Brussels takes legal action against UK over use of British parts in wind farms

Offshore wind farm [image credit: Wikipedia]

Will Brexit bitterness ever die? Renewables are now mired in international politics.
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Brussels has launched a legal challenge over the use of British parts in the UK’s offshore wind farms, reports the Telegraph.

The European Commission submitted its complaint to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the first such move it has made since Brexit.

The UK Government asks offshore wind farm developers to say how many of the parts they are using are from Britain.

Landmark Decision Vindicates Victims: Supreme Court Orders Total Wind Farm Shutdown

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One in the eye for wind farm racketeers.

STOP THESE THINGS

In a world-first, neighbours tormented by wind turbine noise have won a landmark victory, forcing the operator to shut down all of its turbines at night-time.

Yesterday, Justice Melinda Richards of the Victorian Supreme Court slapped an injunction on a wind farm because the noise it generates has been driving neighbours nuts for seven years, and the operator has done absolutely nothing about their suffering.

Her Honour also ordered damages, including aggravated damages for the high-handed way in which the operator has treated its victims. Since March 2015, the community surrounding the Bald Hills wind farm have been tortured by low-frequency noise and infrasound generated by 52, 2 MW Senvion MM92s.

Neighbours started complaining to the operator about noise, straightaway. But, as is their wont, the operator simply rejected the mounting complaints and carried on regardless.

Locals, however, were not perturbed. Instead, they lawyered up. Engaging the tough and tenacious

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Campaigners to challenge Bristol Airport expansion in court

Once again the courts are cast in the role of arbiter of climate obsessions as so-called ‘campaigners’ try to suppress modern developments, intended to meet rising demand, by the usual claim that any minor increase on the 0.04% carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a problem rather than a benefit.
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Bristol Airport Action Network (BAAN) has lodged an appeal against the Planning Inspectorate’s recent decision to approve the expansion, after raising more than £20,000 to cover legal fees, reports New Civil Engineer.

BAAN believes the expansion will be damaging for local people and the environment, and lead to a rise in road traffic, increased noise and air pollution and an “inevitable rise in carbon emissions”.

BAAN representative Stephen Clarke said: “This decision is so damaging for the local people and the climate that it simply cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged.”

Australian court strikes down landmark climate ruling

Lots of coal in Australia

Goodbye landmark. Yet another attempt to use the courts to try to establish the myth that governments can somehow control the climate bites the dust, for now at least.
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An Australian court on Tuesday threw out a landmark legal ruling that the country’s environment minister had a duty to protect children from climate change, reports Phys.org.

Last year’s legal win by a group of high school children had been hailed by environmental groups as a potential legal weapon to fight fossil fuel projects.

But the federal court found in favour of an appeal by Environment Minister Sussan Ley, deciding she did not have to weigh the harm climate change would inflict on children when assessing the approval of new fossil fuel projects.

English Court rejects (again) a request to judicially review the UK Government’s climate change policies

Scales of Justice
[image credit: Wikipedia]

Climate lawfare draws a blank again. Exactly as the verdict says, such claims “invite the Court to venture beyond its sphere of competence.”
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The High Court has refused a renewed application from Plan B and three UK students for permission to apply for judicial review of the UK Government’s alleged failures to meet its climate change commitments, says Freshfields BD, noting the “insuperable problem” of trying to establish that such failures also violated the Claimants’ human rights.

Nature of the complaint

In this latest challenge, the Claimants called for a declaration that the Government’s alleged failures to take effective measures to meet their climate change commitments under the Paris Agreement and the Climate Change Act 2008 were in breach of the Human Rights Act 1998.

They also sought a mandatory order that the Government urgently implements a framework to meet its commitments going forward.

Alaska court rules against youths in climate change lawsuit

Case dismissed

Another climate lawfare caper, supposedly by youths (who pays the legal costs?), bites the dust. Governments can’t control the climate, but may pretend they can. Next!
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The Alaska Supreme Court on Friday upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit filed by 16 young Alaskans who claimed long-term effects of climate change will devastate Alaska and interfere with their individual constitutional rights, reports AP via the Daily Mail.

The lawsuit against the state of Alaska claimed the state´s legislative and executive branches had not taken steps to lower greenhouse gas emissions.

The lower court dismissed the case in 2018, saying these questions were better left to other branches of government.

Net zero: UK Government taken to court over ‘imaginary’ climate policies

Climate lawfare strikes again in the latest attempt to cast politicians as climate managers and make all the claims of greenhouse gas theories — including ‘runaway climate change’ — in effect legally enforceable.
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The UK government is being taken to court over accusations that its climate commitments are “woefully inadequate” reports The Big Issue.

Environmental campaign group Friends of the Earth (FOE), which is bringing the lawsuit, says the government’s flagship Net Zero Strategy fails to comply with the legal requirements of the 2008 Climate Change Act.

FOE has also accused the government of failing to produce an equality impact assessment for both the Net Zero Strategy and the Heat and Buildings Strategy, which were both published last October.

FOE lawyer Katie de Kauwe said the government’s pathway to net zero emissions by 2050 is “imaginary”, with “no credible plan to deliver” the strategy.

Fracking companies threaten government with legal action over ban

[Not to scale]

The complaint now, or one of them, is that geothermal is free to do things the hydraulic fracturers weren’t allowed to do prior to their ban, and which in part led to the ban.
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Fracking companies have threatened to take legal action over the government’s ban on the practice, amid the sector’s growing frustration at being left behind the UK energy revolution, according to reports – City AM.

The sector sent “pre-action correspondence” to the government after fears prompted by earthquakes in 2019 led to a ban on drilling, according to the Telegraph, which first reported the news.

Among the fracking projects that had to be abandoned after the ban, was one financed by billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe whose company Ineos wrote off £63m in 2019.

Greenpeace loses North Sea Vorlich field legal challenge

North Sea oil platform [image credit: matchtech.com]

Shouting ‘climate’ in court doesn’t guarantee legal victories. Appeal to the Supreme Court pending.
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Environmental group Greenpeace has lost its case against the UK government over a North Sea oil field permit, reports BBC News.

Permission to drill the Vorlich site off Aberdeen was given to BP in 2018.

Greenpeace argued in Scotland’s highest civil court there had been “a myriad of failures in the public consultation” and the permit did not consider the climate impacts of burning fossil fuel.

The Court of Session ruling means operations will continue at the field. Greenpeace plans to appeal.

The UK government welcomed the outcome.

German climate groups plan legal action against car giants

Image credit: autocarbrands.com

Climate lawfare is bound to get more popular if it’s seen that courts are willing to believe IPCC theories of how the global climate works. But that smacks of presumption of guilt, with carbon dioxide as the offender, surely?
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German environmental groups on Friday announced a legal offensive against car giants Volkswagen, Daimler and BMW to force them to reduce emissions faster, emboldened by recent court victories in favour of climate protection, reports Phys.org.

Greenpeace Germany and Deutsche Umwelthilfe (DUH) said they have sent a claim letter to the three carmakers asking them to commit to more ambitious targets for reducing carbon emissions, including ending production of fossil-fuel cars by 2030.

If they do not respond to the letter in the coming weeks and halt their “illegal behaviour”, the NGOs said they are ready to file lawsuits in court.

Information Tribunal orders Committee on Climate Change to reveal Net Zero calculations

Money down the drain [image credit: thisismoney.co.uk]

Show us your numbers! You have 35 days to do so, no more ducking and weaving allowed. ‘It is likely MPs were misled’ — strong stuff. Results due before the COP26 climate gab-fest.
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The Information Tribunal has ordered the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) to publish the calculations behind its claim that the UK economy can be decarbonised at modest cost, reports The GWPF.

The CCC’s figures were presented to Parliament ahead of the Net Zero emissions target nodded through in June 2019 to enshrine it in law.

The case was brought by Andrew Montford, the deputy director of the Global Warming Policy Forum.

The ruling, which dismisses almost all of the CCC’s arguments, comes after a two-year battle to obtain the cost calculations.

Dutch court gets climate science wrong

Credit: planetsave.com

Embarrassing. Whatever the true science may be, it’s not what the court claimed. Is an appeal against their verdict in order?
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A recent Dutch Court decision is getting international attention because it commands climate action.

The case itself is like angels on a pinhead, so of little interest, says David Wojick @ CFACT.

Shell Oil proposed to cut CO2 emissions by 40% and the Court made it 45%, both targets being stupid. The real concern is the precedent of Courts making climate policy, so this decision is worth looking at.

Turns out the Court’s version of the science is amazingly bad.

UK climate activist arrested after attacks on banks

Oxford Circus climate demo [image credit: London Evening Standard]

Even ill-informed, climate-obsessed attention seekers calling themselves activists can take things too far, it seems. Having already got away with various reported actions that most people would consider to be outside the law, tolerance is wearing thin.
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LONDON (Reuters) — British climate activist Gail Bradbrook, co-founder of the Extinction Rebellion group, was arrested at home on Tuesday for conspiracy to cause criminal damage and fraud after her group attacked banks such as HSBC and Barclays, says yahoo!news.

Activists from the group smashed the window frontage of HSBC and Barclays in Canary Wharf last month and have targeted Lloyd’s of London as part of what the activists cast as a “Money Rebellion”.

German climate court ruling to have major impact – media commentators

According to AP: ‘Additionally, the court supported the idea that severe restrictions on freedom are acceptable when related to efforts to prevent climate change.’ Severe! You have been warned. 
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Clean Energy Wire reports:

Germany’s Constitutional Court ruling that the government’s climate policies are insufficient will have a major impact on the country’s election campaign and beyond, media commentators say.

“The political impact of the ruling is likely to be enormous,” writes Jakob Schlandt in Der Tagesspiegel. “The judges leave no doubt at all that there is a robust, actionable scientific consensus on man-made climate change,” which results in an obligation for politicians to act, Schlandt writes.

EU’s top court rejects effort to force tougher climate rules

Speculative climate ‘lawfare’, a form of extortion via the courts, has overreached itself again and been declared out of scope. Any idea of weather control is an illusion.
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BRUSSELS — The European Union’s top court on Thursday rejected an effort by a Scandinavian youth group and families around the world to force the EU to set more ambitious targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, arguing that they were not “individually” affected by Europe’s climate policy, reports The Global Warming Policy Forum.

Those behind the initiative — including a Portuguese farmer, an Arctic indigenous activist and German islanders — expressed disappointment at the ruling, but also were determined to keep fighting for faster action against climate change.

Families from Kenya, Fiji, Germany, France, Italy, Portugal and Romania, along with the Swedish Sami Youth organization, launched the legal action in 2018.

60,000 Belgians take government to court over alleged climate inaction

Cue football stadium quips. We seem to be living in an age of IPCC-generated mass delusion, whipped up by the media, as far as the climate is concerned.
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SOME 60,000 Belgians are suing the government for inaction in the fight against global warming in a case that opened today in a civil court in Brussels, reports thejournal.ie.

Launched in 2015 by the association Klimatzaak (the climate case, in Dutch), the procedure follows a similar one in the Netherlands that led to a ruling against the Dutch government.

The cases attack governments for not respecting the greenhouse gas emission reduction targets set by the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

12 State Attorneys General sue Biden Admin over its climate policies

H/T Climate Change Dispatch
An ‘abuse of power’ challenge. The AGs claim Biden’s climate policies are a costly and ‘massive expansion’ of regulations.
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A group of Republican state attorneys general alleged in a federal lawsuit filed Monday that President Joe Biden’s climate policies are a major overreach and could damage their states’ economies, reports The Daily Caller.

The 12-state coalition said Biden overstepped his constitutional authority by declaring there were “social costs” of continued greenhouse gas emissions in a Jan. 20 executive order.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District Court of Missouri, argued that assigning such costs is a “quintessentially legislative action” that falls within Congress’ authority.

European court forces 33 governments to prove emissions cuts in line with Paris climate accord

Climate ‘lawfare’ marches on. Is the Paris accord legally enforceable, and if so how might offenders be penalised?
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Countries named in a legal complaint include the 27 members of the EU, the UK, Switzerland and Russia, reports the National News.

The European Court of Human Rights is forcing 33 governments to prove they are cutting emissions in line with the requirements of the 2015 Paris climate accord.

The court also rejected an attempt by those governments to overturn its decision to fast-track a lawsuit filed by six young Portuguese climate activists.

The activists claim the countries’ efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions are inadequate.

France found guilty of climate inaction in ‘historic victory’

‘Hoist by their own petard’ springs to mind. French courts are now willing to hear from ‘direct victims of climate change’. How they might define climate change remains to be seen, as the insanity gets further embedded into the system.
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A court in Paris has ruled that France’s government is guilty of climate inaction in a ground-breaking legal case, reports Euronews.

The decision comes after a group of NGOs, with the support of two million citizens, filed a lawsuit against the French government for failing to meet the country’s commitments to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

The legal claim was hailed as the “L’Affaire du siècle” or “the case of the century” by activists, who first started the dispute in March 2019.

UK court rejects appeal to stop Drax building biggest gas plant in Europe

Drax power station [credit: drax.com]

Another attempt by climate obsessives to dictate UK energy policy to the government via the courts, bites the dust. Reliability of national electricity supply is not completely dead yet.
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The UK Court of Appeals has rejected a bid from environmental campaigners to prevent Drax from building the biggest gas-fired power plant in Europe, reports NS Energy.

The proposed plant, based next to an existing facility in Selby, North Yorkshire, was given the go-ahead in October 2019.

It was a controversial decision as the UK government, in approving the project, overruled its own planning authority’s recommendation to reject it on climate grounds.