Swiss parliament snubs European court climate ruling, dubbed “judicial activism”

Judges trying to punish governments for not controlling present or future weather is an absurdity ripe for knocking on the head. In any case, Swiss glaciers have advanced and retreated in the past with no input from the government or anyone else, so local climate variation is nothing new.
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BERN (Reuters) -The lower house of the Swiss parliament voted on Wednesday to reject a ruling ordering Switzerland to do more to combat global warming in a move that could encourage others to resist the influence of international courts, reports Swissinfo.ch.

In April, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg issued an unprecedented judgment that said Bern had violated the human rights of a group of older Swiss women, the KlimaSeniorinnen, by failing to tackle climate change.

But Bern’s lower house on Wednesday followed in the steps of the upper house and passed a non-binding motion with 111 votes in favour and 72 against blasting the court’s “judicial activism”.

Landmark case crumbles: Swiss parliamentary committee rejects European climate ruling

Back to the drawing board for the climate miserablists and their litigious Swiss grannies, who had claimed a so-called ‘landmark’ victory after arguing their country wasn’t cold enough for their liking due to lack of government action, or something. The report notes that ‘the government had proposed stronger measures…but Swiss voters rejected them in a 2021 referendum’.
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GENEVA, May 21 (Reuters) – A Swiss parliamentary committee on Tuesday rejected a ruling by a top European court that said Switzerland had violated the human rights of its citizens by not doing enough to prevent climate change.

In April, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg found in favor of a group of elderly Swiss women who took their government to court over its record on tackling global warming.

The decision, which was expected to embolden more people to bring climate cases against governments, indicated Switzerland had a legal duty to take greater action on reducing emissions.

UK Government defeated in High Court over climate plans – as usual

Time for yet another revised ‘net zero emissions’ plan. Whether any country that used to depend largely on fuel-burning power stations for electricity can meet the demands of its own time-limited climate plans/targets is open to question. The BBC report once again wheels out the old climate propaganda con trick of pretending that sunset shadow effects are scary pollution clouds in its report image.
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The government has been defeated in court – for a second time – for not doing enough to meet its targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, reports BBC News.

Environmental campaigners argued that the energy minister signed off the government’s climate plan without evidence it could be achieved.

The High Court ruled on Friday that the government will now be required to redraft the plan again.

In response the government defended its record on climate action.

The UK’s Climate Change Act ‘faces a stress test’

So says an ardent fan of the idea of human-caused weather variations, who thinks UK climate laws were ‘once the envy of the world’. But unwelcome reality strikes in due course, because those in charge ‘underestimate just how far-reaching the necessary changes are’. The article tries to make out that a bit more belt tightening will do the trick, which almost certainly underplays the pain ahead if the current over-the-top net zero policies are persisted with.
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The Scottish government’s decision to row back on its 2030 climate pledge illustrates the crux of any target: it’s easy to set one with a big political flourish, but harder to follow through with a careful plan to achieve it, says The Conversation (via Phys.org).

Does that mean that targets for reducing the emissions of greenhouse gas driving climate change are worthless? Not necessarily.

There are two types of climate target: the empty promise and the calculated ambition. Only one of these works.

Net zero mania update: German transport minister warns of weekend driving ban

Unsurprisingly he gets accused of ‘scaremongering through absurd proposals’. But isn’t the real issue a blind insistence on the unworkable ideology of so-called climate policy that lies behind the proposals? Muttering about pollution is just a means of confusing people into accepting the argument that CO2 is a problem.
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Germany’s transport minister has warned that driving will have to be banned at the weekends unless the country’s net zero laws are changed, says The Telegraph.

Volker Wissing’s FDP party wants the law amended so the polluting transport sector can miss carbon emissions reduction targets, as long as Germany as a whole reaches them. [Talkshop comment – carbon dioxide isn’t a pollutant].

But the change is opposed by the Greens, who are part of the three-way coalition with the pro-business FDP and the Social Democrats (SPD), led by Olaf Scholz, the chancellor.

Negotiations over the law have dragged on since September last year.

European court rules human rights violated by ‘climate inaction’

A victory for cloud cuckoo land thinking. The court has in effect granted a disputed hypothesis the status of truth, based on its assumption that ’emissions’ are driving changes in the climate. Once courts can pick sides in scientific debates, where does that lead?
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A group of older Swiss women have won the first ever climate case victory in the European Court of Human Rights, reports BBC News.

The women, mostly in their 70s, said that their age and gender made them particularly vulnerable to the effects of heatwaves linked to climate change.

The court said Switzerland’s efforts to meet its emission reduction targets had been woefully inadequate.

It is the first time the powerful court has ruled on global warming.

Climate protesters in England and Wales lose criminal damage defence

Appeal court says defendants’ ‘beliefs and motivation’ do not constitute lawful excuse for damaging property. They may think their imaginary weather scenarios, supposedly based on climate models and ‘greenhouse effects’, should be taken seriously but the rest of the world has no obligation to do so.
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One of the last defences for climate protesters who commit criminal damage has been in effect removed by the court of appeal, says The Guardian.

The court said the “beliefs and motivation” of a defendant do not constitute lawful excuse for causing damage to a property.

The defence that a person honestly believes the owner of a property would have consented had they known the full circumstances of climate change has been used successfully over the last year by protesters.

Government climate techno-fixes raise ‘grave doubts’ among UK’s civil servants

Net zero policies and plans of climate-obsessed politicians looking threadbare and unrealistic yet again, this time in court. They can never admit that their goals are unachievable at any price, even supposing their methods had some merit.
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British civil servants have grave doubts about their government’s favoured techno-fixes for climate-polluting industries like meat production and air travel, new documents show.

In risk assessments made public because of an ongoing court case, officials warned that technology to reduce methane emissions from cow burps is “nascent” and there might not be enough plants or hydrogen available to power the world’s planes more sustainably, says Climate Home News.

Yet despite the uncertainties surrounding these and other climate solutions like carbon dioxide removal, the UK government is relying on such technologies to meet a big chunk of its climate plans.

Chancellor Hunt ‘bitterly disappointed’ after gas drilling approved in his constituency

Climate obsession can warp the mind if this case is anything to go by. Government policy is to find more UK gas but one of its top ministers opposes the idea in his own constituency.
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Chancellor Jeremy Hunt says he is “bitterly disappointed” after a Court of Appeal ruling gave the green light to a gas drilling project in his Surrey constituency, reports Sky News.

The site in Dunsfold, which energy company UK Oil and Gas (UKOG) wants to explore, has been the source of a protracted legal battle.

The application was approved by the government in June 2022, despite it being refused by the local Conservative council and opposition from Mr Hunt when he was a backbench MP.

German climate policy insufficient, court rules

German Autobahn

The legal consequences of government climate obsession rumble on, as countries keep insisting that their ‘targets’ will somehow make the weather nicer, or something. Some pressure groups want lower speed limits but with a future of (supposedly) EVs that seems fairly pointless.
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The German government must present emergency programmes to improve its climate policy in the transport and buildings sector, a Berlin court ruled on Thursday (30 November), after the country repeatedly failed to meet emission reduction targets, reports Euractiv.

The higher administrative court of Berlin-Brandenburg ruled that the German government must present immediate action programmes to reach the emission reduction targets in the transport and buildings sector, as written in the German climate law.

The ruling follows a lawsuit by environmental NGOs Deutsche Umwelthilfe (DUH) and Friends of the Earth Germany (BUND), who called it a “groundbreaking” decision.

Alberta Strikes Back at the Federal Government’s Energy Transition Plan

Image credit: mining.com

Alberta is the main player in Canada’s shale oil and gas industry. The outcome of this power struggle over climate ideology and its claimed consequences will be, let’s say, interesting.
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Alberta’s Premier has invoked a controversial piece of legislation to protect its citizens from the federal government’s Clean Electricity Regulation, reports OilPrice.com.

This is the first time the Sovereignty Act has been invoked in Alberta. The move involved Premier Smith tabling a resolution at the Alberta legislature that instructed provincial agencies such as the Alberta Electric System Operator to ignore the Clean Electricity Regulations when they came into effect, “to the extent legally permissible,” CBC reported.

The Sovereignty Act was enacted last year and its purpose was exactly the purpose it was used this week by the government: to protect the province from federal laws that the provincial government considers unconstitutional.

Economic conundrums for Germany as top court cancels climate funding plan

When might it occur to politicians, German or not, that endless subsidies to feed their own climate obsessions either come out of the same pot as the rest of their government’s income, or by pumping up national debt – or both? Looks like a road to nowhere, or nowhere good.
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As Germany scrambles to find €60 billion after the constitutional court ruled that transferring unused COVID-related debt to a climate fund was against the constitution, economists warned that spending cuts could cost the country economic growth in the coming years following a parliamentary hearing on Tuesday, says Euractiv.

Last week, Germany’s Constitutional Court ruled that transferring €60 billion of unused COVID-related debt to a climate fund was against the constitution.

With the amount removed from the fund, the government is now discussing how to close the funding gap, with Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP/Renew Europe) calling for spending cuts.

UK sued for counting wood burning with carbon capture as ‘negative emissions’

Biomass on the move [image credit: Drax]

Denounced by one opponent as ‘an accounting gimmick’ and ‘double counting’. The whole biomass from trees industry is once more outed as little more than a giant subsidy-grabbing confidence trick, from energy-intensive conversion of wood into pellets all the way to so-called carbon capture. Where are the real world benefits in this hugely expensive system?
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Environmental groups are taking the UK government to court on Monday (13 November) over plans to spend billions on Biomass with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS), a technology aimed at removing CO2 from the atmosphere that is also being promoted by the European Union, says Euractiv.

Plaintiffs say BECCS technology relies on flawed accounting assumptions because it sees the carbon captured from wood burning as negative emissions when the process is at best neutral from a climate perspective.

“The government’s rationale for BECCS as providing negative emissions violates international carbon accounting protocols underpinning the Paris Agreement, to which the UK is a signatory,” said a statement from The Lifescape Project and the Partnership for Policy Integrity (PPI), two environmental groups that are the complainants in the case.

“Burning forest biomass and relying on BECCS for negative emissions will not contribute to the government’s legal obligation to achieve net zero by 2050,” they warned.

Greenpeace loses legal challenge to UK’s new North Sea oil and gas licenses

North Sea gas rig [image credit: safety4sea.com]

Trying to subvert democracy with ‘climate lawfare’ fails again.
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LONDON (Reuters)– Britain’s decision to authorise new licences for oil and gas exploration in the North Sea was lawful, London’s High Court ruled on Thursday, dismissing a legal challenge by Greenpeace, reports Yahoo News.

The environmental campaign group had argued Britain’s failure to assess the greenhouse gases produced by consuming oil and gas – so-called end-use or downstream emissions – rendered its offshore energy plan unlawful.

But lawyers representing Britain’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said at a hearing in July that ministers were not required to assess end-use emissions, though they nonetheless considered them.

Judge David Holgate rejected Greenpeace’s case in a written ruling on Thursday.

Full report here.

Chris Packham issues legal challenge against Rishi Sunak

Photosynthesis [image credit: Nefronus @ Wikipedia]

Climate lawfare by carbophobes again. ‘The ball is in your court, Prime Minister’. At the same time the Scottish Nationalists have reported the PM to the police over comments in his conference speech.
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Chris Packham has sent a legal challenge to the Prime Minister over his decision to delay the phase-out of new gas boilers and petrol and diesel cars, reports The National (via Yahoo News).

If Rishi Sunak does not reverse the changes he announced last month, Packham said he will apply to the High Court to challenge this in a judicial review – arguing that such a delay is unlawful given the Government is required to follow a series of carbon budget plans on the way to becoming net zero by 2050.

The Prime Minister said the sale of new fossil fuel cars will not be phased out in 2030 but in 2035 and that only 80% of gas boilers will need to be phased out by that date, instead of 100%.

EU reaches deal banning ‘climate-neutral’ product claims

Game over by 2026?
[image credit: climateneutral.org]

The nonsense of climate greenwashing takes a hit, starting 2026.
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In the wake of longstanding complaints of greenwashing by consumer advocates, EU institutions finalised a new law on Tuesday (19 September) enacting a sweeping ban to combat the misleading of its citizens through erroneous claims of sustainability, reports Euractiv.

In March 2022, the European Commission proposed a law to empower consumers, which, following the conclusion of negotiations between EU countries and Parliament, will now ban companies from claiming that their products are climate-neutral.

“We have achieved an excellent deal for consumers,” said the S&D’s Biljana Borzan, a Croatian EU lawmaker who spearheaded the negotiations on behalf of Parliament.

The law, which still requires final approval by EU countries and the parliament’s plenary assembly – a formality – will be felt from 2026, as EU countries will be given two years’ time to adopt the changes.

Poland files lawsuit against key EU climate policies

European Commission HQ, Brussels [image credit: Em_Dee @ Wikipedia]

Poland objects to being bounced into net-zero style policies against its will, so the EU’s climate dogma will get tested in court. Of course arguing with the EU is usually a waste of time, as the UK found out, but there is an obvious alternative (hint).
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The EU’s recently adopted climate legislation was not properly assessed, exceeded Brussels’ authority and now threatens Poland’s economy as well as energy security, legal arguments published by Warsaw on Monday (28 August) contend, reports Euractiv.

The EU has approved a raft of climate laws over the past months, aiming to reduce its net greenhouse gas emissions to 55% below 1990 levels by 2030 and help the bloc of 27 countries comply with the Paris Agreement on climate change.

But Warsaw is contesting those laws, now aiming to overthrow some of them in court – including the hard-won agreement on banning the sale of new combustion engine cars by 2035.

“We don’t agree with this and other documents from the ‘Fit for 55’ package and we’re bringing this to the European Court of Justice. I hope other countries will join,” Polish climate and environment minister Anna Moskwa said back in June.

Net zero: on the path to destruction – Richard North

DESNZ – blaming humans for changing the climate

As the author points out, many of the public may fail to notice the inevitable pain and folly of net zero ‘climate policies’ until it’s too late to avoid them. Democratic choice is in effect suspended by compulsory five year plans.
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According to Guardian writer, Rafael Behr, Britain is trapped in political purgatory waiting for its undead government to fall, writes Richard North @ The Turbulent Times.

That may well be the case – or wishful thinking – but Behr goes on to add that “policy that can’t work and laws written purely for campaign slogans are clear symptoms of a moribund regime”.

He is, of course, talking about the controls over illegal immigration, which the entire Guardian collective would like to see junked, with no indication of what they would do to control the situation, other than open our borders and let all comers in.

Not one of the collective, though, would dream of substituting Behr’s homily on immigration with the same thought directed at net-zero. Yet it would be hard to find a better example of a policy that can’t work.

New legal challenge to UK Government’s climate plans

Making climate targets legally enforceable turns out not to be such a smart idea, except for fee-seeking lawyers. Who knew?
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THREE ORGANISATIONS are taking the UK Government to court for the second time in under two years over its ‘feeble and inadequate’ strategy for tackling climate change, says Ekklesia.

Friends of the Earth, ClientEarth and Good Law Project say the government’s revised net zero strategy – the Carbon Budget Delivery Plan, published on 30 March – is unlawful and have filed papers at the High Court requesting a judicial review.

The news follows a damning progress report from the Climate Change Committee, published on 28 June, which found there are only credible plans for less than a fifth of the emissions cuts needed to meet the UK’s legally binding climate targets.

This is down from the government’s independent climate advisors assessment last year that just 39 per cent of plans were fit for purpose.

Net zero or busted: Shapps could face potential imprisonment for not having proper plan

Well-known London prison

Cue intensified attempts to reach so-called climate targets at inevitably vast public expense. An exercise in futility.
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Grant Shapps, the Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary has revealed during a meeting of the Environment and Climate Change Committee that he faces the risk of being sent to prison for contempt of court if he fails to deliver on the government’s net zero targets, says Energy Live News.

Shapps, who was asked about the current arrangements that support his role in achieving these targets, stated that he has the greatest incentive among his government colleagues and anyone globally to reach these exacting goals.