Gov. Josh Green’s administration is requesting an additional $2.25 million to fight the climate lawsuit brought by 14 Hawaii youths claiming that the state Department of Transportation has violated their constitutional rights “to live healthful lives in Hawai‘i now and into the future.”

The money will be used to pay for an outside law firm that has already joined the state Attorney General’s Office in representing the department in a case set to go to trial June 24 through July 12 in the 1st Circuit’s Environmental Court in Honolulu.

Attorneys for the young plaintiffs are accusing their counterparts from the law firm of Morgan Lewis &Bockius of using some aggressive, mainland-style tactics to harass the plaintiffs during individual depositions currently being taken with each of the 14 Hawaii youths.

“I don’t think that locally based attorneys would treat their own keiki that way,” said Kylie Wager-Cruz, a Honolulu-based attorney with Earthjustice.

Navahine F. v. Hawaii Department of Transportation is set to become only the second constitutional climate case to go to trial in the United States.

In the first one, a district court judge in Montana in August ruled in favor of 16 youth plaintiffs who argued that lawmakers prioritized the development of fossil fuels over the well-being of Montana’s residents and the protection of natural resources.

The groundbreaking ruling sets a precedent that might have some influence in Hawaii, where a suit argues that the DOT operates a system that emits high levels of greenhouse gasses, violating the young plaintiffs’ state constitutional rights and causing them significant harm.

The complaint asserts that even as Hawaii has sought to be a leader in climate action, emissions from the transportation sector keep rising, with the DOT unable to hit interim benchmarks to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions since 2008.

With plaintiffs ranging in age from 10 to 20, the lawsuit aims to hold the department accountable to ensure it meets the state’s goal to decarbonize Hawaii’s transportation sector and achieve a zero-emissions economy by 2045, attorneys said.

The Green administration is asking for an additional $2.25 million to fight the case as part of the fiscal year 2025 supplemental budget. The money is in addition to the $1 million secured in the past session to pay for the outside law firm.

Hourly rates for attorneys at Morgan Lewis range between $600 and $1,200 an hour. The “global” law firm has offices around the world and counts among its clientele former President Donald Trump; Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency executive found guilty of fraud; and Amazon, for the purposes of preventing the unionization of Amazon workers.

Asked about the firm, the state Department of Attorney General responded that the decision to retain outside counsel was made by the previous administration.

“We understand that the decision was made due to the importance and scope of the lawsuit and the number of vacancies in the department at the time,” the department said in an email.

The department said it disputes any negative characterization of the way the depositions are being conducted.

“We are taking the plaintiffs’ claims seriously — and that means we want to hear their stories in their own words and not filtered through their attorneys. Depositions are being conducted in an age- appropriate and respectful manner.”

A deposition is a witness’s sworn out-of-court testimony. It is used to gather information as part of the discovery process and can be used at trial in some instances.

The first plaintiff to be deposed was Kalalapa Winter, the eldest of the plaintiffs. The University of Southern California sophomore and Mid-Pacific Institute graduate was 18 when the suit was filed and 19 during her deposition in Honolulu last week, but she turned 20 this week.

Winter described her deposition as “pretty crazy” and “kind of insane.”

“I don’t think any of us were expecting that,” she said.

She said the attorney asking her questions was rude, aggressive and disrespectful. At one point Winter was brought to tears.

“It’s clear to me, whoever the attorney is fighting for, she doesn’t really care about my story or my fellow plaintiffs’ stories. It’s really upsetting,” she said.

Winter, who grew up in Haena and Hanalei on Kauai, joined the lawsuit in part because of what happened to her community in 2018. That’s when a massive storm over Kauai caused $180 million in damage, wrecked hundreds of homes and unleashed landslides that cut off the island’s north shore communities for months.

The unprecedented “rain bomb” dropped nearly 50 inches of rainfall in a 24-hour period, shattering the previous 24-hour U.S. rainfall record of 42 inches set in Texas nearly 40 years earlier.

“It destroyed my entire community, and they spent years rebuilding it,” she said.

In the suit, Winter, an avid surfer, also described how climate change-driven beach erosion smothers coral reefs, harms local fish populations and alters surf breaks.

The attorney didn’t ask about those things, Winter said, but instead she ended up berating and questioning her “as if I was supposed to know obscure knowledge about the DOT and the state Constitution.”

“They were so mean,” she said. “It was very clear that one of the lawyers was not from Hawaii. To be mean to children doesn’t make any sense. It’s infuriating.

“I really don’t understand. You would think the government would want to work with us, not against us,” she said.

Earthjustice’s Wager-Cruz said two of the plaintiffs have been deposed to date and so far questions by the outside counsel have been “over the top” and “out of bounds,” designed to harass and rattle the youngsters.

Questions, she said, feel like pop quizzes on the science and the law and do not focus on their stories about how they have been affected by climate change.

“If the governor knew this was happening, I don’t think he’d be happy with it,” Wager-Cruz said.