The old ladies of Switzerland have had their day in the sun – treble Factor 50s all round – but the real plaudits for the recent idiotic climate change verdict from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) belong to the elite billionaire paymasters behind lawfare activists such as Greenpeace and Client Earth. Greenpeace bankrolled the Swiss ladies and Client Earth supplied some of the legal arguments. The case is likely to throw a spotlight on the role that a few moneyed forces are playing in using the judicial system to enforce their insane Net Zero collectivisation on populations around the world. In Europe, the billionaires, who happily fund XR vandals as well as high-earning lawyers, are seeking to redefine the meaning of democracy. In the United States, as we shall see, extensive judge grooming is being undertaken to help the judiciary come to the correct political verdicts in the growing number of climate lawfare cases.
In its way, the ECHR verdict that politicians should somehow protect citizens from alleged human-caused climate change was a punishment beating handed down after a 2021 referendum in Switzerland rowed back on Net Zero. Jessica Simor KC represented the Swiss women and frequently acts for Client Earth. After the verdict she noted: “In Switzerland it’s particularly problematic because they have referendums… the people decided they didn’t want it. This is something that comes up all the time… the conflict between this idea of democracy as entailing… rights which matter irrespective of what the majority decides.”
The stupidity of the ECHR verdict need not detail us for too long since it has been widely discussed elsewhere. But it is surely relevant that most bad weather events have shown little discernible rise in frequency over the last 100 years, while mortality from these events has dropped by 99%. Quite why the United Kingdom is a member of this cultural dead-end of a court with its ‘jurists’ defining law to open borders and save us from the weather is a mystery, but again it need not detain us at this point. Suffice to say it suits Greenpeace, Client Earth and Jessica Simor KC to have a tame, like-minded body of legal social justice warriors to agree on their elite view of what matters, irrespective of how people actually vote.
Condemnation of the ECHR verdict has been widespread, with Net Zero Watch stating that climate catastrophism now represents a clear and present threat to the rule of law and democracy. Director Andrew Montford noted an astonishingly broad interpretation of existing human rights laws that had alarming parallels with what was seen in 1930s Germany. “The judicial activism of the European Court looks very much like the judicial activism under National Socialism,” he added.
As we have seen with attempts to groom journalists and politicians to catastrophise the weather and promote Net Zero, the same wealthy names crop up again and again. So it is with the growing number of lawfare outfits. Greenpeace bankrolled the Swiss case and it collects cash from wealthy donors and foundations around the world. It seeks to remove hydrocarbons from human energy supplies and it is against nuclear energy. It is not clear how the old ladies of Switzerland will survive winter when the wind stops blowing and the sun doesn’t shine in their icy mountain redoubt.
Client Earth has been heavily supported by the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, the activist vehicle of Sir Christopher Hohn, one time paymaster of eco-vandals and law-breakers Extinction Rebellion. Hohn is a big contributor to another funder, the European Climate Foundation. Contributions are also forthcoming from green billionaires Michael Bloomberg and Jeremy Grantham, while even the British taxpayer chips in with a contribution from the Foreign Office. Quite why the British Conservative Government is helping to fund an operation that is likely to sue it in the courts is, of course, another mystery.
But if it is bad enough in Europe, climate lawfare is rapidly escalating out of control in the United States. Numerous actions against oil and gas companies are ongoing in a judicial system that is more obviously political than its European counterparts. It might not be surprising to learn therefore that billionaires through their tax-efficient foundations are attempting to re-educate judges around the idea that the climate is collapsing due to the action of humans, and in particular the wicked actions of those that supply 80% of industrial society’s current energy needs.
Washington D.C.-based Environmental Law Institute is backed by billionaire foundation money and, according to Influence Watch, it received $500,000 from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to set up the Climate Judiciary Project (CJP). According to Influence Watch, by May 2023 more than 1,000 judges have participated in the CJP program, which includes 13 curriculum modules. According to the CJP website, the goal is to provide “neutral, objective information” to the judiciary about the science of climate change as it is understood by the expert scientific community and relevant to current and future litigation”.
Needless to say, neutral and objective are not words that spring immediately to mind when examining some of the detailed curriculum notes. Misinformation is particularly rife in a module that suggests individual weather events can be attributed to longer term changes in the climate. The judges are told that it is now possible to use attributions techniques to link individual human-caused weather events to climate change. It is not, it is junk science from computer models and since any ‘results’ are unfalsifiable, they fail the first test of the true scientific process. The best known ‘attribution’ service is called World Weather Attribution and is partly funded by Jeremy Grantham. Despite this, CJP claims bizarrely that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change couldn’t hold the view that human influence has warmed the planet without the many attribution analyses that are said to underpin it.
The distinguished science writer Roger Pielke Jr. is unimpressed with weather attribution work, noting: “I can think of no other area of research where the relaxing of rigour and standards has been encouraged by researchers in order to generate claims more friendly to headlines, political advocacy and even lawsuits”.
Paymaster Larry Kramer, President of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, is more supportive: “With the growth in climate related litigation, judges need this kind of education to be prepared to weight scientific evidence and make better informed decisions.”
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Perhaps action against the funders of such suits would be in order?
Yes. They seem to be able to make the judiciary believe absurdities. Atrocities follow.
The next Republican Congress should be investigating all the leftwing billionaires that use their money to derail democracy. It’s time to put these people under the microscope because they are a threat to the freedoms of all of us. The leftwing billionaires are trying to buy their way to political power.
Mr. Morrison, I disagree with your characterization of the lawyers involved in the ECHR issue as “high-earning.” They are not high earning, but they are high charging.
Notice one of the names: Children’s Investment Fund Foundation. Most people would think this is a charity concerned with helping children. In reality it is concealing something else. Most of our NGOs in Ireland that are generously sponsored by the government are simply organizations to promote the views of politicians and activists and do not resemble real charities. They have a large number of employees and their CEOs are very well remunerated. It is no surprise when there is a failure to be transparent and give account of the funds they receive.
GRIFT
For money and for power. That is all.
Your arguments that try to reason with, or change the behavior of those people are useless.
My question to all you big-brained folks is: how do you intend to change the situation?
You can be as right as rain and as thoroughly logical as spock, but so what, you have not changed the direction of where this is all headed. The motion might be slowed down here and there, but the ratchet clicks another notch tighter with each passing month.
When something finally gives, will it be a crack in the damn and then a flood, or a sudden discharge like a shorted battery? Look at history. Fellows such as Spengler, Durant and Evola make it very difficult to believe that rational expectations are reasonable. Humanity is a big black pill.
But do not give up.
Time to yell louder.
I see encouraging news daily, such as the pushback against forced migration to EVs and opposition to the idiotic ‘Net Zero’ me-too agenda. But the movement goes in fits and starts and often backtracks. The public is beginning to realize how expensive the green boondoggle really is.
20 years ago I said skeptics would not and could not win the argument until the negative impact of climate policies became sever and catastrophic for the majority of the population.
My position is the same today and I don’t think a lot has changed.
I agree with you.
I think we are a lot closer to severe and catastrophic consequences from climate change policies. The natives are starting to get restless as their bank accounts get smaller and smaller as climate change policies take more and more money out of their pockets.
And then there are the coming blackouts, due to climate change policies, which will really get the public exercised and asking questions of their representives.
We are closer to the end than the beginning. One of our crash-test dummies is going to crash in the near future. Actually, they are all in a slow-motion crash even as we speak.
“Racketeering is a set of illegal activities aimed at commercial profit that may be disguised as legitimate business deals. Racketeering is defined by a coordinated effort by multiple people to repeatedly earn a profit. Typically, by fraud, extortion, bribery, threats, violence, or other illegal means.”
Racketeering, or politics as usual? I can’t tell the difference.
There is no difference where leftwing politics is concerned. Their motto is: “Whatever it takes, legal or illegal”.
Congress should investigate leftwing billionaire racketeering which results in the loss of our personal freedoms, like the freedom to drive the kind of car we want to drive, or the freedom to burn coal, oil and natural gas..
Assuming we get a Republican Congress. We can forget investigations by the Democrats. They are not going to bite the hand that feeds them.
Sounds like it’s time for more “exits.” Strip the EU of its power by stripping it of its members.
Is the EU the problem? The ECHR isn’t part of it, I think.
The ECHR is just another Marxist organization claiming power over the people but in reality does nothing more than push its’ ideology on the people through lawfare. The Marxists have slowly and stealthily gained power in all the courts throughout the world while the rest of us were happy with our standard of living earned through Capitalism.
Where are the capitalist highways?
Built with capitalist money.
It’s hard for capitalists to compete with companies that are subsidized by government.
Most of the earliest roads and waterways were built by capitalists.
There are no Real Victors of the ECHR Climate Decision. We all are losers.
We all lose.
From the article: “The judges are told that it is now possible to use attributions techniques to link individual human-caused weather events to climate change.”
In other words “confidence levels”. Low confidence, medium confidence, and high confidence, is what passes for climate science today.
Let’s put this in a form that any judge can understand:
The prosecutor tells the judge in court that he has “high confidence” that the defendant is guilty of the crime.
A competent judge should then ask what evidence the prosecutor has that shows the defendant is guilty of the crime. A competent judge would not accept the prosecutors “high confidence” opinion that the defendant is guilty of the crime, he would require evidence demonstrating that the defendant is guilty.
That’s what should happen in a climate change lawsuit, too. Evidence should be required to prove the case. Opinions don’t belong in court, and attribution techniques like “confidence levels” are opinions, they are not established facts.
The truth is the climate alarmists don’t have any facts to back up their claims of climate change doom, so they make things up like confidence levels, that sound official and definitive but are really just opinions and guesses, neither of which belong in court, or in science.
Idiocracy has arrived.