Climate change and human rights
Climate change is a human rights issue (as well as an issue under other headings).
A group of older Swiss women have won the first ever climate case victory in the European Court of Human Rights. The women, mostly in their 70s, said that their age and gender made them particularly vulnerable to the effects of heatwaves linked to climate change. The court said Switzerland’s efforts to meet its emission reduction targets had been woefully inadequate.
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The ruling is binding and can trickle down to influence the law in 46 countries in Europe including the UK.
The Court ruled that Switzerland had “failed to comply with its duties under the Convention concerning climate change” and that it had violated the right to respect for private and family life. It also found that “there had been critical gaps” in the country’s policies to tackle climate change including failing to quantify reductions in greenhouse gases – those gases that warm Earth’s atmosphere when we burn fossil fuels like oil, coal and gas.
Does anyone have to pay attention? Yes.
Decisions made in the European Court of Human Rights influence law across its 46 member states. Estelle Dehon KC, a barrister at Cornerstone Barristers in the UK, said “the judgement deals with difficult issues that also vex the UK courts in a way that may be persuasive. It comprehensively dismisses the argument that courts cannot rule on climate legal obligations because climate change is a global phenomenon or because action by one state is just a ‘drop in the ocean’,” she told BBC News.
So, it’s a start.
Here in Australia, there are politicians who are not exactly climate ‘skeptics,’ but who probably don’t agree anyway that atmospheric CO2 concentration has anything at all to do with the climate. These are mainly on the ‘conservative’ side of politics. But one such ‘conservative’ prime minister (John Howard) has maintained, when he can be bothered, that as Australia only contributes 1.5% or so of the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere, whatever Australia chose to do would not make much difference either way.
He was and still is wrong there, IMHO. A country which produces 1.5% of the global problem, is responsible for at least 1.5% of the global solution. And that ain’t trivial.
As well, every country in the world is in a minority position re greenhouse gas emissions, even China, the biggest of all with around a 10% contribution to the total. And they all use that as an argument for doing too little and too late, while pointing their fingers at anyone but themselves.
And so, the energy content of the atmosphere-hydrosphere-lithosphere-biosphere complex just keeps on rising, and the Earth’s climate tends increasingly towards that of Venus, with its ~!00% atmospheric CO2 load and surface temperature hotter even than that of Mercury, and at around the melting point of lead.
Mercury BTW is the closest planet to the Sun.
Reuters has a more detailed report of the judgement.