WILL JONES
The UN has opened the door to Britain being sued over its ‘contribution’ to climate change, after the International Court of Justice said historic emissions or failure by countries to meet their climate obligations could allow other states ‘affected by climate change’ to sue them. The Telegraph has more.
In a significant legal opinion, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) said failure by countries to meet their climate obligations could, in specific cases, allow other states affected by climate change to sue them.
It also cleared the way for lawsuits over historic emissions, which could leave the UK, the birthplace of the industrial revolution, at risk of legal action from other nations.
The advisory opinion issued on Wednesday in The Hague is a way of clarifying specific questions of international law, and is not legally binding.
However, it carries legal weight and moral authority and is expected to be influential on the future of environmental litigation.
The UK implemented an ICJ advisory opinion when it agreed to hand back the Chagos Islands to Mauritius last year in a deal in which Lord Hermer, the Attorney General, played an influential role.
The new opinion will raise fears that Lord Hermer would back any attempt by a foreign country to use the opinion to sue Britain.
“Hermer has demonstrated he does not bat for Britain,” said Richard Tice, Deputy Leader of Reform UK.
The Tories and Reform both rejected the ruling and said they would not pay any damages if they were in government.
Dame Priti Patel, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, said: “The ICJ has lost its core purpose and is now joining political campaigns and bandwagons based upon ideological obsessions on issues such as reparations and destroying the sovereign rights of national governments.
“The Labour Government is equally ideologically obsessed with this nonsense. Activist-led court rulings like this should never be treated as binding.
“This is the process of lawfare that led to the Chagos surrender and must not be replicated on this issue. We challenge Labour to put Britain’s interest first and make clear they do not intend to act on this ridiculous advisory ruling.”
Mr Tice said: “Under no circumstances would a Reform government pay any ludicrous climate reparations. Nor will we not be beholden to any foreign court.
“This is another non-binding advisory judgment by the ICJ, who absurdly said we should give up the Chagos. They just hate us.”
Worth reading in full.
See Related Article Below
The Absurdity of Climate Reparations
The UN’s top court wants to punish the West for the ‘historic’ pollution that created the modern world as we know it.
LAUREN SMITH
If an international court told the Western world to jump off a cliff, would we do it? We may be about to find out. The UN’s top court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), ruled on Wednesday that wealthy nations must meet their environmental targets, or else face being sued by the states most affected by climate change.
The case was brought to the ICJ by a group of law students from the Pacific Islands—where countries like Vanuatu are particularly at risk from rising sea levels—and was supported by 132 nations in total. As part of the ruling, Judge Yuji Iwasawa also called climate change an “urgent and existential threat,” said that a healthy environment is a human right, and declared that “states must cooperate to achieve concrete emission-reduction targets.” Those who fail to reduce their fossil fuel consumption could expect to cough up “full reparations to injured states in the form of restitution, compensation and satisfaction provided that the general conditions of the law of state responsibility are met.”
The decision is not legally binding, but it could still prove influential. Campaigners and climate lawyers hope that it’ll pave the way for Western nations to pay out ‘compensation’ to countries most affected by climate change. Experts have warned this also opens the door to lawsuits over historic emissions, as less developed nations vie for ‘climate reparations’ from countries like the UK, where the Industrial Revolution began.
Judge Iwasawa did, however, warn that it would be extremely difficult to assign historic blame and quantify the damage done by various nations over the last few hundred years. This might be the one sensible point he makes. After all, it would be ridiculous to calculate the environmental impact of the steam engine while disregarding the far greater positive impacts it has had on the world. Should we be weighing up the climate harms of mass manufacturing without accounting for the benefits of people not having to sew their own clothes? Are we supposed to attach a numerical cost to the invention of the vaccine, the sewage system, or the lightbulb, while pretending that no good has come of them? Any right-thinking person understands that the gains from these innovations far outweigh the environmental damage they may have caused.
Not that the logistics of this really matter. The fanatical green activists demanding reparations have already judged the entire West to be guilty. Now, they want us to apologise for creating the modern, developed world. It doesn’t matter that the much maligned Industrial Revolution also gave birth to an age of global transportation, higher standards of living, better health care, and longer life expectancies. Never mind that those supposedly Satanic mills lifted billions out of poverty, paved the way for social progress, and helped to deliver iced oat matcha lattes into the hands of eco-zealots the world over. If it were up to them, we’d still be living in 17th-century squalor and balancing our humours.
Proponents of historic climate reparations seem to believe that countries like the UK were simply pumping emissions out into the atmosphere for the hell of it back then—rather than with the purpose of propelling the world forward technologically and scientifically. Not to mention the fact that the phrase ‘climate change’ did not exist in the vocabulary of any 18th-century industrialist or Victorian inventor. It hardly feels fair to criticise our forebears for not considering a problem they were literally unaware of—and it’s doubly unfair that today’s taxpayers should be held responsible for the past’s carbon footprint.
As the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, the UK will be firmly in the sights of eco-conscious states in search of reparations. For starters, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has made himself an easy target for these non-binding judgements. He chose to follow ICJ opinion when he needlessly and recklessly handed over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius last year, for example, at a cost of around £30 billion. Given Starmer’s track record of rolling over in the face of ‘human rights’ and international law, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if he immediately caves and decides to pay out billions of pounds to atone for our supposed climate sins.
Contrast this with countries like Russia, China, or the U.S.—all of which exceed the UK’s historic carbon emissions, even when that contribution takes into account emissions produced in all British territory at the height of the Empire. How much can we expect Putin, Xi Jinping, or Trump to fork out because an international court told them to? Last I checked, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine wasn’t exactly in line with international law, nor are China’s various human rights abuses. When these countries are willing to commit such egregious violations, we can hardly expect them to abide by something as absurd as green reparations. If anyone is going to be held ‘accountable’ for past environmental transgressions, it’ll be the grey-suited, managerial Keir Starmers, Friedrich Merzes, and Ursula von der Leyens of the world.
That is, if anyone ends up paying climate reparations at all. It’s far more likely that this is a purely symbolic threat, designed to guilt-trip the West into introducing yet more unrealistic Net Zero targets. Perhaps the one ironic silver lining to this is that, as these policies are already setting many European nations on the road to bankruptcy, blackouts, and deindustrialisation, there might not be any money left in the pot for idiotic schemes like this.
Regardless, the West shouldn’t be punished for lifting its populations out of pre-industrial misery and into the modern age. If anything, a thank you wouldn’t go amiss for the many, many contributions today’s developed nations have made to science, technology, medicine, and general global prosperity. Not that we can expect anything of the sort from green activists, who would rather humanity leave no trace on the Earth at all—even if that means inventing nothing, building less, and aspiring to very little at all. This bleak future is exactly where insane schemes like climate reparations will lead us.
*****
Now climate zealots can sue and fro worldwide
HENRY GETLEY
AND so the climate madness reaches new heights of absurdity. The latest insanity is a pronouncement from the International Court of Justice that countries can sue each other over damage caused by alleged global warming.
The BBC gleefully reports that the case was the ‘brainchild of a group of young law students from low-lying Pacific islands on the front line of climate change’. They basically claimed that rising sea levels affecting their homelands are caused by developed nations which ‘have historically burned the most fossil fuels’ – and that those countries should be made to pay compensation.
Now it doesn’t take a meteorological genius to see the fatal flaw in this concept. How the hell can you say which country created which bit of pollution which ‘damaged’ which bit of the planet? One of the plaintiffs, Vanuatu, is a scattered group of islands in the South Pacific. If, for instance, its rulers decided to sue Britain, would they perhaps find an ingenious way of tracking exhaust fumes from a traffic jam on the M25 to their tiny dots in the ocean 10,000 miles away?
However, in the alternative universe inhabited by climate zealots, idiocy has never been a barrier to ever more outlandish antics. It’s even more depressing, if not surprising, that the case was brought with the help of a British law firm, which hailed the decision as ‘a huge win that is going to change the face of climate advocacy’. But perhaps the most worrying aspect of this crazy ruling by the Netherlands-based ICJ – effectively the world’s highest court – is that compensation claims could even be made for ‘specific extreme weather events’. So where is that going to end up?
Let’s fast-forward to 2050, where the British Court of Climate Justice is in session in its gleaming £200million headquarters in London. The presiding judge is His Honour Lord Miliband of NetZero, 81-year-old former Minister for Energy and Climate Change, assisted (via video link from a yacht in the North Atlantic) by Dame Greta Thunberg of Skolstrejk. Several claims against the UK Government citing ‘specific extreme weather events’ are before the court . . .
Case 1: A sudden downpour inundated the summer fete and bring-and-buy sale in the vicarage garden of Grubbing Mattock, Wiltshire, leading to the ruination of various items donated by villagers, including cupcakes, tea cosies and corn dollies. Verdict: Guilty – Government to pay £1million fine for climate crime and £100,000 compensation to the organisers, plus a new trestle table.
Case 2: A gentleman’s hairpiece was blown off by a freak gust of wind as he sat on a pub patio in Basingstoke with friends who did not realise he was bald. Verdict: Guilty – Government to pay £1million fine for climate crime and £100,000 compensation to the follically challenged victim for embarrassment, hurt feelings and to buy him a super-adhesive new syrup.
Case 3: The weather turned so hot in Bournemouth that an ice cream cone bought for a five-year-old girl by her parents in an attempt to cool her down melted before she was able to eat it. Verdict: Guilty – Government to pay £1million fine for climate crime and £100,000 compensation to the victim, plus counselling for the traumatised family and a ten-year supply of Haagen-Dazs Vanilla Mini Cup scooper tubs.
Case 4: The weather turned so cold in Newcastle that it froze the **** off a brass monkey (details redacted). Verdict: Guilty – Government to pay £1million fine for climate crime and an unlimited sum for restorative welding services.
This article (Now climate zealots can sue and fro worldwide) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Henry Getley
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