POSTERICIDE CLIMATE INJUSTICE DENIER'S RECKLESS CONDUCT AND CRIMINAL SANCTIONS

POSTERICIDE & VICARIOUS LIABILITY

RECKLESS CONDUCT CARRIES WITH IT A VICARIOUS LIABILITY & POTENTIAL CRIMINAL SANCTIONS

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IT KILLS THEM GETTING IT OUT, IT KILLS US USING IT - Drilling and pumping oil is a messy occupation playing with carcinogenic fluids, that traditionally makes millionaires of those prospectors. Hence the name "Black Gold" and "Texas Tea." Years ago oil prospecting was respectable, today those investing in oil companies are deemed by many to be climate criminals - because it kills us when we burn it. Thus, investing in oil is investing in cancer, death and suffering - knowingly engaging in spreading disinformation, such as employing professionals to tell people that something is good for them, or not harmful, when it is obvious from scientific data, that it is not good for them.

VICARIOUS LIABILITY & RECKLESS CONDUCT

Deliberately engaging in climate denial spin, such as to endanger human lives or cause suffering, should be a new crime on the statute books of every country, or at the very least a prosecutable offence at the International Criminal Court, as per the Rome Statute of 1998. About which we respectfully submit that the deliberate spread of misinformation as to climate change, or harm to health from inhalation of fossil fuel fumes, should be recognised as Postericide.

ENVIRONMENTAL, SOCIAL, GOVERNANCE (ESG)

Investors are increasingly applying these non-financial factors as part of their analysis process to identify material risks and growth opportunities.

ESG metrics are not commonly part of mandatory financial reporting, though companies are increasingly making disclosures in their annual report or in a standalone sustainability report. Numerous institutions, such as the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), and the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) are working to form standards and define materiality to facilitate incorporation of these factors into the investment process.

As ESG investing accelerates in demand, several key trends are emerging – from climate change to social unrest. The coronavirus pandemic, in particular, has intensified discussions about the interconnectedness of sustainability and the financial system.

There is no one exhaustive list of ESG examples. ESG factors are often interlinked, and it can be challenging to classify an ESG issue as only an environmental, social, or governance issue.

ESG factors can often be measured (e.g., what the employee turnover for a company is), but it can be difficult to assign them a monetary value (e.g., what the cost of employee turnover for a company is).

ANTI-GREENWASHING - SUSTAINABILITY DISCLOSURE REQUIREMENTS (SDR)

On the 18 October 2021, UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak published a roadmap setting out the Treasury's new Sustainability Disclosure Requirements (SDR). The requirements, which will affect asset managers, investment products and listed corporates, require firms to disclose the environmental impact of any activities they finance and "clearly justify any suitability claims [they] make".

Some key points in the report, entitled Greening Finance: A Roadmap to Sustainable Investing, include reporting environmental impact using the UK Green Taxonomy, timescales on SDR disclosures and the potential for ESG ratings agencies to come into the scope of Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) authorisation and regulation.

Although the UK Taxonomy has not yet been produced, the document says it ‘draws on the EU approach, which the UK helped design' and the six environmental objectives are exactly the same as the EU Taxonomy, down to applying the climate change mitigation and climate change adaptation before the other four, having technical screening criteria for each economic activity, and requiring any activity to both contribute to at least one objective and also to do no significant harm to any others.

ACCELERATING THE EXTINCTION OF HUMANITY

Criminal sanctions are the most potent tools we have to mark out conduct that lies beyond all limits of toleration. Criminal conduct violates basic rights and destroys human security. We reserve the hard treatment of punishment for conduct that damages the things we hold most fundamentally valuable. Climate change is causing precisely such damage.

Over the last 250 years or so, we have burned fossil fuels for cheap energy, destroyed carbon sinks, grown the global population, and failed to halt the malign influence of corporate interests on political action that could have made mitigation manageable. Now, we have a window of just ten years or less to avoid using up the carbon budget for 1.5 ℃, according to the 2018 Special Report(link is external) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). If we continue on our current trajectory of emissions without aggressive mitigation, we could see warming in the range of 4–6.1 ℃ above pre-industrial averages by 2100. Even if all countries meet their current mitigation targets under the Paris Agreement 2015(link is external) (COP21), we are likely to see warming of at least 2.6 ℃ by 2100.

A 4–6.1 ℃ rise in temperature by 2100 would be catastrophic. Large areas of the earth would become uninhabitable as sea levels rise and temperatures soar. Severe weather events, crop failure, and conflict in the face of mass migration never before seen in human history, would place intense pressure on remaining habitable places. In these fragile and febrile conditions, positive feedback from warming could put humanity at risk of extinction, according to the journal, Futures, September 2018. This feedback occurs when tipping points are passed in the climate system, causing processes to be unleashed that exacerbate warming. For example, the transformation of the Amazon forest from the world’s largest carbon sink to a carbon source; or, the massive retreat of polar ice, which reduces the planet’s reflectivity, leading it to warm at a greater speed. These tipping points are described in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) as a critical threshold at which global or regional climate changes from a stable state to another stable state.

Temperature rises of 4–6.1 ℃ are not likely, but they are not science fiction either. Each year that passes without aggressive mitigation to reach net zero emissions by 2050 makes this existential threat more real. Even if the Paris Agreement aggressively ratchets up mitigation ambition to close the emissions gap by 2030, it remains the case that we have already reached 1 ℃ of warming. Given the time lag between emissions and the warming they induce – due to the long lifetime of carbon molecules in the atmosphere – further increases are to be expected.

CLIMATE CRIMES MUST BE BROUGHT TO JUSTICE

Climate denial has increased the risk of catastrophic global change. Should international criminal law be used against those who promote this dangerous trend? Economic and political leaders can no longer pretend it is business as usual. Whether they actively induce environmental harm or just ignore the existential threat against the survival of the human species, states and corporations must be held accountable for their actions or inaction regarding climate change. By Catriona McKinnon

EXAMPLE OF DENIAL POTENTIALLY PUTTING LIVES AT RISK

A fire has started in the theatre, from which there are no exits. Unchecked, the fire will kill and injure many in the theatre, starting with those in the cheapest seats. Many people can smell the smoke, but some others have not noticed it yet. Some people are trying to warn everyone so that the fire can be contained before it spreads out of control. Another group – sitting mainly in the most expensive seats – is trying to shout loudly that there is no fire, or that it is not serious, or that there is plenty of time left to put it out. This group uses emotive language and insists that the other group is not to be trusted.

Many people in the theatre are confused by these conflicting messages or convinced by the fire-deniers. There are enough people in this combined set to significantly slow down the efforts of those listening to the accurate warnings, those who are trying to put out the fire. In this scenario, those shouting “No fire!” ought to be silenced, because there is a fire that requires urgent and immediate action to prevent it from spreading and becoming uncontrollable. But the fire is not being tackled properly because many of the people in the theatre do not know whom to believe.

Can we compare those who deny the reality of climate change to the group that occupies the best seats in the theatre? The answer seems obvious: yes.

BETWEEN IRRESPONSIBLE BEHAVIOUR ...

Should we use criminal law to tackle climate change? The current generation of people alive in the Anthropocene is capable of damaging and degrading the environment in ways that could make humanity go extinct. Postericide is a morally required response to humanity's changed circumstances in the Anthropocene. The scope of international criminal law makes it the right site to address the existential threats created by climate change. International criminal law aims to protect the entire human community irrespective of national borders, now and into the future. International criminal law expresses the values that bind the human community together across time. It asserts the condemnation of “unimaginable atrocities that deeply shock the conscience of humanity” – as stipulated in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court of 17 July 1998, which defines, inter alia, the international crimes over which the ICC has jurisdiction.

For there to be a crime, there must be a criminal. The death and suffering caused by climate impacts is deeply shocking, but this is not enough to prompt prosecution under international criminal law. Death and suffering are caused by volcanic eruptions, yet there are no culpable agents in these cases.

The current climate crisis has been caused by human activity over the last two and a half centuries or so, leading to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The crisis is in large part an unintended consequence of action across history that has led to the destruction of carbon sinks, increased carbon flows, and concentrated carbon stocks. Most of this conduct is beyond the legitimate reach of international criminal law, not least because the relevant people are dead. Most, but not all.

... AND POSTERICIDE

I have proposed that international criminal law should be expanded to include a new criminal offence that I call postericide. It is committed by intentional or reckless conduct fit to bring about the extinction of humanity. Postericide is committed when humanity is put at risk of extinction by conduct performed either with the intention of making humanity go extinct, or with the knowledge that the conduct is fit to have this effect. When a person knows that their conduct will impose an impermissible risk on another and acts anyway, they are reckless. It is in the domain of reckless conduct, making climate change worse, that we should look for postericidal conduct.

No one person’s emissions are fit to bring about human extinction as a result of climate impacts – the many private jets and oil wells they own can do so, however. But individual people in their roles as political and corporate leaders can exert extensive control over how much worse climate change becomes as a result of their executive action. A country’s president can withdraw an entire state from a global agreement on mitigation; a Chief Executive Officer can authorize the withholding of information about the progress and impacts of climate change because it threatens the corporation’s bottom line.

Individuals often have control over conduct they do not perform themselves – for example, by giving direct orders to subordinates, or by virtue of the special relationship in which they stand to others whose conduct causes harm. This means that we can assign vicarious liability to individuals of power, authority and influence within groups that, as collectives, worsen climate change in ways fit to make humanity go extinct. Just as international criminal law holds military leaders to account for genocide committed by their troops, it should hold political and economic leaders to account for postericide committed under their authority. These leaders should go to trial at the ICC and be held to account at the bar of the human community’s fundamental shared values.

Who should be prosecuted for postericide? We could start by examining the established international network of well-funded organizations devoted to organized climate denial(link is external) (For more on this subject, read "Text-mining the signals of climate change doubt", in the journal Global Environmental Change, Volume 36, January 2016). The epicentre of this activity is in the United States. A set of Conservative think-tanks has deliberately deceived the public and policymakers about the realities of climate change. Their ideologically-driven climate denial has been heavily funded by the fossil fuel industry; which include, for example, Koch Industries and ExxonMobil. This climate denial has had a significant impact on public opinion and has impeded legislation to tackle climate change.

MAN MADE FAMINE - There is little difference between Man Made Famine, once the cause of the starvation and deaths is known, than other forms of genocide. Those responsible are held to be Climate Nazis by many, and may one day be accountable for such crimes in the International Criminal Court.

Man Made Famine is a form of geographical genocide. You don't have to line people up and shoot them, gas, or otherwise take their lives to commit the crime of this form of genocide. You simply have to carry on, business as usual, in the knowledge that failing to take action to curb global warming, is killing people in another land.

Famine that is caused by the industrialization and acceleration of growth of economies in unsustainable fashion, is nothing less than the premeditated murder of those less fortunate peoples in climate vulnerable locations on planet earth, who are unable to defend themselves.

GLOBAL WARMING - The cause of much famine is man-made. As our climate warms, the artic ice melts causing ocean levels to rise and agricultural land to become deserts. The most influential world leaders, of the G7 and G20 are fully aware of the consequences of failing to act in sufficient time to prevent Geographical Genocide. According to the 1948 Convention, Genocide is a crime. Any person or state advocating policies that do not seek to reduce climate warming, are therefore criminals. The excuse that their economy might suffer, is no excuse when it comes to (in effect) murdering another human being. It is the insatiable lust for economic growth that has caused the deaths of millions of displaced persons and those who died of lung cancer.

VICARIOUS CRIMINAL LIABILITY

Should Rex Tillerson [the former CEO of Exxon Mobil, who also served as US Secretary of State from February 2017 to March 2018] Charles Koch and David Koch [the owners of Koch Industries] be tried for the crime of postericide at the ICC? Their vicarious criminal liability would be generated by their authorization of multiple acts of climate denial by others, without which early aggressive political action on climate change would have been more likely.

Climate denial has seriously impeded aggressive mitigation efforts that could have averted our present climate emergency. It has magnified the risk that humanity locks in to catastrophic global climate change. The people in positions of authority in states, or industrial groups whose lies have put us and our descendants in peril, should be held accountable. The damage that climate deniers do is heinous, and they have no excuses. The time has come to prosecute them for postericide.

ABOUT CATRIONA McKINNON

Catriona McKinnon is a Professor of Political Theory at the University of Exeter, United Kingdom. She has published numerous articles and books on climate justice, and on toleration and liberal political ideals. Professor Catriona is currently completing a monograph defending postericide (Endangering Humanity: An International Crime), writing an introductory book on climate justice, and researching the ethical questions raised by geoengineering.

SUSTAINABLE ENERGY

The benefits of sustainable energy to mankind, land and marine animals are manifold. Think of all those islanders being displaced by melting arctic ice, raising sea levels. And what about all the forest fires burning houses to the ground. Why not plant more trees, instead of cutting natures filtration system down. Why do deniers go to such efforts to discredit climate change?

G20 abusers will say they had no choice, resting on the paid conflictions manufactured by employees of fossil fuel concerns. They can then say they need to keep burning coal, gas and oil for their economies - just like the camp guards at the many concentration camps, they were forced into 'business as usual' - in the case of the camp guards, they argued they were just following orders. But that is not true. We all have choices. There are clean alternatives, such as solar and wind power. There is no need to keep building coal fired electricity generating stations, and no need to drive carcinogenic petrol or diesel vehicles that contribute to lung cancer. We have hydrogen fuel cells, electrolyzers and zero emission electric vehicles. We also have low cost flatpack service stations. All the G20 have to do is join up the technology dots and change statute to force big businesses to do the right thing.

ADDICTED TO OIL - Oil and coal deposits are the Banks of Death for cowardly administrations, who it appears, refuse to even try to to fix the climate, for fear of reducing party political contributions and change, where business as usual rocks the election and popularity vote. Are they Chicken? You betcha. Chicken and homicidal at the same time, playing with your lives, and to chicken to try and do the right thing.

Yet, dozens of potential solutions abound, of which SmartNet™ is just one example. We hope that by giving examples and showing what the state of the technology is, or can be, that we will inspire at least one world leader and one giant energy corporation with the guts - to take the plunge - and give it a go.

COMMON LAW - Postericide is committed when an agent intentionally or recklessly performs conduct fit to bring about the extinction of humanity. International criminal law contains no precedents for the prosecution of postericide, because to obtain a conviction you would need to prove that the activity complained of was the fault of the parties concerned, acting either independently, or in concert. Meaning that upwards of four world leaders would need to be prosecuted. But that such prosecution would be likely to ignite hostilities and so be unenforceable in real terms. As the culprits brought up military barriers to protect themselves.

But we do have Corporate Manslaughter as a steer, since the crimes and intention to commit such crimes have been admitted by India and China during COP26 by Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping, in that they intend ramping up coal usage. In the full knowledge of the harm that will cause: Desertification, Sea Level Rise and Temperature Rise. In that an administration is and operates much like a Corporation, the controlling minds would be the guilty party.

Prosecution in the International Criminal Court, would be such as to declare those Leaders, incompetent and thus incapable of leadership. The requirement, apart from fines and/or imprisonment, would be to call a General Election. Advertising the extant Conviction as the basis for the Election. The Rome Statute of 1998, already contains such power to prosecute offenders.

Hence, in our view, the offence of, 'Postericide,' or a lesser charge, not so much directed at 'Extinction,' but directed at behaviour that will contribute to human deaths and displacement, is a moral necessity in the Anthropocene Age.

LINK & REFERENCE

https://www.

CANCER KINGS - The oil barons know about respiratory victims dying of lung cancer from carcinogenic and particulate vehicle exhausts, as they reap export dollars in return from selling such automobiles. They had/have a duty to their fellow man, abandoned to keep the $dollars rolling in. Cash for lives = climate butchers. Climate butchers are criminals that need to be brought to justice.

CLIMATE DENIERS A - Z

Fiona Wild
Marc Morano

Myron Ebel

COAL & OIL COMPANIES - In seeking to extend the use of fossil fuels, the world's oil, gas and coal companies, and the nations that continue to develop coal generation for so-called cheap energy, are turning the whole planet into one giant carcinogenic gas chamber. The oil barons know about cancer victims dying of lung cancer from carcinogenic and particulate vehicle exhausts, as they reap export dollars in return. As with cigarettes, this makes them vicariously liable, all the while fossil fuels are sold without a health warning clearly displayed.

LINKS & REFERENCE

https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190881931.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780190881931-e-44

https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2015/09/15/climate-change-deniers-bad-hitler-yale-history-professor-goes-full-godwin/

CONTINUED USE OF FOSSIL FUELS WILL CAUSE EARTH'S TEMPERATURE TO RISE, HUMAN DEATHS AND EVENTUAL EXTINCTION