does discount future effects in weighing regulations, that practice is not discriminatory and any link to resulting climate harms is speculative.
“The purpose of [discounting] is to treat future and present effects equally,” he said. “It is based on empirical observations about behavior in economics … and economic theory that suggests that in order to treat present and future effects equally, you have to discount the monetary value of future effects,” he said.
At the hearing, the 9th Circuit judges asked questions that “suggested that they thought that the young people hadn’t said enough to allege discrimination,” Our Children’s Trust co-director Mat dos Santos said.
He expects them to issue a decision in the next several months.
The youths are all Californians who say they have already suffered the effects of climate change. They have lost homes in wildfires, struggled with respiratory issues from polluted air, missed weeks of school because of storms and wildfire smoke and had a hard time finding bottled water in times of drought, according to the original complaint.
Oregon-based Our Children’s Trust is best known for bringing the landmark case Juliana vs. the United States, which alleged the federal government was failing to protect the atmosphere for future generations by allowing the unabated burning of fossil fuels.
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear that case after the 9th Circuit dismissed it for the second time in 2024. But in a similar case the group brought in Montana, the courts found that the state had a duty to consider greenhouse gas emissions in permitting energy projects.
The case that was the subject of the Thursday appeal, Genesis vs. EPA, is distinct in that it alleges discrimination, specifically in the way the EPA conducts cost benefit analysis.
“When the government builds a system that treats future harms as less important than the present ones, it’s children who are paying that price,” dos Santos said. “They can’t vote. They don’t have economic power. They are especially susceptible to climate harms, and study after study shows this.”
The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment, and the EPA press office said the agency does not comment on current or pending litigation.
