{"id":8820,"date":"2020-06-17T15:39:05","date_gmt":"2020-06-17T14:39:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=8820"},"modified":"2020-06-17T15:39:05","modified_gmt":"2020-06-17T14:39:05","slug":"enforcing-environmental-rights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2020\/06\/17\/enforcing-environmental-rights\/","title":{"rendered":"Enforcing Environmental Rights"},"content":{"rendered":"

Introduction<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

However scant the support provided by the legal process, as a lawyer I am drawn to rights-driven considerations. In terms of recent context \u2013 blinkered by the present over-reaction<\/a><\/span> \u2013 Obama\u2019s climate change initiative has been overturned by Trump, who effectively tore up the Kyoto Accord.<\/p>\n

The internal U.S. solution to climate issues is to endorse such market-driven approaches as \u2018Cap and Trade<\/a><\/span>\u2019. For example the Law and Economics movement allows and encourages individual U.S. States to permit, through legislation, permission to purchase the right to pollute<\/a><\/span>. Obviously what happens is that once a corporation\u2019s pollution credit is exhausted in a given State they simply move on. It is, in short, a polluter\u2019s charter.<\/p>\n

A pollution or carbon tax is justified on the basis that it will promote efficiency but little account is taken of the externalisation of environmental meltdown, or on whether it is regressive or not. China\u2019s ongoing disregard for pollution controls and restraints on consumption is well documented. The excuse given is that the U.S. is doing worse. So there seems to be little hope of the Big Two changing course.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, as we will see, such \u2018environmental rights\u2019 as there are can be divided into three distinct categories: environmental procedural rights<\/em>; the right of environment<\/em> and the right to environment<\/em>.<\/p>\n

A Consensus of Crisis<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Discourse on the status of the Blue Planet is varied and complex. On the one hand it is quite clear that it will survive climate chaos even if humankind does not. Gaia, as James Lovelock conceives her, has an infinite capacity for renewal and regeneration. But the scale and imminence of the impending disaster is being carefully manipulated in the vectors of public opinion. Trump, Bannon<\/a><\/span> and others should be indicted for the crime against humanity of ecocide.<\/p>\n

The science is saying \u2013 the work of Elizabeth Colbert<\/a><\/span> in particular \u2013 that without radical action, within sixty years the remaining wild mammals may be extinct. In these circumstances human extinction is likely to occur by increments.<\/p>\n