How Leftists Puppet Children For Climate Lawfare Schemes

An environmental lawfare group that represents children and uses tactics some critics argue amount to “brainwashing” and “indoctrination” has drawn scrutiny for the way it integrates activist talking points into educational training materials.

Our Children’s Trust offers curricula to teachers that introduces students to the mindset behind youth climate lawsuits, encouraging them to consider the dangers of fossil fuel reliance. Though U.S. courts have dismissed several of its cases in recent years, including most recently on Wednesday in Montana, the group continues to offer its curricula to minors and is now taking its fight against American fossil fuels to the international stage.

The group’s social media often highlights minors‘ pleas for climate justice, which some critics argue is emotionally manipulative and fuels anxiety among children.

“They’re using these children to advance climate-nuisance lawsuits, which keep getting thrown out,” Jason Isaac, CEO of the American Energy Institute, told the DCNF. “They brainwash these kids, indoctrinate them, and it’s really awful for the kids. They’re so scared about their future — they’re not getting married, they’re not having children. It’s just absolutely appalling.” (RELATED: Washington Throws Out Climate Lawsuit Brought By Environmentalists Using Children As Props)

2025.09.23+Juliana IACHR+Petition by audreystreb

Our Children’s Trust offers classroom materials for high school teachers that include several activities, one of which is to conclude with instructions to “explain to students that there is currently an active campaign to address the United States’ role in the climate crisis underway in federal court. Introduce students to Juliana v. U.S., using the power point for support. Explain that the case is only possible because 21 youth have spoken up about how the climate crisis negatively impacts their lives.”

The group brands itself as “a non-profit public interest law firm that provides strategic, campaign-based legal services to youth from diverse backgrounds to secure their legal rights to a safe climate,” according to its website.

“We support our youth clients and amplify their voices before the third branch of government in a highly strategic legal campaign that includes targeted media, education, and public engagement work to support the youths’ legal actions,” its website states. “Our legal work – guided by constitutional, public trust, human rights laws and the laws of nature – aims to ensure systemic and science-based climate recovery planning and remedies at federal, state, and global levels.”

Our Children’s Trust features educational materials which argue that administrations across generations, including the Obama and Clinton administrations, have helped contribute to the “climate crisis” now burdening the next generation. The group includes an infographic in its curricula that labels Congress as “compromised,” the White House as “politicized” and the courts as the avenue for “justice.”

Alleigh Marré, executive director of the American Parents Coalition (APC) told the DNCF that Our Children’s Trust is “stoking fear of an enormous world-ending climate crisis in kids when they’re very young and impressionable.”

“Using kids to move forward the adult agenda is just becoming a widespread and broadly used tactic on the left — everything from gender to climate, etc. And this is just the latest example of using that fear in kids at a really, really young age to advance the agenda,” Marré told the DCNF.

Marré added that though children should care about the environment, Our Children’s Trust is “shepherding these kids through their curriculum and their pipeline and using them as mini-activists to promote their agenda and to advance their causes.”

“The implications are much larger than the left scoring bullet points and having names of 12- and 13-year-olds on their lawsuits,” Marré told the DCNF. “The fear that is stoked around this is making the generation of childbearing adults not want to have children. … [Our Children’s Trust] is using fear and anxiety as a tactic in the developing mind and process of childhood — that’s just fully inappropriate.”

Other materials encourage students to consider questions like “what do you think of the idea of youth turning to the court system to spur systemic change?” and “can you think of other systemic changes that the Courts may be able to aid in?”

Isaac noted that so-called “climate anxiety” has been on the rise, with recent studies showing that young people are afraid to have children due to their worries of a warming world. He argued that groups like Our Children’s Trust may not only heighten this anxiety among Gen Z, but they also elevate inexperienced voices while calling for extreme climate mandates that ignore the dangers of energy poverty.

“It’s very rare that a teenager is a policy expert in a particular field, especially when it comes to something so critical as energy production and electric generation,” Isaac said. (RELATED: ‘Structural Violence’: UN Panel Says Kids Should Be Able To Sue Their Countries Over Climate Change)

Protesters attend a rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court held by the group Our Children’s Trust October 29, 2018 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Win McNamee/ via Getty Images)

After U.S. courts dismissed several lawsuits including Juliana v. United States and Genesis v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — the group filed a petition on Sept. 23 with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, alleging climate human rights violations.

The filing calls for the revocation of all “administrative, legislative, and other measures that foster a fossil fuel based energy system” and includes several petitioners who were involved in the Juliana v. United States case as minors.

The filing alleges that the U.S. is violating human rights through its climate policies and denying the upcoming generation a stable and clean environment by continuing to promote and rely on fossil fuels. The petitioners urge the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to call on the U.S. to take steps to accelerate the green energy transition in their filing.

The petitioners requested the Commission “take all necessary and effective measures to ‘achieve the deep, rapid, and sustained reductions of GHG emissions’ required ‘for the prevention of significant harm to the climate system’ according to best available science, including: revoke all administrative, legislative and other measures that foster a fossil fuel based energy system and undermine mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions.”

The Biden administration pushed for a green energy transition, which many Democrats at the state level continue to push, though some officials in blue states like New York have recently admitted that their transition timeline is likely too unrealistic and extreme. In contrast, the Trump administration sounded the alarm over energy poverty and increased rolling blackouts by 2030 if the U.S. continues to phase out reliable energy sources without adequate replacements.

“These youth hold fast to the hope that their children, grandchildren, and those who follow will one day experience their rights in full, in a world powered by the abundance of wind and solar energy. That hope drives their action,” Deputy Director of Global Strategy for Our Children’s Trust Kelly Matheson wrote on Sept. 25 regarding the petition. “They have spent their developing years immersed in this crisis. Whether they form families and can healthfully and with dignity pass down their cultures and traditions to the next generation will depend on whether their rights are upheld and the United States is held accountable.”(RELATED: Trump Has No Shortage Of Targets In His War Against Blue State Climate Lawfare)

Protesters attend a rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court held by the group Our Children’s Trust October 29, 2018 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Win McNamee via Getty Images)

Notably, numerous Democratic-leaning jurisdictions have filed lawsuits seeking damage claims from energy companies that some critics like Isaac say could cripple the fossil fuel industry if they are successful. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on April 8, directing his administration to investigate state-level efforts to sue or seek large settlements from energy companies over climate change and several of these “climate-nuisance” lawsuits have been dismissed of late.

Human prosperity almost directly correlates with access to reliable energy and power, as documented by energy policy experts for the World Energy Assessment and The Heritage Foundation — a point critics like Isaac hammer home when it comes to cases like these.

“The real human rights abusers are the global elites funding the climate alarmist movement and blocking access to capital for fossil fuel development in the world’s poorest nations. While they push legal stunts in courts and foreign tribunals to dismantle America’s energy system, billions of people in developing countries are denied access to clean water, refrigeration, and reliable electricity,” Isaac told the DCNF. “The people who should answer to a human rights tribunal are the climate crusaders who live in luxury while condemning others to poverty, disease, and lifespans 20 years shorter than their own. Energy poverty is the real injustice, and it’s time the world holds the climate-industrial complex accountable for it.”

Our Children’s Trust did not respond to the DCNF’s multiple requests for comment.

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