Where Congress and the executive fail to act, courts are being looked to by opponents of climate change. In Connecticut v. American Electric Power, for instance, the state of Connecticut is leading a coalition of plaintiffs suing some of the country's largest electric utilities. The plaintiffs are asking a federal court to order reductions of the utilities' greenhouse gas emissions, which, at their present levels, allegedly present a public nuisance in the form of climate change.
Doug Kendall and Hannah McCrea of the Constitutional Accountability Center and Warming Law, a blog that tracks climate-change litigation, detail the set-backs and progress plaintiffs are making in American Electric Power and related cases:
Utah is one of only two states in the country that does not contribute any state funding for the right to counsel (Pennsylvania is the other). Collectively, Utah counties spend only $5.22 per capita for the right to counsel, or, 57% below the national average ($12.09). Only Missouri ($5.20) and Mississippi ($4.15) spend less.
"Forty years ago today, twenty million Americans - fully one-tenth of our country's population at the time - came together to express the wakeup call that was Earth Day 1970,"