For the Busse brothers, climate change is a reality

While riding the chairlift one winter, his freestyle coach made an offhand comment about the future of resort skiing. “He said, ‘my kids might be able to ski on this, with real snow, but your kids definitely won’t,’” Badge recalled. “It was just this complete eye opener. I just want to be able to ski with my kids in the future.”

“I do not want my kids to only ski on artificial snow,” Badge said. “Skiing is my happy place, especially on Whitefish Mountain. I need them to have the same experience, the same connection to the earth that I have when I’m skiing.”

Brothers Badge and Lander Busse are two of the 16 youth plaintiffs in the constitutional climate change lawsuit Held v. State of Montana, which was filed in Montana’s First Judicial District Court in 2020. The lawsuit alleges that the state, through several of its agencies, including the Department of Natural Resources, Department of Environmental Quality, and Montana Department of Transportation, has implemented and overseen policies that violate the plaintiffs’ right to a clean and healthful environment, a provision provided in the Montana Constitution when it was ratified in 1972.

The lawsuit specifically names two statutes — the State Energy Policy and a provision in the Montana Environmental Protection Act (MEPA) that excludes consideration of regional climate effects on state development decisions — that are actively adding greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere, aggravate the effects of climate change, and threatening the youths’ future way of life.