Read the following academic passage concerning environmental jurisprudence and constitutional law:
In recent legal scholarship, proponents of "atmospheric trust litigation" have sought to expand the ancient Roman and common-law doctrine of the public trust—historically confined to navigable waterways and submerged lands—to encompass the Earth's atmosphere as a res communes subject to an affirmative sovereign duty. Under traditional formulations of the public trust doctrine, sovereign states hold title to critical ecological commons in trust for the public, preventing both unilateral privatization and irreversible degradation by private entities. Advocates of the atmospheric trust argue that the atmosphere meets every ontological criterion of a trust corpus: it is vital to human survival, indivisible, and inherently insusceptible to exclusive private ownership. By conceptualizing the atmosphere as a shared public asset, these theorists argue that courts can bypass the political recalcitrance of legislative and executive branches by enforcing an affirmative fiduciary duty on government to cap greenhouse gas emissions and preserve a stable climate system for present and future generations.
However, traditional legal theorists and judicial skeptics contend that this atmospheric expansion fundamentally misconstrues the institutional competence of the judiciary and the doctrinal limits of the trust mechanism. While orthodox public trust jurisprudence empowered courts to invalidate discrete legislative conveyances of public waterways to private actors—a negative, boundary-policing function—atmospheric trust claims demand that courts exercise sweeping, affirmative regulatory oversight. To quantify planetary carbon budgets, mandate national reduction schedules, and supervise administrative compliance would require the judiciary to assume policy-making and resource-allocation responsibilities that the constitutional separation of powers commits exclusively to the representative branches. Moreover, skeptics argue that expanding the doctrine to an ambient, borderless resource with global externalities dilutes the distinct property-based anchors that gave the historic common-law doctrine its legal coherence.
Nevertheless, viewing this doctrinal conflict merely as a rigid boundary dispute over institutional competence overlooks the innovative jurisprudential middle ground forged by emergent climate decisions. Rather than demanding that judges act as central environmental planners, contemporary atmospheric trust jurisprudence increasingly frames judicial intervention as a structural catalyst—a remedial mechanism designed not to dictate specific carbon reduction policies, but to compel recalcitrant administrative agencies to articulate and adhere to evidence-based decarbonization baselines. By redefining the sovereign fiduciary duty from direct judicial management of emissions to the enforcement of procedural integrity and non-arbitrary ecological accounting, the doctrine can reconcile the fiduciary protection of the atmospheric corpus with the foundational institutional constraints of constitutional democracy.
Based on the passage, what is the primary purpose of the author's argument regarding the atmospheric trust doctrine?
Answer: To argue that the atmospheric trust doctrine can be reconciled with constitutional limits by reframing the judicial role as enforcing procedural accountability rather than directing policy / To argue that the atmospheric trust doctrine can be reconciled with constitutional constraints by defining the judicial role as procedural oversight rather than direct policy management / To reconcile the atmospheric trust doctrine with constitutional separation of powers by redefining the judicial role as procedural oversight / To demonstrate that the atmospheric trust doctrine is compatible with constitutional constraints when courts focus on procedural integrity and baseline enforcement / To propose reconciling the atmospheric trust doctrine with constitutional limits through procedural judicial oversight / Reconciling the atmospheric trust doctrine with constitutional separation of powers by limiting courts to procedural and accounting oversight