In Montana, a black-robe district judge has ruled that Montana is violating its own constitution by denying its “children” a clean and healthful environment, as reported by Breitbart not long ago.

A quick response to this is to ask the16 plaintiffs ranging in age from five to 22 (not all children, of course, but perhaps childishly immature) to go ahead and give up the fossil fuels condemned in the ruling. We here at TPOL suspect that their environment would rapidly become anything but “clean and healthful.” (We are also curious as to how a five-year-old had standing, but assume that he or she was little more than a living puppet for parents and the representatives.)

(A colleague points out that today, we are supposed to assume incredible levels of “maturity” from “properly-raised” very young children: after all, if a two-year-old is considered able to decide they were born with the wrong body parts and can begin transition “therapy,” then a five-year-old can give informed consent to a lawsuit to attack a State government for not obeying its own constitution. Even if the child can’t marry, have sex, have a firearm, drink alcohol, smoke, chew, or drive.)

As Breitbart reported, Julia Olson, executive director of the nonprofit Our Children’s Trust, which represented the plaintiffs, welcomed the ruling as a “huge win for Montana, for youth, for democracy, and for our climate.”

“Today, for the first time in US history, a court ruled on the merits of a case that the government violated the constitutional rights of children through laws and actions that promote fossil fuels, ignore climate change, and disproportionately imperil young people,” Olson said.

“As fires rage in the West, fueled by fossil fuel pollution, today’s ruling in Montana is a game-changer that marks a turning point in this generation’s efforts to save the planet from the devastating effects of human-caused climate chaos.”

So much wrong with that, isn’t there?

First, we have the obvious lack of value of democracy regarding the physical sciences and environmental issues. “Let’s have the people vote today on whether or not to repeal the First Law of Thermodynamics!” “Let us vote in favor of this popular initiative to outlaw all wildfires larger than one acre!” It is even more ludicrous (and dangerous) than the usual run of democratic logic, in which the voting wolves outnumber the voting sheep. The equivalent of the sheep voting to defang and declaw the wolf, perhaps? In the fable (or was it a Warner Brothers cartoon), was not the vote to bell the cat a democratic action on the part of the mice?

Can we legislate – even as “we, the people” that Lake Woebegon syndrome be made real? (That all our children are above average, and similar dreams?)

Of course, some of us might blame the politicians, lawyers, and people of Montana back in 1972 or 1974 who put that clause in the State Constitution: “The state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations.” For many reasons, the first being that it is impossible for the State to do such a thing. A second is that the obligation seems to lie equally with the “State” and “People.” Exactly how can every person in Montana carry out this obligatory constitutional demand? The infant? The toddler? The disabled? The senile?

Why is it government’s role – and embedded in Montana’s Constitution, to guarantee the aforementioned quality of life issues for youth? Talk about a nanny state! By assigning an impossible task to government, do we not assure that government will fail? Not just at that task but at all the jobs it is assigned? Is this not foolishness? Does this not open the way for totalitarian control?