Enlarge / Youth plaintiffs are greeted by supporters as they arrive for the nation's first youth climate change trial at Montana's First Judicial District Court on June 12, 2023. (credit: William Campbell / Contributor | Getty Images North America )

A Montana state court today sided with young people who sued the state for promoting the fossil fuel industry through its energy policy , which they alleged prohibits Montana from weighing greenhouse gas emissions in approving the development of new factories and power plants. This prohibition, 16 plaintiffs ages 5 to 22 successfully argued, violates their constitutional right to a "clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations."

Experts previously predicted that a win for youths in Montana would set an important legal precedent for how courts can hold states accountable for climate inaction. The same legal organization representing Montana's young plaintiffs, Our Children's Trust, is currently pursuing similar cases in four other states, The Washington Post reported .

The Post described this landmark case as "the nation’s first constitutional and first youth-led climate lawsuit to go to trial."

Enlarge / Westlands Solar Park, near the town of Lemoore in the San Joaquin Valley of California, is the largest solar power plant in the United States and could become one of the largest in the world. (credit: Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty)

California’s San Joaquin Valley, a strip of land between the Diablo Range and the Sierra Nevada, accounts for a significant portion of the state’s crop production and agricultural revenues. But with the state facing uncertain and uneven water supply due to climate change, some local governments and clean energy advocates hope solar energy installations could provide economic reliability where agriculture falters due to possible water shortages.

In the next two decades, the Valley could accommodate the majority of the state’s estimated buildout of solar energy under a state plan forecasting transmission needs [PDF], adding enough capacity to power 10 million homes as California strives to reach 100 percent clean electricity by 2045. The influx of solar development would come at a time when the historically agriculture-rich valley is coping with new restrictions on groundwater pumping. Growers may need to fallow land. And some clean energy boosters see solar as an ideal alternative land use.

But a significant technological hurdle stands in the way: California needs to plan and build more long-distance power lines to carry all the electricity produced there to different parts of the state, and development can take nearly a decade. Transmission has become a significant tension point for clean energy developers across the US, as the number of project proposals balloons and lines to connect to the grid grow ever longer.

Enlarge (credit: Dong Energy)

The 1970s oil crisis , and how the countries impacted by it responded, has several lessons for modern countries looking to transition to renewables, according to the authors of a new paper. In 1973, the Arab countries in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), stopped exporting oil to nations that supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War. The results saw oil shortages and prices in many nations—including parts of Europe, the United States, and Canada—skyrocket. In response, some began moving toward renewables.

However, there's a political price to be paid for adopting policies that transition away from fossil fuels. These policies can be costly in the short term, prompting businesses and consumers to push back on them. Some nations—often in Europe—had advantageous political features or adopted tactics that softened the political blow, allowing them to move forward with these efforts. Others, such as the US and Canada, floundered. New research looked at OECD nations' responses to the oil crisis and dug into the political reasons why these responses differed.

"We are... interested in trying to understand when a country's policymakers are able to overcome opposition to [these] costly policies for businesses and households," Jonas Meckling, an associate professor of energy and environmental policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author of the paper, told Ars.