{"id":19572,"date":"2017-11-25T15:29:21","date_gmt":"2017-11-25T15:29:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dominiclevent.com\/blog\/?p=19572"},"modified":"2019-04-17T17:16:06","modified_gmt":"2019-04-17T17:16:06","slug":"climate-litigation-needs-to-become-a-mass-movement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dominiclevent.com\/blog\/climate-litigation-needs-to-become-a-mass-movement\/","title":{"rendered":"Climate Litigation Needs to Become a Mass Movement"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Things are not going well for the Earth. It goes well beyond the Trump administration\u2019s decision to eventually leave the Paris Agreement and Scott Pruitt\u2019s purge of the Environmental Protection Agency\u2019s scientific experts<\/a>. Even non-American efforts to curb climate change aren\u2019t going so well: Newly released data from the World Meteorological Organization<\/a> reveal a record increase in average global concentrations of CO2<\/sub> between 2015 and 2016. The United Nations Environment Programme recently issued its annual synthesis report on the emissions gap<\/a>, which is the difference between country-specific plans and reductions suggested by scientific consensus. One of the salient findings is that domestic carbon-reduction policies for the 168 countries that have ratified the Paris Agreement amount to just one-third<\/em> of what is necessary to limit global temperature rise to the Paris boundary of \u201cwell below 2 degrees Celsius.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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At the same time, and perhaps in response, litigating to protect the climate is on the rise. If climate litigation<\/em> is construed broadly, the past 20 years have seen 654 cases tried in the United States and at least 230 in other jurisdictions.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Is readying our collective casebooks and heading for the courthouse actually the best solution? Litigation, after all, is typically an inefficient method of achieving policy reform. The flagship public-interest law efforts during the civil rights movement provide instructive lessons here, particularly when academics and activists are increasingly extending historical parallels between environmental protection and racial justice<\/a> to climate change.<\/a> Even where many of the necessary conditions for successful legal reform strategies are present\u2014as with some of the landmark cases tried by NAACP lawyers\u2014there is a strong argument that lawsuits constrained by narrow legal doctrines and limited remedies will rarely be able to produce the kinds of sweeping economic changes <\/a>required to combat the approaching climate catastrophe.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And yet, even though the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (the parent treaty to the Paris Agreement) was drafted 25 years ago, we still do not have coherent global or local plans to limit destructive warming. The Paris Agreement was certainly the right direction after international law\u2019s failure to achieve binding targets, but bottom-up targets only work when national commitments are extremely ambitious. So, in sum, it seems that litigating to reform energy policy is both utterly inefficient and entirely necessary.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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