http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/05/science/earth/05climate.html?ref=science
By FELICITY BARRINGER, NY TIMES
Published: May 4, 2011
AND EARLIER LAWSUIT BY DANNY BLOOM - 2008 - REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://blogs.reuters.com/environment/2008/11/28/sue-world-leaders-1-billion-for-global-warming/
COMMENT
I’m not sure how this guy is being taken so seriously when he uses language like “manslaughter”. I agree that something should be done, but I think he is going about it the wrong way.
The government can prevent prevent global warming using various techniques such as adding a Pigouvian Tax on industries that pollute the environment and contribute to climate change, but if Dan Bloom wants to sue someone it should not be world leaders for not imposing the correct restrictions, but instead the corporations that contribute to global warming. Why sue governments when they are not the ones causing the problem. there are other organizations such as http://www.claimer.org/howwill that are trying to do just that. they should combine their claims together into a large lawsuit, but not at governments, but at the corporations.
RE:
In a global stunt, a U.S. environmental activist is poised to lodge a $1 billion damages class action lawsuit at the International Criminal Court (ICC) against all world leaders for failing to prevent global warming.
Activist and blogger Dan Bloom says he will sue world leaders for “intent to commit manslaughter against future generations of human beings by allowing murderous amounts of fossil fuels to be harvested, burned and sent into the atmosphere as CO2″.
He intends to lodge the lawsuit in the week starting Sunday, Dec. 6.
The prosecutor’s office at the ICC, the world’s first permanent court (pictured below right) for war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity, says it is allowed to receive
information on crimes that may fall within the court’s jurisdiction from any source.“Such information does not per se trigger a judicial proceeding,” the prosecutor’s office hastened to add.
The question is: will or should the prosecutor take on the case?
One might argue in defence that world leaders are in fact trying to impose climate-saving measures. In Vienna last year, almost all rich nations agreed to consider cuts in greenhouse emissions of 25-40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. Talks on a new climate treaty will be held in Poznan, Poland, from Dec. 1-12.
Rajendra Pachauri, head of the U.N. Climate Panel, says the cuts are needed to limit temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius, an amount seen by the EU, some other nations and many environmentalists as a threshold for “dangerous” climate change.
Granted then that there is growing consensus that climate change poses a real threat, is it not only world leaders who are failing to prevent global warming?
Perhaps the global collective of individuals, governments and industry is to blame and the ICC lawsuit a valid publicity stunt in the constant battle to raise awareness and prompt action?
Because it’s action we need — and now, right?
RE, nytimes.com
Advocates of stringent curbs on greenhouse gas emissions sued the federal government on Wednesday, arguing that key agencies had failed in their duty to protect the earth’s atmosphere as a public trust to be guarded for future generations.
Similar lawsuits are to be filed against states around the country, according to the plaintiffs, a coalition of groups concerned about climate change called Our Children’s Trust.
Most of the individual plaintiffs in the suit, filed in United States District Court in San Francisco, are teenagers, a decision apparently made to underscore the intergenerational nature of the public trust that the earth’s atmosphere represents. More novel, however, is the suit’s reliance on the public trust doctrine, which dates to Roman times.
That doctrine has been invoked in cases involving the protection of Chicago’s lakefront and of Mono Lake in the Sierra Nevada.
But in some ways the suit parallels a current case, brought by several states against the five largest utilities in the country, that frames greenhouse gas emissions as a public nuisance, legal experts noted.
Last month, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on issues in that case, including the standing of the states to bring such lawsuits. Several justices expressed skepticism: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, for example, questioned whether the courts were being asked to intervene in an arena in which the executive branch — specifically the Environmental Protection Agency — has the requisite expertise to act.
The E.P.A. has determined that greenhouse gases pose a danger to the public health and welfare and are therefore subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act. It has argued that this regulatory process, which is already under way, should not be pre-empted by the courts.
Legal experts interviewed on Wednesday said they were unsure whether the new lawsuit could gain legal traction, given that it presents issues that overlap in some ways with the public nuisance case. The Supreme Court is expected to issue an opinion on that case this spring.
Courts that hear these cases will be heavily influenced by the Supreme Court’s opinion, said Michael B. Gerrard, director of Columbia University’s Center for Climate Change Law.
Mr. Gerrard said that by filing such lawsuits, environmentalists were “trying to use all available options in view of the failure of Congress” to act on greenhouse gas emissions. The House approved a sweeping bill to limit such emissions in 2009, but a more cautious effort died in the Senate last year. And the recently elected Republican majority in the House is threatening to strip the E.P.A. of regulatory powers related to global warming.
Lisa Heinzerling, an environmental law expert at Georgetown University, said of the new suit, “Part of this is keeping the issue alive in lots of different settings and having all the branches, including the courts, continually react to it.”
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