New Green advocates
Global warming is increasingly being fought in the courtroom
In February a tribunal in Kirkenes, in Norway’s far north, ruled that oil extraction in the Barents Sea was illegal. The courtroom — an auditorium sculpted from 190 tonnes of ice — and the verdict were fictitious, staged as part of a festival. But the legal question is real.
On November 14th a district court in Oslo, Norway’s capital, will begin hearing the case that inspired the theatrics. Greenpeace and another pressure group, Nature and Youth, allege that by issuing licences to explore for oil in the Arctic, Norway’s government has breached its constitutional obligation to preserve an environment that is “conducive to health” and to maintain environmental “productivity and diversity”. Their case rests not on local harms, for example to wildlife or water quality, but on the contribution any oil extracted will make to global warming which, under the Paris accord of 2015, Norway and 195 other countries have pledged to keep to “well below” 2°C compared with pre-industrial times.
As policymakers prepare for the annual UN climate pow-wow in Germany, starting on November 6th, activists who think too little is being done to meet that goal are turning to the courts. Cases where the negative effects of carbon emissions are central, not tagged on to more direct…
