The climate lawyers’ grand buffet

Climate activists would be wise not to get too carried away by the International Court of Justice’s “historic” and “landmark” ruling on Thursday (AEST) that opens the way for countries to sue for reparations over damage caused by climate change.

That may, indeed, be the nub of the 500-page judgment handed down by the top United Nations court’s Japanese president, Yuji Iwasawa, on behalf of all 15 judges, including, given the context, one each from India and China.

The judgment delivered by a court that claims global jurisdiction is a recipe for global legal chaos that will inevitably play into the hands of green extremists and the lawyers who see rich pickings in getting the briefs that are likely to follow the ICJ’s decision, even though it is specifically a “non-binding” decision.

Mr Iwasawa and his fellow judges may feel they have well served the cause of defending countries against the effect of global warming by concluding that “failure of a state to take appropriate action to protect the climate system … may constitute an internationally wrongful act”, while declaring the climate crisis to be “an existential problem of planetary proportions that imperils all forms of life and the very health of our planet”.

A clean, healthy and sustainable environment is a human right, the United Nations court added, making the point that countries that did not develop the most ambitious possible plans to deal with climate change would be in breach of the Paris climate accords, with international law applying also to countries (such as the US) that were not signatories.

This provides the setting for what is likely to be an international environmental lawyers’ picnic. The process that might flow from the court’s judgment looks at best intractable and at worst absurd, as so much about the United Nations and its agencies invariably is.

How much, for example, might any country or corporation have to pay in the event of a successful claim – and to whom – given the expansive estimates published by the journal Nature that between 2000 and 2019 there was $US2.8 trillion ($4.23 trillion) in damage and losses caused by climate change – some $US16m an hour.

It is no wonder that it was lawyers who appeared to be cheering even louder than climate extremists when the judgment was pronounced in The Hague by Mr Iwasawa. They look likely to be the big winners from the international legal chaos resulting from the ICJ’s misplaced climate change zeal.