In a closing argument, Attorney Nate Bellinger urged Judge Kathy Seeley to overturn a Montana law that forbids state agencies from considering environmental impacts when issuing permits for greenhouse gas releases, The Associated Press reported. 

Throughout the seven-day Held v Montana trial, the plaintiffs maintained that officials disregarded their constitutional right to a healthful and clean environment, by enabling companies to build and expand fossil fuel infrastructure, according to the AP.  

“The state of Montana comes before this court because of a pervasive systemic infringement of rights,” Bellinger said. 

The right in question is a Montana Constitution amendment adopted in 1972, which indicated that “the state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations.” 

During the trial, plaintiffs said that they have been encountering longer wildfire seasons, as well as smoke-filled summers and dwindling rivers, Montana Public Radio reported.  

Bellinger argued that the state has exacerbated the crisis by enacting a 2023 law that barred state regulators from considering greenhouse gas releases when permitting energy projects, the NPR affiliate explained. 

Lawyers for the state spent only one day presenting their side, arguing that climate change is a global issue and that limiting emissions in Montana would not affect the plaintiffs’ lives, according to Montana Public Radio.  

“What we heard in plaintiff’s case is not constitutional controversy, but rather a week-long airing of political grievances that probably belongs in the Legislature, not a court of law,” Montana Assistant Attorney General Michael Russell said.  

Heading into the trial, one legal expert questioned what it would take “to give teeth” to the 1972 constitutional provision in an analysis published by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice.  

The plaintiffs would need to prove causal connections among the state’s actions, climate change and individual harms, wrote Michael Burger, executive director of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.  

“The trial will be a major stage for the nation to see contemporary climate attribution science, which links climate change to both slow onset changes in the environment and more immediate, short-term, extreme events,” Burger stated.  

An explanatory piece in Nature likewise described how “climate science will get its day in court.” 

Our Children’s Trust, the law firm representing the Montana youth, stressed in a press statement earlier this week that the plaintiffs are not seeking money.  

“They are asking the court to declare that Montana’s fossil fuel energy policies and actions violate young people’s state constitutional rights,” the statement said.    

Whether that request will be fulfilled now lies in the hands of Seeley, the district court judge, who is expected to issue a decision within a few months, according to Montana Public Radio.  

Welcome to The Hill’s Sustainability newsletter, we’re Saul Elbein and Sharon Udasin — every week we follow the latest moves in the growing battle over sustainability in the U.S. and around the world.

Rising temperatures from climate change are unraveling the ecological webs that keep insect pests and their predators in balance. 

Small creatures, big implications: Such disruption could mean serious upheaval for future biodiversity and crop yields, according to a study published on Wednesday in Ecology Letters. 

Evolutionary tale: The study builds on a natural experiment dating back to the 1840s, when settlers began to introduce apple orchards to the native hardwood forests of New York’s Hudson Valley. 

Opportunity for a fly: Apples soon became a new potential food source for local flies that had previously fed on hawthorn fruit, a member of the pear family.  

As apples spread across the region in the early 19th Century — with big, crunchy and appealingly thornless fruit — some hawthorn flies jumped to the new crop.  

Evolution in action: This jump coincided with the publication by Charles Darwin and others of the theory of evolution, according to Thomas Powell, the lead author of the new study.   

• The entomologist who discovered the new apple flies wrote to Darwin about it “potentially being an example of the origin of species in real-time,” said Powell, a professor of biology at Binghamton University. 
  
  
• That’s something modern research has confirmed. 

 A pest is born: Like their hawthorn-dependent ancestors had, apple flies lay eggs in their chosen fruit — and plague apple growers across the country.  

New experiment: Powell and his colleagues used these two closely related populations to predict potential impacts on insect communities as the atmosphere heats up and growing seasons shift. 

• The researchers raised populations of both flies under average conditions from the last 10 years — and under the hotter temperatures projected for the late 21st century. 
   
• Despite their close relationship, the two fly populations — and the wasp that is their main predator — experienced very different climate effects. 

What they found: The ancestral hawthorn fly population adapted best to the new conditions. 

The apple flies, by contrast, saw their far-future lifecycle thrown out of whack with their apple tree hosts, “making their survival tenuous,” the authors wrote. 

Lonely wasps: The predatory wasps that feed on the apple and hawthorn pests weren’t affected by the rising heat at all, scientists found — which meant they were now breeding out of sync with their prey. 

Dire consequences: If that prediction holds true, it could spell “dire consequences,” scientists concluded.  

• In addition to leading to an unchecked pest problem, such a difference could also impact the survival of the wasp species itself. 
  
  
• That would lead in turn to unknown impacts on other species in the food web that depend on it — or that it might eat instead. 

Falling behind: If such similar species had such different results from each other — as well as from one of their principal predators — researchers foresee a future of upheaval.  

“Widespread chaos:” If such divergent impacts are showing up in such closely related insect species, “we may see widespread chaos in the ecological timing of insect communities in the coming decades,” Powell added.