Maybe Things Will Get A Little Better
Balancing Bad News With Some Good News
According to a May 2024 BloombergNEF report, global emissions may fall by as much as 2.5% in 2024, in part due to reductions in China's coal-fired electricity generation. The report also predicts that developed countries will see their emissions decline between now and 2030, while developing economies like India, Indonesia, and Vietnam will see their emissions rise until the late 2030s.
The BloombergNEF report suggests emissions in China may peak this year, and then begin a gradual decline.
Two, Four, Six, Eight, Time For Us to Litigate
Also from Bloomberg
A historic human-rights verdict
By Hugo Miller and Olivia Rudgard
The seeds of this week’s victory by an association of elderly women at the European Court of Human Rights were sown in the heat of summer 2003.
That year, a heat wave killed more than 70,000 people across Europe, most of them elderly women. Zurich-based lawyer Cordelia Baehr, now 43, was attending law school at the time, but in 2016 she had an “aha” moment informed in part by the heat wave’s impacts: Research has shown that elderly women are particularly vulnerable to extreme heat, and that extreme heat is exacerbated by climate change.
“That’s when I came up with the idea of protecting older women,” Baehr says, “based on statistics that the risk of dying from extreme heat was far greater to women than men.”
In August 2016, Baehr and about 270 pioneering members of KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz, which loosely translates as Senior Women for Climate Protection Switzerland, held their inaugural meeting.
Almost eight years after that confab, the women made legal history. On April 9, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the “Swiss Confederation had failed to comply with its duties” concerning climate change and had violated the plaintiffs’ rights to respect for private and family life. The verdict carries outsized importance because decisions by the court are binding across all 46 member states of the Council of Europe.
“The court recognized that climate change affects human rights now and in the future and that, as a result, countries need to adopt science-based targets to limit dangerous climate change,” says Lucy Maxwell, co-director of the Climate Litigation Network.
Elisabeth Stern, 76, has been a member of KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz since 2016 and now sits on its board. An ethnologist who has taught in California, Switzerland and Zimbabwe, she says the group’s intention has always been to use medical facts to push for tangible change.
...
The 2003 heat wave in Europe killed more than 72,000 people, according to United Nations figures; in France alone, the excess mortality rates for women were 75% higher than for men. …
Now the next phase of waiting begins. The Swiss Federal Office of Justice said it will analyze the judgment and “review what measures Switzerland will take in the future.” Viola Amherd, Switzerland’s president, was more blunt: “I would like to know what the grounds for it are,” she said.
While they wait, Baehr, Stern and their colleagues are enjoying a victory lap. Baehr says she has nothing but admiration for the women, and feels an almost familial bond with them. “I had a strong relationship with my German grandmother and I really like them,” she says. “They’re great women who’ve devoted thousands of hours to this cause.”
Stern is just as complimentary, calling Baehr “the brains” of the campaign and describing her fellow plaintiffs as “agents of change.”
“Statistically speaking, we are not going to be here in 10 years,” Stern says, “so we are doing this for future generations.” With apologies, she then cut the interview short. It was time to pack and catch a train to the Swiss capital Bern — for a celebration party.
‘Absurd verdict’
As environmental groups celebrated the ruling by the Strasbourg court, newspaper editorials said the decision would fan fears that the judiciary was getting involved in politics.
"Absurd verdict against Switzerland: Strasbourg pursues climate policy from the judge's bench," the center-right Neue Zuercher Zeitung (NZZ) newspaper wrote.
Describing the ruling as "activist jurisprudence" that could pave the way for "all kinds of claims", the paper said the elderly plaintiffs were ultimately pawns of environmental lobbies that used the court to circumvent democratic debate.
Switzerland, where referendums regularly test the limits of national policymaking, has committed to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030, from 1990 levels.
The government had proposed stronger measures to deliver the goal, but voters rebuffed them in a 2021 referendum.
Under the headline "We don't want climate justice", national daily Blick called the court's ruling "questionable" and warned it was likely to deepen divisions over climate policy.
"And in European politics, it should be noted, this plays into the hands of those who smell foreign judges everywhere," the paper wrote.
The Court's ruling against the Swiss government does not only matter for Switzerland, but for all 46 countries which are signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights.
This is the first time a regional human rights court has ruled that countries can violate human rights by failing to reduce their climate-warming emissions fast enough.
The Court said it interpreted the European Convention on Human Rights language on a right to private and family life to encompass a right to effective protection by governments from climate change's adverse impacts on lives, health, well-being and quality of life.
Any climate and human rights case brought before a judge in Europe's national courts will now need to consider the top human rights court's ruling in whatever decision they make.
While the outcome of the Swiss women's case is not legally binding in jurisdictions outside Europe, experts expect international courts will consider the ruling in future judgments.
Three other international tribunals — the International Court of Justice, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea — are also writing advisory opinions now on states' obligations on climate change.
In Newsweek we read
As a growing number of legal experts, scientists, and former prosecutors have recently begun positing, the fossil fuel industry's knowing generation and coverup of the climate crisis may constitute a range of criminal offenses. Indeed, the facts described in these civil suits could support charges including criminal fraud, conspiracy and racketeering, reckless endangerment, criminal damage, causing or risking catastrophe, and criminally anticompetitive practices. They could even support charges of homicide.
This, the most serious of crimes, is committed when a person or corporation contributes to or accelerates any death with a culpable mental state. Given the escalating body count from climate-driven heat waves, wildfires, storms, and other extreme weather events, and the mounting evidence that fossil fuel companies acted with clear knowledge of the dangerousness of their conduct, it may already be possible to show that Big Oil's actions satisfy both requirements.
So, it's no wonder that Big Oil executives like Darren Woods want to obscure this history. Like many unreformed criminals, fossil fuel companies want to pin the blame for their lethal conduct on anyone—everyone—but themselves.
A Few More Pleasantries
Rich countries met the goal of providing $100 billion for poorer nations to cope with climate change in 2022, albeit two years late, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reported according to Reuters. Critics noted that the amount falls far short what developing nations need, and that a large part of the $115.6 billion the O.E.C.D. recorded was made up of loans to already highly indebted nations.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s biggest union ratified a new contract that intended to protect its members from political intrusion, HuffPost reported. The goal, the union said, is to guard government scientists working on environmental issues against attempts by a possible future administration to silence them. Under the Trump presidency, E.P.A. researchers were repeatedly sidelined amid what many believed to be an attack on science.