The ICJ's Climate Ruling Is Wrong

The Scottish comedian, Billy Connelly, once quipped, "There's no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong clothes, so get yourself a sexy raincoat and live a little." Quite right. We get rather less rain in South-East England than our northern kin, but there is still enough to ruin summer barbecues. I never complain. For one thing, rain brings out a particular beauty to these islands, and shows you why the ancients believed they held magic. For another, it's a privilege to live in a place without thirst.

For much of the world, rain is the most important thing that doesn't happen enough. Consider the virtual ubiquity of rain-dances and other metaphysical invocations across cultures, the rain demigods in polytheistic religions, the rain-makers who have run scams on villagers for millennia. Consider too that many of civilization's first architectural feats were not temples to gods, or palaces for kings, but structures to capture and store rain. Yet, heat gets all the attention.

I wonder if climate change would be taken more seriously if we stopped talking about heat? The problem I see is that many people don't worry about rising temperature because they have an illusion of control — air-conditioning. Yes, I know that air-con only provides localized relief from hot temperatures, and actually makes global temperatures worse, but we humans have a tendency to think locally. A couple of degrees hotter outside doesn't hit all that hard when it's lovely and cool inside. Just like famines don't bother the well-fed.

You can't deny this when you look at how air-con has reshaped the global economy. Modern Singapore couldn't function without it, a city like Phoenix (Arizona) would be depopulated overnight, and Dubai wouldn't be a magnet for the jet-setting wealthy if they had to live under its death-dealing sun. The world is warming, its climate is changing, and the messaging so far has proved insufficient.

The recent ruling by the International Criminal Court of Justice is a disaster. It's ruled that countries affected by climate change can sue countries they accuse of historically causing it. This is the most arse-backward nonsense I've heard in quite some time.

Let me preface everything I'll say next by dispelling a myth, and dodging an accusation of bias. Some readers might take my objection to the ICJ ruling as a Brit worried that his country is in for a legal grilling due to having been the planet's first coal-burning super-power. In truth, Britain's emissions since the 1700s have been dwarfed by those of the USA, China, and Russia. Britain was the centrepiece of the early Industrial Revolution, not the far more fossil-blazing revolution in mass-manufacturing. By then, we were decolonizing and becoming a nation of bankers.

My objection has three parts. In the first instance, and I've said this before, if China burns Australian coal to make American iPhones that are shipped to Swedish customers on Greek vessels that run on Saudi oil, who is responsible for the emissions? Who gets sued? The climate catastrophe is a collective sin. No country with airports, shipyards, cars, medicines, tractors, or any other technological advancement — all of which come from industrialization and manufacturing — deserves a right to sue another for climate change. This includes countries with air-con.

Secondly, we've only recently seen a shaky sense of collective responsibility with things like the Paris Agreement. And most positively, rich countries were beginning to accept that they have the broadest shoulders, so they should lift the heaviest burdens (pay the most) in a green energy transition. The ICJ ruling stomps all over this, turning the argument back into finger-pointing and blame. This will be particularly destructive given my third objection — the why bother effect.

The United States is by far the biggest historical polluter, with China almost certain to overtake it. Climate change cannot be resolved without these countries doing the most, and massively adapting their economies. Everybody else is a bit player. Will suing the United States for its historical pollution incentivize it to decarbonize? To risk its own economic harm for the global good? Or will that already large, and vociferous, pro-fossil lobby convince president after president to burn, drill, and frack to pay the claimants?

After all, if you've been deemed guilty and punishable by a world that was happy to take the fruits of your manufacturing and technological progress, why hurt yourself to help it?