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https://hotair.com/david-strom/2025/07/29/icc-rules-that-fossils-are-ille gal-n3805238

The invaluable Mike Rowe pointed me to this article yesterday.

Well, not me, exactly. Mike doesn't know me from Adam, but he shared it
online with 7 million other people, and I count myself among them.

It's a piece in The New York Times--for him, it was the international
version with a different headline--that argues that several decisions by various international courts amount to outlawing the extraction and use
of fossil fuels.

It's hard to argue with their conclusion because I am not an
international lawyer, but let's assume that the claim is true, as it
appears to be on its face.

Rulings by the International Court of Justice, the Inter-American Court
of Human Rights, and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea
all suggest that the climate harms resulting from the burning of fossil
fuels violate international law.

Steve Milloy
@JunkScience
·
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Climate science is not the law: The UN's International Court of Justice
has not buffed the climate science turd into any sort of popsicle,
scientific or legal. https://nytimes.com/2025/07/24/opinion/international-court-climate-change -ruling.html

https://x.com/JunkScience/status/1948378419223273748/photo/1

If so, there are a lot of lawbreakers in the world, most certainly
including all the people involved in these legal cases. There is not a
person in the Western world who does not somehow rely on the use of
fossil fuels, save a few hermits whose living conditions mirror those of
the pre-industrial age. And probably most of them, too.

The I.C.J.’s unanimous opinion reinforced these conclusions and
broadened their reach, stating that countries must protect citizens from
the “urgent and existential threat” of climate change. When a country
fails to curb greenhouse gas emissions — whether by producing or
consuming fossil fuels, approving new exploration to find them or
subsidizing the industry — it may be held liable for “an internationally wrongful act,” the court’s 15 judges said.

This makes it much harder for any government or company to say that
rules don’t apply to them or they don’t have to act. Read together,
these three landmark legal rulings leave no doubt that continuing fossil
fuel production and use, let alone expanding it, violates the law. It is
a cease-and-desist notice to fossil fuel producers.

No doubt the judges made this ruling just before they got into their chauffeured limos to zip off to a resort somewhere to enjoy a nice
lunch.

The case before the I.C.J. is part of a growing global movement that is
turning to the courts to hold polluters accountable. From the lawsuits
brought by a Belgian farmer against the French oil giant TotalEnergies
and Indonesian villagers asking a Swiss cement company to pay climate
damages to the dozens of cities and states across the United States that
have accused the fossil fuel industry of climate deception and harm, a
new wave of plaintiffs is edging closer to making polluters pay.

Leading fossil-fuel-producing nations, such as the United States and
Saudi Arabia, will probably argue that this I.C.J. opinion is
unenforceable and thus inconsequential. But no country is exempt from
the obligations the court laid out. Their duties to prevent and remedy
climate harm are rooted in multiple sources of law, including principles
and treaties with which all countries must comply.

Ah, globalism. I remember the days of my youth when I was told that
everybody should learn Esperanto, the United Nations should replace
sovereign governments, and our biggest fears were overpopulation,
depletion of resources, mass starvation, the next ice age, and nuclear
war.

Thankfully, I didn't learn Esperanto. I don't even like the metric
system, although that is mostly because I am lazy and learned Imperial
units of measurement and hate snobby Europeans. No country that uses the
Metric system has landed a man on the moon, so there.

As Rowe points out, the whole "science is settled" died a miserable
death in 2020-21 (well, he didn't exactly say THAT, but it did), and the
whole "we understand the climate" thing is total crap. But even assuming
it were true, the criminalization of fossil fuels is about as cruel an
act toward human beings as has ever been contemplated. I would condemn
billions to permanent poverty, early deaths, and impoverish the world.

Even if climate change is here, fossil fuels are a necessary tool to
adapt to changing circumstances. Climate resilience is predicated on
abundant energy, as anybody who lives in Phoenix or Atlanta knows. Or
even here in Minnesota, where summers can reach 100 degrees and winters
-35 degrees. These places would be uninhabitable without abundant
energy. The fastest-growing metro regions in America are in places
people would flock from, not to, were energy scarce.

But forget the First World, for a moment. Billions of people less
fortunate than we are use wood and dung to cook their food and stay warm
at night. Forget cooling. There is none. Or lighting--it's hard to come
by. Life is nasty, brutish, and short (kinda like Danny DeVito in many
of his roles).


The Real Mike Rowe
@mikeroweworks
·
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A Detour to Dachau

I was going to share some more photos of yesterday’s road trip through
the German countryside, along with a few thoughts about my five-hour
visit to Dachau, where it’s impossible not to reflect on just how easy
it is to hurt so many by doing nothing at all. Show more

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Gw9SgYzbIAAxSbo?format=jpg&name=240x240

Rowe asked Alex Epstein his opinion on the Times article, and I will
excerpt a few choice paragraphs:

The logic behind these court rulings dangerously misrepresents our
relationship with the natural world. It assumes Earth is a delicate,
nurturing entity that we are harming. The truth is that nature is
dynamic, difficult, and often dangerous. Human flourishing requires that
we *impact* our environment to make it safer and more livable.

Fossil fuels are the key to this mastery. They power the machines that
irrigate deserts, build sturdy homes, and provide heating and air
conditioning that make our climates livable. Thanks to this
energy-powered resilience, deaths from climate-related disasters have
fallen by 98% over the last century, even as CO2 emissions have risen.
Banning fossil fuels would not save us from climate danger; it would
strip us of our primary means of protection.

Most people don't know this, but deaths from climate-related disasters
have been dropping faster than Stephen Colbert's ratings--and that is
because modern societies are resilient, whereas poorer ones are not. A magnitude 7.5 earthquake hitting in America is a problem that can kill hundreds; elsewhere in the world, the same quake might kill tens of
thousands. Same with hurricanes, floods, and most climate disasters.

If you look at the roster of disasters by number of deaths--even in
absolute terms and not adjusted for population increases--the drop has
been around 99%, and that is attributable to our increasing wealth. With
wealth comes resilience.

Instead of allowing unelected international bodies to dictate our energy future, we must fight for energy freedom. This means defending the right
of individuals and companies to produce and use all forms of
energy—including fossil fuels, nuclear, and any evolving alternatives
that can prove their worth on a free market.

The campaign to make progress a crime must be rejected. The real work is
not to “cease and desist” from producing the energy that improves lives,
but to unleash the human ingenuity that will allow all 8 billion of us
to flourish. We must demand policies that empower people, not impoverish
them.

This point is so obvious that only a globalist technocrat or a communist
who admires dictators who starve their populations to death couldn't see
it.

Yet here we are, with The New York Times printing this idiocy, and international courts imagining they can eforce their dictates on the
entire world.


--
November 5, 2024 - Congratulations President Donald Trump. We look
forward to America being great again.

We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that
stupid people won't be offended.

Every day is an IQ test. Some pass, some, not so much.

Thank you for cleaning up the disasters of the 2008-2017, 2020-2024 Obama
/ Biden / Harris fiascos, President Trump.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp. Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood
queer liberal democrat donors.

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