Green activist calls for wave of climate lawsuits
Publish date: 21 November 2017
Issue Number: 534
Diary: Legalbrief Environmental
Category: Climate Change
As scientists warned at the now-concluded COP23 climate talks that the stakes could not be higher, activists called for litigation and political mobilisation to be escalated in order to counter corporate-driven climate change, writes Legalbrief. One of the fathers of climate science is calling for a wave of lawsuits against governments and fossil fuel companies that are delaying action on what he describes as the growing, mortal threat of global warming. A report in The Guardian notes that former Nasa scientist James Hansen said from the sidelines of the conference that the litigate-to-mitigate campaign is needed alongside political mobilisation. Hansen is quoted in the report as saying: ‘The judiciary is the branch of government in the US and other countries that is relatively free of bribery.’ For Hansen, the key is to make the 100 big ‘carbon majors’ – corporations like ExxonMobil, BP and Shell that are, by one account, responsible for more than 70% of emissions – pay for the transition to cleaner energy and greater forests. The best way to hold them to account, he believes, is to sue them for the damage they are doing to the climate. Hansen is involved in a 2015 lawsuit against the US federal government, brought by his granddaughter and 20 others under the age of 21. They argue the government’s failure to curb CO2 emissions has violated the youngest generation’s constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property. A district court is due to hear the case in February in Oregon, though the federal government has tried to delay the case. ‘Climate change is a human rights issue,’ Hansen says. ‘We are seeing injustice against the young. The present generation has a responsibility to future generations.’
A new alliance of 19 nations committed to quickly phasing out coal was launched last week at the UN climate summit in Bonn, Germany. A report in The Guardian notes that the move was greeted as a ‘political watershed’, signalling the end of the dirtiest fossil fuel that currently provides 40% of global electricity. New pledges were made last week by Mexico, New Zealand, Denmark and Angola for the Powering Past Coal Alliance, which is led by the UK and Canada. ‘The case against coal is unequivocal,’ said UK Climate Minister Claire Perry, both on environmental and health grounds – air pollution from coal kills 800 000 people a year worldwide. ‘There is a human cost and an environmental cost but we don’t need to pay that price when the price of renewables has plummeted,’ said Catherine McKenna, Canada’s Environment Minister. ‘I’m thrilled to see so much global momentum for the transition to clean energy – and this is only the beginning.’ The alliance aims to have 50 members by next year. The current alliance includes a few nations like Fiji that do not use coal and does not include any Asian countries where much of the world’s coal is used. Australia, the region’s biggest supplier of coal, has refused to join.
As climate change drives up temperatures, Earth comes ever closer to dangerous 'tipping points' that could accelerate global warming beyond our capacity to reign it in, scientists warned at the Bonn summit. A News24 report quotes Johan Rockstrom, executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, as saying: ‘Climate change is here. It is dangerous. And it is about to get much worse.’ He explained: ‘In the last two years, evidence has accumulated that we are now on a collision course with tipping points in the Earth system.’ Rockstrom and other scientists identified a dozen tipping points – keyed to different temperature triggers – in a briefing paper presented at the 196-nation, 12-day UN talks. An increase of 1-3°C could provoke the loss of Arctic summer sea ice; irreversible melting of parts of the Greenland Ice Sheet; loss of many warm-water coral reefs; and the disappearance of many mountain glaciers. A temperature rise of 3-5°C would likely turn large swathes of the Amazon rainforest into savanna; slow down the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a deep-sea current which regulates weather on both sides of the northern Atlantic; and affect the intensity and frequency of El Niños.
US President Donald Trump's pullout from the Paris Agreement will push up global temperatures nearly half a degree Celsius by 2100, according to a report released last week at the Bonn talks. According to a TimesLIVE report, if all countries – including the US – honour carbon-cutting pledges under the treaty, the world would see 2.8°C of global warming above pre-industrial levels, the Climate Action Tracker (CAT) research group had previously calculated. That is not nearly good enough to avoid climate catastrophe, scientists say. But if the US abandons its goals for reducing greenhouse gases, set under the Barack Obama administration, the end-of-century thermometer will climb even further to 3.2°C, the report showed. ‘This is largely due to the fact that the US is walking away from its 2030 target, and long-term 2050 goals,’ CAT said.
Carbon dioxide emissions are set to rise this year after a three-year pause, scientists said at UN climate talks last week, warning that ‘time is running out’, even as White House officials used the occasion to champion the fossil fuels that drive global warming. According to a News24 report, CO2 emissions, flat since 2014, were forecast to rise 2% in 2017, dashing hopes they had peaked, scientists reported at the Bonn negotiations which ended on Friday. ‘The news that emissions are rising after a three-year hiatus is a giant leap backward for humankind,’ said Amy Luers, a climate policy adviser to Barack Obama and executive director of Future Earth, which co-sponsored the research. Global CO2 emissions for 2017 were estimated at a record 41bn tons. ‘Time is running out on our ability to keep warming below 2°C, let alone 1.5°C,’ said lead author Corinne Le Quere, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia. ‘As each year ticks by, the chances of avoiding 2°C of warming continue to diminish,’ said co-author Glen Peters, research director at Centre for International Climate Research in Oslo, Norway.
