Scotland could become one of the first countries to establish a specific crime for mass environmental destruction as championed by late Scots barrister Polly Higgins.
“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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
This is how the legal system typically works when a new law is introduced.
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.
It needs to go.
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.
Funny how quickly people forget that they’re supporting authoritarianism just because it happens to line up with their belief system in one instance.
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.
I agree. I edited my post (probably after you saw it) to reflect that.