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.”