BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit from young climate activists seeking to block President Donald Trump’s executive orders promoting fossil fuels and discouraging renewable energy.
U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen said the plaintiffs showed overwhelming evidence climate change affects them and that it will worsen as a result of Trump’s orders.
But Christensen concluded their request for the courts to intervene was “unworkable” because it was beyond the power of the judiciary to create environmental policies.
The 22 plaintiffs included youths who prevailed in a landmark climate trial against the state of Montana in 2023. During a two-day hearing last month in Missoula, the activists and experts who testified on their behalf described Trump’s actions to boost drilling and mining and discourage renewable energy as a growing danger to children and the planet.
A United Nations agency said on Wednesday that heat-trapping carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere jumped by the highest amount on record last year, “turbo-charging” the climate and making weather more extreme.
Legal experts said the young activists and their lawyers from the environmental group Our Children’s Trust faced long odds in the federal case. The Montana state constitution declares that people have a "right to a clean and healthful environment," but that language is absent from the U.S. Constitution.
White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said Wednesday's ruling marked a victory for the administration and voters who supported its agenda to create American “energy dominance” by producing more fossil fuels.
“President Trump saved our country from Joe Biden’s wildly unpopular Green Energy Scam and he will continue to ‘DRILL, BABY, DRILL’,” Rogers said in an e-mailed statement.
Christensen said in a 31-page ruling that injunction sought by the activists would have effectively meant reverting to the environmental policies of the Biden administration. Enforcing it would have required scrutiny of every climate-related action taken since Trump took office in January, the judge added.
That would mean monitoring “an untold number of federal agency actions to determine whether they contravene its injunction,” Christensen wrote. “This is, quite simply, an unworkable request.”
The climate activists will appeal Wednesday's ruling, said Julia Olson, chief legal counsel at Our Children’s Trust.
“Every day these executive orders remain in effect, these 22 young Americans suffer irreparable harm to their health, safety, and future," Olson said. “The judge recognized that the government’s fossil fuel directives are injuring these youth, but said his hands were tied.”
A previous federal climate lawsuit in Oregon from Our Children’s Trust went on for a decade before the U.S. Supreme Court declined to consider their final appeal this year. Christensen cited that case in concluding that the plaintiffs in Montana lacked standing to sue the government.
“This Court is certainly troubled by the very real harms presented by climate change," he wrote. “This concern does not automatically confer upon it the power to act.”
Attorneys for the U.S. Department of Justice and more than a dozen states led by Montana had urged Christensen to dismiss the case.
Acting Assistant Attorney General Adam Gustafson said in a statement that the lawsuit was a sweeping and baseless challenge to Trump's energy agenda that the court correctly threw out.
Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen said the rule of law had prevailed.
"Our suspicions were confirmed – this was just another show trial contrived by climate activists who wasted the taxpayer’s money,” he said.
Only a few states, including Montana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and New York, have environmental protections enshrined in their constitutions.
Montana’s Supreme Court upheld the 2023 trial outcome last year, requiring officials to more closely analyze climate-warming emissions. To date, that has yielded few meaningful changes in a state dominated by Republicans.
Some of the Lighthiser v. Trump youth plaintiffs make their way to the Russell Smith federal courthouse, where the young climate activists were in court challenging President Donald Trump's orders promoting fossil fuels, Sept. 17, 2025, in Missoula, Mont. (Ben Allan Smith/The Missoulian via AP)
University of Montana student Maddie Grebb leads a chant across the street from the Russell Smith federal courthouse, where young climate activists were in court challenging President Donald Trump's orders promoting fossil fuels, Sept. 17, 2025, in Missoula, Montana. (Ben Allan Smith/The Missoulian via AP)
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Pessimism about the country's future has risen in cities since last year, but rural America is more optimistic about what's ahead for the U.S., according to a new survey from the American Communities Project.
And despite President Donald Trump’s insistence that crime is out of control in big cities, residents of the nation’s largest metropolitan centers are less likely to list crime and gun violence among the chief concerns facing their communities than they were a couple years ago.
Optimism about the future is also down from last year in areas with large Hispanic communities.
These are some of the snapshots from the new ACP/Ipsos survey, which offers a nuanced look at local concerns by breaking the nation’s counties into community types, using data points like race, income, age and religious affiliation. The survey evaluated moods and priorities across the 15 different community types, such as heavily Hispanic areas, big cities and different kinds of rural communities.
The common denominator across the communities? A gnawing worry about daily household costs.
“Concerns about inflation are across the board,” said Dante Chinni, founder and director of ACP. “One thing that truly unites the country is economic angst.”
Rural residents are feeling more upbeat about the country's trajectory — even though most aren't seeing Trump's promised economic revival.
The $15 price tag on a variety pack of Halloween candy at the Kroger supermarket last month struck Carl Gruber. Disabled and receiving federal food aid, the 42-year-old from Newark, Ohio, had hardly been oblivious to lingering, high supermarket prices.
But Gruber, whose wife also is unable to work, is hopeful about the nation's future, primarily in the belief that prices will moderate as Trump suggests.
“Right now, the president is trying to get companies who moved their businesses out of the country to move them back,” said Gruber, a Trump voter whose support has wavered over the federal shutdown that delayed his monthly food benefit. “So, maybe we'll start to see prices come down.”
About 6 in 10 residents of Rural Middle America — Newark's classification in the survey — say they are hopeful about the country's future over the next few years, up from 43% in the 2024 ACP survey. Other communities, like heavily evangelical areas or working-class rural regions, have also seen an uptick in optimism.
Kimmie Pace, a 33-year-old unemployed mother of four from a small town in northwest Georgia, said, “I have anxiety every time I go to the grocery store.”
But she, too, is hopeful in Trump. “Trump’s in charge, and I trust him, even if we’re not seeing the benefits yet,” she said.
By contrast, the share of big-city residents who say they are hopeful about the nation's future has shrunk, from 55% last year to 45% in the new survey.
Robert Engel of San Antonio — Texas' booming, second most-populous city — is worried about what's next for the U.S., though less for his generation than the next. The 61-year-old federal worker, whose employment was not interrupted by the government shutdown nor Trump's effort to reduce the federal workforce, is near retirement and feels financially stable.
A stable job market, health care availability and a fair economic environment for his adult children are his main priorities.
Recently, the inflation outlook has worsened under Trump. Consumer prices in September increased at an annual rate of 3%, up from 2.3% in April, when the president first began to roll out substantial tariff increases that burdened the economy with uncertainty.
Engel's less-hopeful outlook for the country is broader. “It's not just the economy, but the state of democracy and polarization,” Engel said. “It's a real worry. I try to be cautiously optimistic, but it's very, very hard.”
Trump had threatened to deploy the National Guard to Chicago, New York, Seattle, Baltimore, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, to fight what he said was runaway, urban crime.
Yet data shows most violent crime in those places, and around the country, has declined in recent years. That tracks with the poll, which found that residents of America's Big Cities and Middle Suburbs are less likely to list crime or gun violence among the top issues facing their communities than they were in 2023.
For Angel Gamboa, a retired municipal worker in Austin, Texas, Trump's claims don't ring true in the city of roughly 1 million people.
“I don't want to say it's overblown, because crime is a serious subject," Gamboa said. “But I feel like there's an agenda to scare Americans, and it's so unnecessary.”
Instead, residents of Big Cities are more likely to say immigration and health care are important issues for their communities.
Big Cities are one of the community types where residents are most likely to say they’ve seen changes in immigration recently, with 65% saying they’ve seen a change in their community related to immigration over the past 12 months, compared with only about 4 in 10 residents of communities labeled in the survey as Evangelical Hubs or Rural Middle America.
Gamboa says he has witnessed changes, notably outside an Austin Home Depot, where day laborers regularly would gather in the mornings to find work.
Not anymore, he said.
“Immigrants were not showing up there to commit crimes," Gamboa said. "They were showing up to help their families. But when ICE was in the parking lot, that's all it took to scatter people who were just trying to find a job.”
After Hispanic voters moved sharply toward Trump in the 2024 election, the poll shows that residents of heavily Hispanic areas are feeling worse about the future of their communities than they were before Trump was elected.
Carmen Maldonado describes her community of Kissimmee, Florida, a fast-growing, majority-Hispanic city of about 80,000 residents about 22 miles (35 kilometers) south of Orlando, as “seriously troubled.”
The 61-year-old retired, active-duty National Guard member isn't alone. The survey found that 58% of residents of such communities are hopeful about the future of their community, down from 78% last year.
“It's not just hopelessness, but fear,” said Maldonado, who says people in her community — even her fellow native Puerto Ricans, who are American citizens — are anxious about the Trump administration's aggressive pursuit of Latino immigrants.
Just over a year ago, Trump made substantial inroads with Hispanic voters in the 2024 presidential election.
Beyond just the future of their communities, Hispanic respondents are also substantially less likely to say they’re hopeful about the future of their children or the next generation: 55% this year, down from 69% in July 2024.
Maldonado worries that the Trump administration's policies have stoked anti-Hispanic attitudes and that they will last for her adult child's lifetime and beyond.
“My hopelessness comes from the fact that we are a large part of what makes up the United States,” she said, “and sometimes I cry thinking about these families.”
Parwani and Thomson-DeVeaux reported from Washington.
The American Communities Project/Ipsos Fragmentation Study of 5,489 American adults aged 18 or older was conducted from Aug. 18 - Sept. 4, 2025, using the Ipsos probability-based online panel and RDD telephone interviews. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 1.8 percentage points.
President Donald Trump speaks to reporters before boarding Air Force One at Palm Beach International Airport in West Palm Beach Fla., on his way back to the White House, Sunday, Nov. 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
