Lawyers Get Excited Suing Over “Climate Change”

“It bears repeating over and over,” opened a recent Nature editorial on suing over “climate change”. “The science is not in question.”

Now why would a “the science” that is not in question bear repeated assertions, over and over? That question is not rhetorical. Do you hear editorials, over and over, proclaiming that electricity and magnetism are aspects of the same phenomenon? Are politicians mounting rostrums to insist in passionate rhetoric that blood circulates in the body? Do propagandists devote entire broadcasts on how the sun rises in the east? Over and over?

Those questions are rhetorical.

There is no need to trumpet, over and over, a science that has proven itself. What needs repeating, over and over, is advertising for products people don’t want or need, but which some entity who stands to make a profit is pushing. Who stands to profit from blasting, over and over, the possibility of a slight increase in modeled average global temperature?

Lawyers, for one. Nature says “By the end of last year, 2,666 climate-litigation cases had been filed worldwide”.

Climate litigation?

Yes: “under the legally binding Paris climate agreement, nations pledged to keep average temperatures within 1.5 °C of pre-industrial levels.” Of course, if you have followed the stats (blog/Substack), it would be next to impossible to measure the difference of the tenth of a degree from times historical, given the imprecision in measuring what temperatures were—and are. (This involves proxy modeling, which should be put in predictive terms, yet is instead put in parametric language, which introduces vast over-certainties; see the links.)

But never mind that. Let’s think about these “law”-suits instead. Here’s a picture of their number:

This is an astonishing increase. All predicated on the premise that countries, and businesses with money inside countries, can not only control the climate, and control it with micro-, tenth-of-a-global-degree precision. Ludicrous isn’t in it. I don’t know how else to say this except to insist there is no way to know.

The companies sued are not all “fossil fuel”, the products of which all those who sue use with gusto, ignoring the hypocrisy. They include companies producing of all manner of things, from paper to tobacco to “health services”—and even propaganda (“media”). Any business with a lot of money, really.

Most of these suits are filed by “people and NGOs”. There have been several by kids. Which is to say, by adults using kids as cover in the hopes the Appeal to Non-Authority Fallacy (blog/Substack) can help their case.

These suits are, for now, mostly exploratory, activists pestering people and groups trying to score a quick money hit, yet “most claimants struggle to get a positive result”.

 In the next few months, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the United Nations’ principal judicial organ in The Hague, the Netherlands, will begin hearing evidence on two broad questions: first, what are countries’ obligations in international law to protect the climate system from anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions, and second, what should the legal consequences be for states when their actions — or failure to act — cause harm?

We’ve discussed it before (blog/Substack), but there is no such thing as “international law”; at least, there can’t be unless there is some power above countries and nations. Does such a One World Power exist? Ask China or Russia. There can be treaties and agreements between nations, more or less adhered to. But good luck collecting from, say, China, if it is determined that they are the largest contributor of “greenhouse gases.”

California is shaking down “five of the world’s largest oil companies — BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon and Shell — and their subsidiaries, demanding that they pay ‘for the costs of their impacts to the environment, human health and Californians’ livelihoods, and to help protect the state against the harms that climate change will cause in years to come’.”

Gruesome Newsom is not stupid: he will only squeeze enough so that oil companies make some profit, like they did with car companies. If oil companies lost money, they’d leave. Or should. Which means that if the left gains complete power, they could move to nationalize all energy companies, stealing the resources outright. Even the Nature writer sort of recognizes this:

Ultimately, climate action at scale and pace will happen only when the international community is persuaded that humanity has no alternative but to decarbonize in a just way; not because of the threat of prosecutions, but because our collective survival depends on it.

In other words, our self-destruction will commence when the hersterical idea that the climate is out to kill us no longer needs to be repeated, over and over.

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