Criminalizing Carbon
Climate Change: A British jurist wants to form an international court for the environment with the power to punish states and businesses. Will fossil fuels soon become controlled substances?
The United Nations Climate Change Conference kicked off in Poznan, Poland, on Monday with representatives from around the world working to negotiate the framework for a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol.
Stephen Hockman, the former head of the British Bar Council and a deputy High Court judge, has an idea why Kyoto failed to reach its emission goals and has proposed a remedy: creating a body similar to the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
The new court would have the ability to sanction and perhaps even punish those who violate or fail to obey climate change treaties such as Kyoto.
It's tempting to dismiss this as the pipe dream of a barrister who also supports bringing Shariah law to Britain. But the idea of enforcing greenhouse gas reductions through legal means has been voiced by others and could easily snowball into widespread acceptance.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has agreed that the idea of such a court will be taken into account when considering ways to make such international agreements binding on all parties.
"The time is now ripe to set this up and get it going," said Hockman. "Its remit will be overall climate change and the need for better regulation of carbon emissions but at the same time the implementation and enforcement of international environmental agreements and instruments."
Many, if not all, warm-mongers consider the Industrial Revolution a crime against humanity, or at least against the Earth goddess, Gaia. Global warming alarmist James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Al Gore's favorite scientist, has said in the past that heads of major fossil-fuel companies who spread disinformation about global warming should be "tried for high crimes against humanity and nature."
Certainly it is the green theme first advanced by Gore in his book "Earth In The Balance" that the internal combustion engine was the greatest threat to mankind in its history. He and Bill Clinton have both said that global warming is ultimately a greater threat than terrorism.
The April 21 issue of Time magazine called green "the new red, white and blue" and compared global warming to the fight against Nazism and fascism. The cover took the famous Joe Rosenthal photo of Marines planting our flag on the blood-soaked island of Iwo Jima and replacing our flag with a tree.
World War II was followed by the Nuremberg trials of war criminals for their crimes against humanity. Is this what people like Hockman and Hansen have in mind? Show trials in which the accused are the producers and consumers of fossil fuels? Warming skeptics are already being compared to Holocaust "deniers."
Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, and next head of the European Union starting in January, recognizes such authoritarianism and totalitarianism when he sees it. He sees global warming hype not as an attempt to save the planet but as a campaign to collectivize it, to put the nations of the world and their economies under the thumbs of global planners.
Writing in the Financial Times, he warned: "As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not communism."
Klaus, who has challenged Gore to a debate and rejected Europe's embrace of Kyoto, told the Cato Institute recently that "environmentalism is a religion" that accepts global warming on faith and seeks to exploit it to reshape the world and economic social order.
As the earth demonstrably cools, this new court might find itself dealing with "facts" not in evidence. But for the warm-mongers, that's not a problem. We're sure it will be sentence first, trial later.