CLIMATE ON TRIAL

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Dunn v. Wisconsin Public Service Commission is a constitutional case brought by fifteen young Wisconsin residents against the state agency responsible for regulating the energy utilities that shape Wisconsin’s air quality and climate future. The plaintiffs argue that the Wisconsin Public Service Commission has been making consequential decisions about the state’s energy infrastructure, including approvals for gas-fired power plants that emit the pollutants driving both local air quality crises and the broader climate crisis, without adequately accounting for the documented dangers those decisions impose on the children who will live with their consequences for the rest of their lives. The constitutional argument centers on the rights of young people to a government that does not make decisions on their behalf that knowingly compromise their health and their future.

The case sits within a growing international and domestic movement of youth climate litigation, in which young people are using the courts to demand that governments and regulatory bodies treat climate change not as an abstract future concern but as a present constitutional matter with immediate consequences for identifiable individuals. What distinguishes Dunn v. Wisconsin in the landscape of these cases is both the specificity of the harm claims, which connect regulatory approvals to documented health consequences affecting named plaintiffs right now, and the youth of the plaintiffs themselves, including an eight-year-old who was already carrying the consequences of those regulatory decisions in her daily life before the case was ever filed.

The documentary introduces the people behind the case names and filing documents, and that introduction is the most important thing it does. These are not actors in a lesson about climate change. They are children living specific, documented consequences of the decisions being challenged in court, and their stories are specific enough to resist the kind of abstraction that allows climate policy debates to proceed without any human face attached to what is actually at stake.

Dunn v. Wisconsin is one case in a global pattern of young people turning to the courts because the legislative and regulatory processes that were supposed to protect them have not. The pattern is broad and accelerating. In the United States, Held v. Montana produced a landmark 2023 ruling in which a Montana court found that the state’s failure to consider climate impacts in its energy permitting process violated the constitutional rights of young plaintiffs. In Juliana v. United States, youth plaintiffs argued for decades for federal recognition of a constitutional right to a stable climate, keeping the issue in courts and public attention through a period when federal legislative action was stalled. Internationally, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2024 that Switzerland’s inadequate climate policy violated the human rights of older women plaintiffs, establishing a precedent that advocates around the world immediately began applying to cases involving younger plaintiffs with longer futures at stake.

The theory that connects all of these cases, and that the fifteen Wisconsin plaintiffs are advancing in their own state’s courts, is not complicated: governments have obligations to the people they govern, those obligations include not making decisions that knowingly impose serious harm on identifiable members of the public, and children who will live for decades with the consequences of decisions being made right now are the most identifiable possible members of the public with the most direct stake in those decisions. The fact that children cannot vote, cannot lobby, cannot donate to political campaigns, and have no formal mechanism for participating in the regulatory processes that determine their futures is precisely what makes the courts the appropriate venue for their claims. The courthouse may be the only door that opens to people who have no other access to the decisions being made in their name.

The documentary’s contribution to this legal and political landscape is to make the human reality of the case impossible to set aside. Regulatory proceedings produce documents. Courts produce opinions. Documentaries produce faces and voices and the specific details of specific lives that allow the people watching to understand what is actually at stake in language that legal argument rarely provides. The lawyers working on the case and the public health expert featured in Climate on Trial provide the analytical and evidentiary framework. The children provide the reason it matters.

Sustainable Action Now: Our Youth and Climate Coverage

We cover the young people leading the fight for climate accountability and the cases, campaigns, and communities behind them. The next generation did not cause this crisis. We cover them because they deserve to be heard.