Protesters in Milwaukee take part in a 2019 march demanding action to address climate change. Fifteen young people are suing the state of Wisconsin for harming their future by allowing pollution that hastens climate change. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)(

Kaarina Dunn has grown up hearing stories of the Wisconsin winters her parents and grandparents got to enjoy. Winters with enough snow cover that the family of ski-enthusiasts could get on the slopes from Thanksgiving to Easter. 

But despite the state’s continued connection with ice and snow, winters like those of her family’s past are gone. Climate change has caused Wisconsin’s winters to warm more than any other season. A number of recent winters have seen drought conditions with little to no snow across the northern part of the state — severely damaging winter tourism and canceling or modifying events such as the American Birkebeiner. While data shows that the amount of snowfall on average is similar to decades past, the weather doesn’t stay as cold throughout the winter, meaning that the snow melts before it can accumulate to the truly deep levels of previous generations. 

“I hear all these great stories about how they got to ski over Thanksgiving, how they skied past Easter time, how they went on all these great trips around the state of Wisconsin to all these ski hills, mountains, all these amazing places,” Dunn, a 17-year-old Onalaska resident, tells the Wisconsin Examiner. “And I can’t help but feel incredibly saddened by this. I will never experience these things. These are family traditions, trips that my family would go on, with family members, with friends, and do all these amazing and fun things. And honestly, I do feel left out. I feel let down by my state. I can no longer enjoy these things due to the direct results of fossil fuels in the environment.” 

Dunn is one of 15 young people suing the state of Wisconsin, arguing that state laws violate their constitutional rights and worsen climate change. The lawsuit mirrors a similar lawsuit from children in Montana, who successfully argued that the state had to consider the greenhouse gas emissions and climate change impact of permits involving fossil fuels. 

The children are represented in the lawsuit by Madison-based Midwest Environmental Advocates and Oregon-based Our Children’s Trust. 

In Wisconsin, the suit argues that state lawmakers have made a number of declarations that the state’s energy production should be decarbonized and the greenhouse gas emissions of that production should be reduced, but state laws prevent that from happening. 

The state’s law for siting power plants requires that the state Public Service Commission determine that “[t]he proposed facility will not have undue adverse impact on other environmental values such as, but not limited to, ecological balance, public health and welfare, historic sites, geological formations, the aesthetics of land and water and recreational use.” However the law also prohibits the PSC from considering air pollution, including from greenhouse gas emissions, in that determination. 

Additionally, the state set a goal in 2005 that 10% of Wisconsin’s energy come from renewable sources by 2015. That goal was met in 2013. However, now that the goal has been met, state law treats it as a ceiling on renewable energy the PSC can require. 

“The Commission cannot require any electric provider to increase its percentage of renewable energy generation above the required level,” the lawsuit states, meaning that for more than a decade, Wisconsin’s energy regulators have been unable to push the state’s power companies to develop more renewable energy sources. 

Coal and natural gas make up 75% of the energy produced in Wisconsin and renewable sources make up 17%. 

Skylar Harris, an attorney for Midwest Environmental Advocates, says that children today are going to spend most of their lives dealing with the effects of climate change on their health and lifestyles yet don’t yet have the ability to vote and influence environmental policy. 

“I think people are really starting to acknowledge the direness of the situation that we’re in and the situation that climate change is causing, and how it impacts our inherent rights such as life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” Harris says. “And courts are really starting to see that without the right to a stable climate, which is what we’re arguing for in this case, the rights to life, the rights to liberty, the rights to the pursuit of happiness, they mean nothing, because people can’t pursue them to the fullest extent.” 

Harris says that if the lawsuit is successful, she believes that the PSC will use its new authority to deny permits for new or expanded fossil fuel burning power plants and push the state’s power companies to expand their renewable capacities. 

In the Montana lawsuit, officials argued that the state can’t be held responsible for the effects of climate change on the children in that lawsuit because climate change is caused by emissions from across the globe. Harris says that yes, climate change is a global problem, but it gets fixed by individual governments doing something about it. 

“Climate change is a global problem, but there is no such thing as a global government,” she says. “So if we are to address this global issue, that means every individual, every business and every government, including the state of Wisconsin, has to step forward and do its part. And that’s what we’re trying to make sure is happening with this lawsuit.”

The 15 children in the lawsuit represent a wide swathe of Wisconsin. They live in urban and rural parts of the state and include athletes who have had wildfire smoke affect their sports, farm kids who have had droughts and heavy rains affect their families’ livelihoods and members of the state’s Native American tribes who have seen their cultural traditions put at risk. 

Dunn has spent much of her childhood fighting for environmental causes as president of her local 4-H club and has won three grants for environmentally focused projects from the Bloomberg Philanthropies Climate Action Fund. She says she joined the lawsuit because it can help her community and kids like her across the state. 

“I began my environmental work because I always believed in doing the right thing,” she says. “I believe in fighting for my community, fighting for my family, fighting for my siblings, fighting for everyone, fighting for youth and fighting for families.”

She adds that the PSC “knows that what they are doing is wrong. The governor and the Wisconsin Legislature have indicated that they want renewable energy, and the Public Service Commission simply isn’t changing the laws, and the Legislature isn’t changing the laws.” 

Dunn’s family has lived western Wisconsin’s Driftless Region for generations and she spent most of her childhood in Vernon County. She says the Mississippi River is “almost a family member.”

But massive rain events causing flooding and erosion triggered a massive boulder to tumble down a bluff and into her backyard, making her family fear that it wasn’t safe in their home anymore. They moved north to La Crosse County. 

“We felt very unsafe in the childhood home that I planned to live my entire life in. We made the difficult decision to move cities, move counties, move school districts,” she says. 

A member of her school’s tennis team, Dunn says hotter summers and poor air quality caused by wildfires elsewhere on the continent have forced her to change how and when she practices. Flooding has prevented her and her family from swimming off the dock at her grandparents’ home and affected the work done at their walnut tree farm. 

Dunn says that for her, joining the lawsuit is about standing up and trying to force her state government to admit it has a role to play in mitigating climate change and responding to the ways in which climate change has harmed her life and the lives of the other kids in the suit. 

“Ultimately, our country knows the science that is creating climate change, the fossil fuel industry, and especially Wisconsin, they can no longer stand behind saying, ‘There’s nothing we can do. We don’t know about it. There’s nothing that we can do,’” she says. “But ultimately, we have the science and technology to make changes and to save my life and my future children’s life and have a safe and healthy environment.”

Heavy traffic moves along Interstate-395 on Nov. 22, 2022, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has submitted a proposal to scrap a years-old finding that greenhouse gas emissions threaten the environment and public health, a move that former agency officials say would gut the EPA’s authority to reduce emissions and is sure to end up in the courts.

The EPA sent a draft proposal to the White House late last month calling for scrapping what’s referred to as the endangerment finding on top of vehicle emissions standards for certain cars and trucks. The White House Office of Management and Budget could finish reviewing the draft on Monday and some expect an announcement on the issue the last week of July, Joe Goffman, a former assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, said in an interview.

Former EPA officials say such a move would gut the agency’s own power to curb greenhouse gas emissions, which have been widely found to cause global warming.

“It’ll be the most decisive step taken to make the agency totally irrelevant, which then will become an excuse to just get rid of it,” Christine Todd Whitman, the EPA administrator from 2001 to 2003 under President George W. Bush, said in a phone interview.

Whitman said she thinks “the long-term goal of all of this is to ensure that the agency can’t do regulations.”

‘Suffocating its own authority’

The EPA finalized what it is known as the endangerment finding in late 2009. It said that greenhouse gases are a threat to both the environment and public health and that emissions from vehicles pollute the air with greenhouse gases. The finding is what obligates the EPA to address greenhouse gas emissions, Goffman said.

“Essentially what the EPA is doing is suffocating its own authority under the Clean Air Act…to establish programs and rules to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” said Goffman, who worked at the EPA during the administrations of Democratic Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama.

“They’re making it impossible to take steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions” in a deliberate fashion, he said.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced back in March that the agency was going to reconsider the finding.

Its proposal — which was submitted to the executive branch’s Office of Management and Budget on June 30 — will be shared for public comment following interagency review and after Zeldin has signed it, an EPA spokesperson said Thursday in an email.

The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Court fight ahead

The Trump administration’s moves to scrap the finding and vehicle emissions standards are its latest plays to dial back U.S. climate policy and efforts to fight climate change.

President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans scaled back support for renewable energy projects and other climate policies in the budget reconciliation bill signed into law July 4.

Trump also signed executive orders during his first days back in office to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement again and to aid fossil fuel production.

The EPA said the endangerment finding went beyond the agency’s statutory authority under the Clean Air Act, according to a summary of part of the proposal that was sent to the White House.

The Clean Air Act “does not authorize the EPA to prescribe emission standards to address global climate change concerns,” an executive summary of the proposal sent to the White House states, according to an excerpt obtained by States Newsroom.

Because of that, the agency is proposing rescinding “the Administrator’s findings that GHG emissions from new motor vehicles and engines contribute to air pollution which may endanger public health or welfare,” it said.

The agency in its proposal also raises a key 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case of Massachusetts v. EPA that determined the EPA is allowed to regulate greenhouse gases as part of the Clean Air Act because they pollute the air.

The EPA argued that the decision doesn’t support how the agency has carried out the Clean Air Act. On top of that, the agency says that the “EPA unreasonably analyzed the scientific record” and that “developments cast significant doubt on the reliability of the findings.”

Similar to numerous other executive actions taken by the Trump administration, Whitman and Goffman said they expect this latest move will end up in the courts.

“This is the beginning of a long, long saga,” Goffman said.