Greenhouse Lawsuits on the Way?

In recent decades, American businesses and institutions have been battered by lawsuits of all varieties as radical trial lawyers have sought to accomplish in the courtroom what the left has been unable to achieve through legislation. An opinion column in the August 7th International Herald Tribune suggested that UN-connected eco-Leninists, frustrated by the reluctance of the United States to adopt the Kyoto Protocol on "greenhouse" gasses, may attempt the same strategy on the international level.

"As the rich world keeps falling out over how to deal with global warming," wrote Andrew Simms of the London-based New Economics Foundation (NEF), "exasperated poor countries may come to the conclusion that when all else fails, it's time to go to court." Rulers of countries "that suffer most from the increasingly unpredictable and extreme weather delivered by global warming ... could test the emerging international legal architecture with a novel nation-to-nation tort-like action. Greenhouse gas emissions in the United States are already top of the league, especially on a per capita basis, and keep rising. Perhaps it is time to take the United States to court."

Simms points out that "the United States is the most obvious candidate" for an international greenhouse "tort action" and warns that "U.S. greenhouse gas emissions will come under increasing scrutiny as a consequence of the UN International Law Commission's draft declaration on state responsibility."

One possible anti-U.S. legal strategy, continues Simms, would be for the UN General Assembly to "request an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice. Countries committed to realistic action on cutting emissions might view the U.S. cheap energy policy as an insidious subsidy and implement anti-subsidy duties. The United States' legal remedy would then be to seek resolution of the dispute at the World Trade Organization, where multilateral attempts to use trade measures for environmental issues are viewed more positively than purely unilateral action."

Nor is the U.S. the only country that could find itself targeted in this fashion. Simms warns that "all industrialized countries are, per person, above a sustainable threshold," and should be "looking over their shoulders."

Simms, incidentally, is author of the NEF study An Environmental War Economy: The lessons of ecological debt and global warming, which uses Britain's World War II "war socialism" as a model for a "sustainable" global economy.