https://archive.md/gublc
"Last month, the world’s highest court issued a long-awaited opinion on how
international law should regard climate harm. The International Court of
Justice concluded, unanimously, that states have binding legal obligations to
act to protect the climate system, and failure to do so—by continuing to
produce, consume, and subsidize fossil fuels—may “constitute an internationally
wrongful act.” In other words, curbing greenhouse-gas emissions is not merely
voluntary in the eyes of the court; failure to do so is illegal.
A week later, the U.S. government proffered an entirely opposite picture of
legal responsibility. It announced a plan to rescind one of the most important
legal underpinnings of the federal effort to combat climate change. The
Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding for greenhouse gases,
from 2009, says quite simply that these emissions endanger the public and
qualify as harmful pollution; they can therefore be regulated under the
Clean
Air Act. This finding is the legal basis for power-plant rules,
tailpipe-emissions regulations, and almost every other action the executive
branch has taken to curb the release of carbon dioxide and methane. And the
U.S. EPA would now like to throw it out.
The United States and the rest of the planet are now in “completely separate
worlds” in terms of legal understanding of climate responsibility, the
human-rights attorney Lotte Leicht, who works as the advocacy director of the
nonprofit Climate Rights International, told me. “I think almost nothing could
have painted a starker picture,” Nikki Reisch, an attorney and the Climate and
Energy Program director at the Center for International Environmental Law,
agrees.
The ICJ opinion was the first time the world court has expressly addressed
climate obligations under international law, and it did so with unusual
clarity. It removed what Leicht described to me as a legal fog that the world
has existed in for decades by rebuking two of the main arguments that
high-emitting countries and companies have made to avoid liability. The first
is that the climate crisis is simply too big and complex to attribute to any
particular entity, rendering individual accountability impractical and unfair.
“The court made clear that that is not an excuse that holds up anymore,” Leicht
said. Thanks in part to attribution science, a particular country or company’s
contribution to the climate crisis can be assessed, and the fact that many
entities are at fault is not an excuse to evade individual liability.
The second argument—that only special climate accords, such as the
Kyoto
Protocol and the
Paris Agreement, could dictate their climate obligations,
and that even then those pacts were by and large voluntary—was also struck
down. In its opinion, the court wrote that climate action is not, in fact,
voluntary at all: Instead, because climate change threatens lives, degrades
health, and deprives people of their home, both domestically and across
borders, climate agreements are legally binding, and states can be sued for
failure to uphold them.
In fact, according to the court, even if a state is not party to a climate
treaty, or if a treaty agreement is too weak to prevent the climate harm that
country is enacting, that state is still legally liable, thanks to customary
law—well-established fundamental legal principles that all countries must
comply with, such as the general duty to protect basic human rights."
Via Kenny Chaffin.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
