In an astonishing verdict, Europe’s highest human rights court ruled on April 9 that countries must better protect their citizens from “the consequences of climate change.” [emphasis, links added]
In the landmark ruling, setting a legal precedent across 46 member states of the Council of Europe, the court sided with a group of women called KlimaSeniorinnen or “Senior Women for Climate Protection.”
The elderly Swiss ladies claimed that their lives were endangered by heat waves caused by “climate change.”
In the court’s judgment, there is no uncertainty that heat waves are induced — as “scientific knowledge” supposedly makes clear — by fossil fuel use in modern industrial civilization.
This is the first time an international court ruled on a climate-related human rights issue, in the first decision confirming governments have a legal obligation to “protect” people from the alleged effects of “climate change.”
According to the court,
“[I]nadequate State action to combat climate change exacerbated the risks of harmful consequences and subsequent threats for the enjoyment of human rights – threats already recognized by governments worldwide. The current situation therefore involved compelling present-day conditions, confirmed by scientific knowledge, which the Court could not ignore in its role as a judicial body tasked with the enforcement of human rights.”
The ECHR’s established law now requires no need for democratically passed legislation.
Are we at an authoritarian point of inflection, where concerns about climate change are too important to be left to the will of ordinary people? Is the law a Trojan horse to breach the citadels of democracy?
Is It Heat Or Cold?
According to Worldometers, Swiss women have the world’s fourth-highest life expectancy of 86 years, ranking behind Hong Kong, Macao, and Japan.
Yet the KlimaSeniorinnen convinced the august judges at the ECHR that they were threatened by “heat waves.” Questions might arise about how already long life expectancies might be made even longer.
Worries about “heat waves” in the cool temperate climes of Western Europe might also seem rather farfetched.
The Earth has experienced slight and mostly beneficial general warming since the end (around 1850) of the Little Ice Age – when famine and starvation affected much of Europe.
Suing governments over their lack of “action” in avoiding “too much hotness” in Europe is as outlandish as the comments about “global boiling” by the reliably hyperbolic United Nations Secretary-General António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres.
Not mentioned in court were inconvenient facts such as the statistics comparing deaths from excessive cold to those from excessive heat. As Kip Hansen points out, a simple Google Scholar search on heat versus cold deaths has the following responses:
“In UK regions, cold-related mortality currently accounts for more than one order of magnitude more deaths than heat-related mortality (around 61 and 3 deaths per 100,000 population per year, respectively).
“In Australian cities, approximately 33 and 2 deaths per 100,000 population are associated every year with cold and heat, respectively. Between 2000 and 2010, 3.9% of the total mortality was attributed to cold, and 1.2% to heat.”
In another study of “the global, regional, and national mortality burden associated with non-optimal ambient temperatures” published in The Lancet – Planetary Health, it was found that, “…9.43% of all deaths were cold-related and 0.91% were heat-related.”
That is, cold killed more than heat by a factor of over 10. Curiously, the elderly Swiss ladies seem far more afraid of heat than cold, despite the overwhelming evidence that it is the cold that kills far more often.
Climate Lawfare Is Not New
To be sure, the KlimaSeniorinnen were not without powerful supporters in their legal quest. The sleuthing journalism of Chris Morrison is revealing.
Mr. Morrison suggests that the real plaudits over the legal win belong not to the elderly Swiss ladies but “to the elite billionaire paymasters behind lawfare activists such as Greenpeace and Client Earth” who financed the legal action.
Client Earth, for example, is supported by Sir Christopher Hohn’s Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, Hohn is also one of the funders of Extinction Rebellion activists, known for their vandalism and the blocking of ordinary people going about their business (or, in some cases, rushing to the hospital for health emergencies).
He is also a big contributor to the European Climate Foundation. Others involved in financing these activist climate groups include the green billionaires Michael Bloomberg and Jeremy Grantham.
In the push for “Net Zero” decarbonization policies around the world, rich and powerful foundations have been relentlessly supporting an avalanche of “climate lawfare” initiatives in the West.
In early 2020, the UK Court of Appeal’s decision to stop the expansion of Heathrow Airport was one outcome of the lawfare waged by climate zealots.
As one contemporary commentator put it: “This decision will surely open up a whole new Pandora’s box and allow the likes of Greenpeace to legally challenge any and every project they don’t like in the future.”
The ECHR verdict is lawfare gone one step further. Not only is it kosher to stop large infrastructure projects that allegedly affect the climate adversely, but governments now can be compelled, on human rights grounds, to act against normal economic activity that allegedly leads to “climate change” and “extreme weather” events.
By requiring European governments to suppress the emission of greenhouse gases on human rights grounds, any economic activity involving the use of fossil fuels – which provide over 80% of total global energy consumption – is now fair game for radical climate policymakers.
What The Elderly Swiss Ladies Have Wrought
Climate lawfare is now a well-established route to avoid the checks and balances of democratic legislation. It subverts the legal system of a country, often with the help of activist judges, to impose the ideological preferences of an elite of the climate industrial complex on wider society.
The total number of climate change court cases is growing worldwide and has more than doubled since 2017 according to a 2023 report collating data to December 31, 2022.
The report, published by the UN Environment Program (UNEP) and the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, boasts “that climate litigation is becoming an integral part of securing climate action and justice.”
Climate policies that cannot be implemented by democratic means are now pushed through by lawfare campaigns backed by powerful climate-focused foundations.
In June 2021, Swiss voters rejected a new law that was proposed to help the country meet its target for cutting carbon emissions to tackle the alleged “climate crisis”.
The legislation, which included taxes on car fuel and flight tickets, was opposed by 51.6% of the electorate under Switzerland’s system of direct democracy. That popular vote against radical climate policies is now neutered and ordinary people [voters] have effectively been silenced.
Climate lawfare, as the elderly Swiss ladies and their deep-pocketed climate-zealot backers have found, is one way around the populist backlash against immiserating climate policies pursued by virtue-signaling European governments dominated by the green parties.
Even as deaths from extreme weather events have been reduced by 98% over the past century, the West’s obsession over reducing CO2 emissions at any cost never ceases to amaze those not convinced by what the eminent physicist Richard Lindzen called the “absurdity of the conventional global warming narrative.”
What well-intentioned widespread hardships might the elderly Swiss ladies have wrought?
Read more at Forbes
I can remember back some years ago the EDF using kids in their fake Global Warming/Climate Change ads, The Earth dahs gone through Climate Change in the past its just today we have a bunch of well financed useful idiots trying to convince us to force us to return to the Stoneage and sacrificing people like the Pagan Aztecs Incans and Myans did
Earth is doing well. Socialism is sick, needs money money and more money.