Climate Depot Response: Here we go again.
See: Climate Depot’s Morano & other skeptics ‘sentenced to death’ for ‘Crimes against Humanity’
Flashback 2006: GRIST’S DAVID ROBERTS CALLED FOR NUREMBERG-STYLE TRIALS FOR GLOBAL WARMING SKEPTICS
Warmists declare: ‘Nuremberg-style trials must be held’
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/02/fossil-fuels-climate-change-crimes-against-humanity
02.05.2019
By Kate Aronoff – A fellow at the Type Media Center and a contributing writer to the Intercept.
Just one hundred fossil fuel producers — including privately held and state-owned companies — have been responsible for 71 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions released since 1988, emissions that have already killed at least tens of thousands of people through climate-fueled disasters worldwide…
More immediately, a push to try fossil-fuel executives for crimes against humanity could channel some much-needed populist rage at the climate’s 1 percent, and render them persona non grata in respectable society — let alone Congress or the UN, where they today enjoy broad access. Making people like Exxon CEO Darren Woods or Shell CEO Ben van Beurden well known and widely reviled would put names and faces to a problem too often discussed in the abstract. The climate fight has clear villains. It’s long past time to name and shame them.
Left unchecked, the death toll of climate change could easily creep up into the hundreds of millions, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in turn unleashing chaos and suffering that’s simply impossible to project. An independent report commissioned by twenty governments in 2012 found that climate impacts are already causing an estimated four hundred thousand deaths per year.
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That we need to instead strip fossil fuels from the global economy isn’t up for debate. Without the increasingly distant-seeming deployment of speculative, so-called negative emissions technologies, coal usage will have to decline by 97 percent, oil by 87 percent, and gas by 74 percent by 2050 for us to have a halfway decent shot at keeping warming below 1.5 degrees celsius. That’s what it will take to avert pervasive, catastrophic climate impacts that will destabilize the very foundations of society. (Keeping warming to a more dangerous 2.0 degrees celsius will require decarbonization that’s almost as abrupt.)
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Technically speaking, what fossil-fuel companies do isn’t genocide. Low-lying islands and communities around the world are and will continue to be the worst hit by climate impacts.
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Rather, the fossil industry’s behavior constitutes a Crime Against Humanity in the classical sense: “a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack,” including murder and extermination. Unlike genocide, the UN clarifies, in the case of crimes against humanity, it is not necessary to prove that there is an overall specific intent. It suffices for there to be a simple intent to commit any of the acts listed…The perpetrator must also act with knowledge of the attack against the civilian population and that his/her action is part of that attack.
Fossil-fuel executives may not have intended to destroy the world as we know it. And climate change may not look like the kinds of attacks we’re used to. But they’ve known what their industry is doing to the planet for a long time, and the effects are likely to be still more brutal if the causes are allowed to continue.
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After the war, though, the ensuing Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals wrote an important precedent into international law, establishing that “crimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities, and only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes can the provisions of international law be enforced.” At that point, there was no legal framework to understand violence on the scale of those that Hitler’s regime had just carried out, let alone to punish it. To remedy that the international community came together to create and implement one.
On climate, the precedent set in Nuremberg offers other lessons as well. It’s hard to think of a problem more widely attributed to “abstract entities” than global warming, allegedly the product of some unquenchable, ubiquitous human thirst for new stuff. That old Pogo cartoon still holds sway in the popular imagination: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
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If the Nuremberg Trials were outside the box for international law at the time, trying fossil-fuel executives for crimes against humanity might well be in the stratosphere. For one, the United States is not a party to the Rome Statute, so unless the UN Security Council were to grant a US court jurisdiction over the matter — which hardly seems likely — a case would have to happen in a country that is for anything to go before the ICC.
Full article here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/02/fossil-fuels-climate-change-crimes-against-humanity
