“On oil and gas companies who have spent decades burning fossil fuels - ramping up the world’s carbon emissions - Mehta said the law couldn’t go back in time and punish past activities.”
Since we gave people the death penalty at the Nuremberg trials ex post facto, we can do the same with anthropogenic climate change. I would support such death penalties now already, tho I suspect more than a hundred million people would have to die directly from unambiguous climate change events within a short period like a week, before more people would agree. The problem is that the climate-change tipping-points will cascade, which means that the 1st one may cause other tipping points to be triggered, at which point billions of people will die unnecessarily in a Mad Max world.
“On oil and gas companies who have spent decades burning fossil fuels - ramping up the world’s carbon emissions - Mehta said the law couldn’t go back in time and punish past activities."
Are they fucking serious? Why have any legal system at all then? People would just be allowed to rape and pillage as they please under that auspice.
No. They’re saying, “these weren’t laws when these people were breaking them, so we can’t punish them for breaking laws that weren’t yet laws.”
I’d normally agree with that statement but annihilating the environment is a violation of all laws of nature. Also these fucks broke plenty of other laws so…
Genocide wasn’t a de jure crime until after WWII but we killed the fuck out of a bunch of Nazis, because it was super obvious that while no laws were on the books, that shit ain’t allowed.
I don’t really think this is a situation that can be handled by normal laws. We might have to do what was done at Nuremberg when dealing with oil company execs. The crimes of those organizations span at least a hundred years and it’s too important to let them off on a technicality.
It needs to change then, at least for stuff like this. It’s too serious to let off on a technicality.
Letting criminals off on technicalities is one of the things that put us down this dark road in the first place. Justice is far more important and letting them off is not justice, I don’t care how the original U.S. system was set up.
Well the general principle is that you can’t be punished for behavior that was legal when you did it. Otherwise you open the door to “doing X is illegal now” and then locking everyone who was documented doing X in the last several years.
Which maybe sounds nice when it’s destroying the climate… but it’s less nice when it’s gay marriage, alcohol consumption, owning X book, etc.
I think we need to address this not just at individuals or corporations, but at nation states in which those individuals reside and are licensed.
We need to kick them in the wallet. Allowing rampant pollution? Extra trade tariffs, and exclusion from various international groups/events. Complicit in rampant pollution? Punitive economic Sanctions, and loss of access to certain technologies, financial networks, etc.
Because the capable ones to enforce these sanctions are the main culprits of the climate crisis and it would be incredibly convenient for them to use these laws to get even more ahead of underdeveloped nations.
Unless thats exactly what you want, keep the exploited poor and the exploiters rich. Think better.
What is a corporation besides a group of people? This is a Nuremberg defense. I don’t give a fuck if they were following orders to keep food on their table. That doesn’t give them the right to destroy the fucking world.
Thats a true revolutionary cry. But since being “rich” is quite a relative term, you might wake up in the realization that most of the world considers you rich and your lifestyle complicit in the mass destruction of the global environment.
That’s quite the stretch. Don’t regulate the rich cause we might be caught up?
I don’t take private flights from one side of a city to another. I don’t own a yacht (or 6). I don’t own a fleet of vehicles with a staff that drives them around. I don’t throw away more food than most people eat. I don’t horde dozens of acres of land that contain nothing but wasteful lawn.
There’s a pretty stark contrast between the ultra wealthy, and the vast majority of people living in highly developed countries.
This is a form of slippery slope fallacy. Rich in this context refers to portion of society contributing to pollution on a massively higher scale than even an upper middle class American. How many ‘rich’ Americans regularly fly private jets or take yachts? How many average joes own and operate a cruise line or a refinery?
I think with regards to poorer people in other countries, they’d be on the same page with 99.99% of Americans about who’s considered so rich that they alone pose a threat to global health.
No, they’d be able to afford the best lawyers. It’s the poor who would be punished the most. We already have fines for not recycling properly, even though the rubbish all gets mixed back together in Turkey or China and burned anyway. We have to use soggy paper straws with our drinks while the rich blanket the atmosphere in burned fuel from the private jets.
Start by taking away private jets and private flights from rich people. As all laws do, this one will also apply only to regular and poor people, not even big companies and certainly not for rich. Just look at what Musk is doing to nature reserve nears his launch pad. He was warned, didn’t get launch permissions, doesn’t have permission for letting untreated water into ground from cooling… and yet he does all that and no one bats and eye. Just look at the main page of Lemmy and you’ll see news of some dude flying alone in 747 because he can. Royal family has been known to fly across the ocean to get lunch.
I meant you can live as carefully as possible, walk everywhere, never fly a plane and live only on solar for multiple lives and you couldn’t offset what they fuck up in a day.
We’re well beyond the point of industrial activity being done “more safely.” Either it stops entirely, or everything collapses before the turn of the next century.
Okay then, we just build Lofstrom loops and run them on nuclear reactors. Launch materials to put a solar shade up in a Lagrange point to cool the planet down until we stop all fossl fuel use and sequester enough CO2 when it is no longer needed. Construct the shade out of millions of smaller mirrors so that we can move mirrors away slowly over time so as to sync with the lowering CO2 levels.
Those loops only cost like $10 billion. That’s like a third of NASA’s yearly budget.
It’s not pie in the sky or some dumbass excuse to give the ruling class an out on climate change. Actually, the opposite – with cheap access to space, we will have access to near unlimited solar energy so we won’t need fossil fuels anymore, we can mine NEAs for metals making surface mining unnecessary, and actually build the Jetsonian post scarcity future our abusers promised us and failed to deliver on.
We really don’t have a choice anyway – we don’t have access to enough resources down here to make any of that happen, and without the solar shade no surface-only effort to stop climate collapse will work anyhow since the temperature will go up without it no matter what we do down here.
So we are left with a choice to kickstart human expansion into space or allow the biosphere to collapse. Grow or die. I say we grow.
Of course they think that, because the EPA will do whatever it can to pad it's emissions ratings for the Paris Climate Accord. Carbon offsetting does not work, due to wildfire and insect risk.
“Plans to” and actually planted those trees are two different things. But that would be a great solution. Wood is a renewable material, easy to work with and most importantly keeps carbon trapped until its burned or rotten. In other words, plant trees, make stuff with wood.
Looks like the non-profit founded by Higgins and Mehta is active in promoting this law on a worldwide scale, with ongoing legislative efforts in Spain, Finland, and Brazil. Here's their action page to get involved and offer support.
Consevationism, there’s so many other aspects of conservativism than conservationism, the capitalists/right wingers aren’t going to hurt themselves by outlawing all of conservativism.
Conservativism also touches on race, religion, economics, and others that are unique or spawned by the main tenets of conservativism.
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