Greenhouse Lawsuits on the Way?(Brief Article)

In recent decades, American businesses and institutions have been battered by lawsuits of all varieties as radical trial lawyers have sought to accomplish in the courtroom what the left has been unable to achieve through legislation. An opinion column in the August 7th International Herald Tribune suggested that UN-connected eco-Leninists, frustrated by the reluctance of the United States to adopt the Kyoto Protocol on "greenhouse" gasses, may attempt the same strategy on the international level.

"As the rich world keeps falling out over how to deal with global warming," wrote Andrew Simms of the London-based New Economics Foundation (NEF), "exasperated poor countries may come to the conclusion that when all else fails, it's time to go to court." Rulers of countries "that suffer most from the increasingly unpredictable and extreme weather delivered by global warming ... could test the emerging international legal architecture with a novel nation-to-nation tort-like action. Greenhouse gas emissions in the United States are already top of the league, especially on a per capita basis, and keep rising. Perhaps it is time to take the United States to court."

Simms points out that "the United States is the most obvious candidate" for an international greenhouse "tort action" and warns that ...