The Turning Tide
This post was originally published on Legal Planet. Reprinted with permission.
Some events last week sent a strong signal that the tide is turning against fossil fuels. Each of the events standing alone would have been noteworthy. The clustering of these events dramatizes an important shift.
To paraphrase Churchill, this may not be beginning of the end for fossil fuels, but at least it is the end of the beginning of the campaign against them.
Two of the events involved striking decisions in lawsuits in other countries involving fossil fuels. A federal court in Australia ruled that the government had a "duty of care" toward its young people to protect them from climate change. Accordingly, it could be found guilty of negligence if it failed to take their interests into account when considering a request to expand a coal mine. The court said that "it is difficult to characterise in a single phrase the devastation that the plausible evidence presented in this proceeding forecasts for the children," with today's Australia lost and "the world as we know it gone as well." This harm, the judge said, "will largely be inflicted by the inaction of this generation of adults …
Season 5 of the Center for Progressive Reform's Connect the Dots podcast continues with Episode 4: That's an Order. Keep reading for a summary and to listen to the episode.
President Biden put climate policy front and center on his campaigning platform and wasted no time in pushing his agenda when he took office. The president has proposed $14 billion in spending on initiatives to fight the crisis in the nation’s 2022 budget, and he has appointed cabinet officials with informed backgrounds to offer guidance. He’s also altered tax incentives to favor clean energy over fossil fuels and promised to spur a job revolution that will protect workers in this sector. But the U.S. is operated by three branches of government and federal powers are limited. It’s often the case that the "real work" is done on state and local levels. So, how …
