24/10/2018

These Kids And Young Adults Want Their Day In Court On Climate Change

The Conversation -  | 

Young people will spend more years living with the consequences of climate policies than their elders. Robin Loznak, courtesy of Our Children's Trust, CC BY-NC-SA
Humanity must rapidly decrease greenhouse gas emissions to avoid catastrophic levels of global warming, climate scientists have warned for decades. But America’s president has both feet on the fossil fuel accelerator.
One way to force President Donald Trump to put the brakes on his dangerous “energy-dominance” policy is a lawsuit filed on behalf of 21 young people. Using a barrage of legal motions, the administration’s lawyers are scrambling to keep this case, known as Juliana v. United States, from going to trial.
As environmental law professors, we have written about this remarkable case and are teaching our students about it. This case positions the climate crisis squarely in the realm of fundamental civil rights jurisprudence, where we believe it belongs.


Our Children’s Trust plaintiff Aji Piper gave a TED talk in which he explains why he and 20 other young people are suing the federal government over climate change.
A long time coming
Spearheaded by Our Children’s Trust, a nonprofit, this lawsuit is pending in a federal court in Oregon. It challenges U.S. energy policies on the basis that they are destabilizing the climate and violating established constitutional rights to personal security. The case originally took aim at the Obama administration when lawyers first filed the case in 2015. It now targets the Trump administration.
The 21 youth plaintiffs, who now range in age from 11 to 22 years old, are seeking to require the federal defendants to prepare and implement an enforceable national remedial plan to phase out the excessive greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.
The trial is scheduled to begin Oct. 29 unless delayed by the Supreme Court. The district court in Oregon issued a decision reaffirming the case’s core claims on Oct. 15.
Currently, the fate of this case hangs in the balance due to a motion to stop the proceedings, filed by Justice Department lawyers in the U.S. Supreme Court just 11 days before the scheduled trial. The Supreme Court had refused the Trump administration’s prior effort to throw out the lawsuit in July 2018. This time, the court temporarily put the trial on hold the next day.
Attorneys for the youth plaintiffs have since filed a response with the Supreme Court to this latest of many attempts by Justice Department lawyers to stop the climate trial from going forward.

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Civil and constitutional rights
Should the Juliana case succeed, there would be a court-supervised federal plan to shrink the nation’s carbon footprint at a rate necessary to stave off disastrous levels of climate change.
Environmental lawsuits typically rely on statutes or regulations. But Juliana is a civil rights case. It bores down to legal bedrock by asserting that people have constitutional rights to inherit a stable climate system capable of sustaining human lives and liberties.
The judicial role in this case is analogous to court-supervised remedies aimed at ending official school segregation after the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling.
The district court has rightly described Juliana as “no ordinary lawsuit.” As the youth plaintiffs assert, there remains only “an extremely limited amount of time to preserve a habitable climate system for our country.”

Role of the courts
U.S. fossil fuel production surged during Barack Obama’s presidency even though he did support renewable energy and he engaged in climate-related diplomacy. As the window of opportunity to avert what UN Secretary General António Guterres calls the “direct existential threat” of climate change is about to close under Trump’s leadership at a time when Republicans control both chambers of Congress, checks and balances in government matter more than ever before.
The U.S., after all, has three, not two, branches of government. In the Constitution, the Founders wisely created an independent judiciary and gave it the responsibility of preventing the other branches from trammeling upon the fundamental liberties of citizens.
In the Juliana case, youth plaintiffs are asserting well-established rights under the Constitution’s due process and equal protection clauses to personal security, family autonomy and property. They contend that the government’s fossil fuel policies jeopardize human life, private property and civilization itself.
They further assert rights secured by the public trust doctrine, a principle with ancient roots requiring government to hold and protect essential resources as a sustaining endowment for citizens, in the present and the future.
Oregon District Court Judge Ann Aiken issued a landmark decision in 2016 upholding both the Constitution’s due process rights and public trust rights, allowing the case to proceed.
At that time, she declared, “I have no doubt that the right to a climate system capable of sustaining human life is fundamental to a free and ordered society.” Numerous world-class experts plan to testify during the trial in her courtroom to explain the grave threats posed by Trump’s energy policies.

Not just here
Judicial alarm over governmental failure to confront the climate emergency is growing around the world, resulting in decisions in Pakistan, the Netherlands, and Colombia that ordered the authorities to act. These cases are all based on similar legal arguments: that governments have an obligation to protect their citizens from climate change.
A Dutch appeals court, for example, has ordered the Dutch government to cut emissions by 25 percent from 1990 levels by 2020.
In trying to get the case thrown out, Justice Department lawyers for the Trump and Obama administrations alike have contested the jurisdiction of the district court over these claims. The Trump lawyers also argue that a 50-day trial would impose an undue burden and cause irreparable harm.
But for the Supreme Court to stop the case on the eve of trial would disregard the standard judicial process. The courts use trials to develop a full record to determine constitutional violations.
In our view, following the controversies and turmoil surrounding Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, the credibility of the judiciary itself is fragile. Rallies planned around the country in support of the litigation could soon turn to protests against a perceived abrogation of fair judicial process if the case does not go to trial. We think that this climate lawsuit should force everyone to see what a fleeting – and terrifying – moment in history this is. With humanity’s very ability to survive on the planet hanging in the balance, the stakes could not be higher.

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Can Humanity Get Out Of Its Latest ‘Progress Trap’?

The Tyee - Crawford Kilian

A review of ‘The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene.’
Was farming one of humanity’s biggest mistakes? This and other big questions explored in ‘The Human Planet.’ Photo illustration from Magasin Pittoresque, 1857 (Shutterstock).
The Human Planet:
How We Created the Anthropocene
Simon Lewis & Mark A. Maslin
Pelican (2018)
Given the grim prospects offered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its recent Special Report, this book might offer a way out. But it won’t be an easy way, and it won’t be the status quo.
Like climate change itself, The Human Planet begins with an obscure squabble among scientists and then turns into a breathtaking new view of humanity’s past and future as a geological and ecological force. Some scientists think we should start calling the present geological epoch the “Anthropocene” — the period in which humans dominate events on this planet. Other scientists think the idea is ridiculous; they want to stick with “Holocene,” meaning “completely recent.” Never mind that they’re talking about the past 12,000 years, which geologically is just another interglacial period among many.
The debate might seem too trivial to care about, but as authors Simon Lewis and Mark A. Maslin demonstrate, the stakes are very high indeed.
They show that scientists since the 18th century have recognized human influence on the face of the earth. What we have learned since then, and especially in the past 50 years, shows our influence has grown only greater; we just don’t want to admit it, because then we’d have to try to clean up the mess we’ve made.
Lewis and Maslin argue that humanity has gone through four major transitions since we left 200,000 years of hunting and gathering. Each transition has been marked by a dramatic access to energy and an equally dramatic increase in information.

Progress and progress traps
We emerged from the apelike human phase thanks to fire and language. Together, those advantages made us apex predators: we could learn to hunt and forage from our elders and then gain more energy by cooking the food we gathered. After 200,000 years some of us still live that way, but it was what Lewis and Maslin call a “progress trap.” After modern humans left Africa, they effectively exterminated most of the larger mammals they encountered: the mammoths, giant sloths, sabre-tooth tigers, and countless others. In effect, they overshot their resources.
So the first transition, they say, was about 10,500 years ago with the beginning of agriculture. Some have said farming was our biggest mistake: it supported more of us, but at the cost of more disease, poor nutrition, grinding labour, and hierarchical societies that turned into warring empires. But we gained more energy from domesticating animals, and more information by the invention of writing.
“Serendipitously,” the authors write, “farming created environmental conditions across our home planet that were unusually stable. This gave time for large-scale civilizations to develop.”
That is, humans launched global warming not in the 1800s but with the first agriculture. By burning off forests to make farmland, we began to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — coincidentally, just as the earth was moving on schedule back into another glacial period. Over the next few thousand years farming spread across Asia, Africa, Europe, and much of the Americas, keeping the planet just a little too warm for a return of the glaciers.
The authors argue that the Europeans accidentally triggered the Little Ice Age by marching into Mexico and South America with guns, germs, and steel — especially germs. Diseases like smallpox and measles travelled on Indigenous trade routes far ahead of the Spanish and Portuguese. In the century after the conquest of Mexico, Lewis and Maslin claim, 50 million Indigenous people died of disease or slavery.
In that truly genocidal century, farming civilizations collapsed from Brazil to North America. The survivors left the cities and temples they’d built and reverted to village-level farming. Forest and jungle took over the old empires before the Iberians rode in to take over the villages.
Lewis and Maslin argue that as forests reoccupied the farmlands that had fed 50 million people, they absorbed enough carbon dioxide to trigger the Little Ice Age. Antarctic ice cores show a drop in global carbon dioxide starting in 1520 that did not begin to rise again until 1610.
Agriculture itself was a progress trap, and civilizations based on it could collapse in a protracted drought or other natural disaster. But the conquest of the Americas was also a second human transition: an escape from agriculture to profit-driven enterprise: “Western Europeans began colonizing large areas of the rest of the world, creating the first globalized economy.”
Lewis and Maslin call this the “Columbian exchange,” when humans, animals, plants, and microbes established themselves in places they had never been before. Energy from new foods, and information from printing, helped drive this new transition. Farming resumed in the Americas to feed and clothe the Europeans, using the labour of African slaves.

The Great Acceleration
That led to the third transition: Europeans no longer needed on the farm became mill workers and coal miners. Scientific progress encouraged coal-fuelled industries and the telegraph spread information worldwide. Then, just a century and a half later, after two world wars, “The fourth, and so far final, transition as driven by a further globe-spanning organizational change.”
Since 1945 this “Great Acceleration” has permitted the tripling of the human population and the crowding-out of the rest of the planet’s biosphere. Lewis and Maslin tell us: “Populations of fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals have declined by an average of 58 percent over the last forty years… On land, if you weighed all the large mammals on the planet today, just 3 percent of that mass is living in the wild. The rest is made up of human flesh, some 30 percent of the total, with domesticated animals that feed us contributing the remaining 67 percent.”
Each of the transitions has been a progress trap, and every escape into a new way of life has relied on more energy and more information. The authors note that civilizations can collapse, but not into a previous way of life. Farmers don’t go back to hunting and gathering; they desert their kings, priests, and cities and go back to small-scale farming. When the first global society of the early 1900s collapsed after the First World War, countries reverted to tariffs and relatively small-scale capitalism — and large-scale wars. If the Trump regime has its way, we’ll see a similar reversion.
But Lewis and Maslin note that each transition arrives faster than the previous one, and a fifth transition could be upon us very soon. The Great Acceleration is accelerating. In the past 40 years, we have digitized 500 times the information coded biologically in the human species. We consume more energy than ever before, and our demand for it will increase by 48 per cent between 2012 and 2040. More people are travelling and exchanging more information.

Accelerating into a wall?
The authors argue that “The simultaneous rapid increases in the number of people, level of energy provision and quantity of information being generated, driven by the positive feedback loops of reinvestment of profit, and ever-growing scientific knowledge, suggest that our current mode of living is the least probable of our three future options. Such rapid, radical changes suggest that a collapse or a switch to a new mode of living is more likely.”
Climate change, Lewis and Maslin say, makes collapse look likely. Violent weather events create food shortages, population displacements, rebuilding costs, and economic dislocation as global supply chains break down. The problem for the Anthropocene, they argue, is “how to equalize resource consumption across the world within sustainable environmental limits.”
This involves moving much faster to renewable energy sources and leaving the damn fossil fuels in the ground. It also involves carbon capture and sequestration, on a far greater scale than was accomplished by the destruction of the American indigenous civilizations. So we might plant new forests and burn their wood for energy while trapping and burying the carbon dioxide emissions.
Lewis and Maslin don’t say much about what an egalitarian, low-emission global society would look like, nor how we might get there. They suggest some form of universal basic income that people could live on without having to take climate-damaging jobs, and they argue for “Half-Earth” — taking just half the planet’s land and seas for human use, and leaving the other half for the rest of the biosphere. So we might establish long corridors running north-south or from sea level to mountain tops, enabling plants and animals alike to find a survivable climate. Meanwhile, we’d have to find ways to feed, shelter, and clothe 10 billion people out of our half.
Such measures may sound both odd and impossible, but they’re more likely to save us than expressing pious ambitions for 1.5ºC while continuing to pump oil and gas to all takers. Those who read The Human Planet will have a clearer picture of the trap we’re in — and of how our ancestors got us out of comparable traps.

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Is Socialism The Answer To The Climate Catastrophe?

The Guardian - 

Our leaders privilege GDP over the environment because the economy must expand year after year – or else the world tips into crisis
‘From a human perspective, the argument “if we don’t mine the stuff someone else will” is obscene. Within the logic of capitalism it makes perfect sense, since amoral self-interest underpins the entire system’ Photograph: Philipp Guelland/EPA 
A spectre (or, if you prefer the earlier translation, a “frightful hobgoblin”) is haunting Europe – and, indeed, much of the world. This new, socialistic bogey has been shaking its chains at pollsters for some years now.
In 2016 a survey revealed that, on balance, British people rather disliked capitalism – and more of them regarded socialism favourably than negatively.
That year, a Harvard study found that a majority of Americans aged between 18 and 29 did not support capitalism. A survey early in 2018 suggested that about a third of US millennials actually self-identified as some form of socialist.
In Australia, the Centre for Independent Studies commissioned YouGov to put the same questions here – and received an even more forthright response. A remarkable 58% of those born between 1980 and 1996 said that, yes, they thought socialism sounded rather good.
Such results become less startling when alongside the latest report by the IPCC, a document that paints a frankly apocalyptic picture of what the economic status quo has wrought. The scientific consensus compiled by 133 experts from 6,000 scholarly publications holds that the planet will soon crash through the barrier of a 1.5 degree temperature rise, with horrendous consequences for the natural environment and, of course, millions of people.
We’re locked into a frankly carcinogenic model, predicated on unplanned but relentless growth
That’s if we’re lucky.
“[T]he new report’s worst-case scenario is, actually, a best case,” argues David Wallace-Wells. “In fact, it is a beyond-best-case scenario. What has been called a genocidal level of warming is already our inevitable future. The question is how much worse than that it will get … We are on track for four degrees of warming, more than twice as much as most scientists believe is possible to endure without inflicting climate suffering on hundreds of millions or threatening at least parts of the social and political infrastructure we call, grandly, ‘civilization’.”
In a rational society, an imminent threat to planetary civilisation would constitute rather a big deal.
In our society, not so much.
According to the Media Matters monitoring service, in America, where president Trump describes climate change as a Chinese hoax (he has, he says, “a natural instinct for science”), most newspapers didn’t even mention the IPCC report on their homepages.
In Australia, Scott Morrison reacted by pledging not to spend money on global climate conferences and “all that sort of nonsense”, while the deputy prime minister Michael McCormack boasted that the government would not change policy on the basis of “some sort of report”.
As for opposition leader Bill Shorten, he declared his support for renewables … but then insisted that “coal will be part of our energy and export mix going forward”.
Most of us know, deep in our guts, that the inability of the political class to acknowledge (let alone act on) the threat of global warming doesn’t stem exclusively from the machinations of media barons or the personal pusillanimity of individual politicians. It’s increasingly difficult to ignore the profound incompatibility between serious climate action and an economic system predicated upon the pursuit of profit in a ceaseless war of all against all.
When our leaders privilege GDP over the environment, they do so because the economy must expand year after year, decade after decade – or else the world tips into crisis.
We’re locked into a frankly carcinogenic model, predicated on unplanned but relentless growth, conducted with complete indifference to long-term consequences.
Marx defined capitalism as a regime of universal commodity production, in which goods were created not because they were useful but because they could be exchanged. It was, he said, a society in which things ruled people, rather than the other way around. What does that mean? Think of Morrison and his friends in the House of Representatives genuflecting before a lump of coal and you’ve got a pretty good picture.
From a human perspective, the argument “if we don’t mine the stuff someone else will” is obscene. Within the logic of capitalism it makes perfect sense, since amoral self-interest underpins the entire system.
Humans can and should collectively decide how they interact with the world
As a result, the measures for which the IPCC pleads – massive changes in transportation, industry, cities and land use as part of a thoroughgoing transition away from fossil energy – become almost impossible to implement.
Many mainstream pundits can avoid acknowledging the profound failure of capitalism. Their generation lived through the long post-war boom; they’ll be safely dead before the worst hits.
The Wentworth byelection spurred considerable liberal excitement about the return of that legendary creature, the “sensible centrist”.
But for millenials, who can expect to see the IPCC’s predictions unfold, what does liberal centrism – or indeed capitalism as a whole – offer? It’s not just that the scientific consensus warns of the ruination of the planet. It’s also that capitalist business-as-usual means the steady destruction of social welfare, a preposterously unaffordable housing sector, an increasingly sinister security state and a political culture dominated by race-baiting charlatans.
In the US, Bernie Sanders’ tilt at the presidency helped overcome the cold war taboo on the ‘s’-word, something underscored by the emphatic victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The Democratic Socialists of America have seen their membership increase from about 5,000 to more than 35,000 in the course of the last two years. The socialist podcast Chapo Trap House has built a cult following; Jacobin magazine has become so popular that it has relaunched the iconic British socialist publication, Tribune.
That, of course, comes in the wake of Jeremy Corbyn’s success in steering the Labour party away from Blairism and back to old-style social democracy, a venture that rests, in part, on the new willingness of young people to embrace the socialist label.
In Australia, the veteran activist Steve Jolly has managed to unite Melbourne’s usually fractious left as the Victorian Socialists (full disclosure: I’m a member), in a grassroots campaign for the forthcoming state election financially supported by the Electrical Trade Union and the National Union of Workers.
Yes, it’s all small beer so far, particularly when compared to the scale of the unfolding crisis.
But there’s every reason to expect various versions of socialism to play an increasingly important role in discussions about the climate catastrophe.
After all, they all begin from the conviction that humans can and should collectively decide how they interact with the world.
Let’s remember that, for the overwhelming majority of recorded history, people created most objects to use, rather than exchange.
In the age of nanotechnology and AIs and the Mars rover, do we truly think ourselves incapable of similar agency today? If we accept democratic control over politics, why shouldn’t we exercise the same scrutiny over economics, so that production becomes subordinate to human need rather than global markets?
Isn’t that the obvious (perhaps only) solution to the environmental crisis – the conscious direction of resources away from fossil energy and towards planetary repair?
Marx and Engels began their famous manifesto by invoking that spectre terrifying the established order of Europe. But they never presented its victory as somehow pre-ordained.
On the contrary, they suggested that fundamental social divisions would culminate either in “a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large” or in what they called “the common ruin of the contending classes”.
The IPCC’s given us a terrifying image of what ruination could involve. It’s well past time we started talking about the alternative.

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