Environmental World: Green lawsuits on the rise

LONDON -- In Australia, environmentalists use the courts to challenge a proposed mine. California sues carmakers seeking damages for environmental effects of their vehicles. Arctic Inuits file a petition claiming U.S. carbon emissions are violating their human rights by melting polar ice.

Around the world, greens are increasingly taking their battle against global warming to the courts. While obstacles are enormous, plaintiffs are making headway in some cases, and the lawsuits are racheting up pressure on politicians to impose mandatory curbs on emissions and forcing companies to change their products or improve their public images.

Some hope that such cases will be as effective as the threat of obesity lawsuits were against some soft-drink and junk-food makers, causing them to modify products. Companies such as Boeing Co. and General Motors Corp. already are using advertisements to boast about the fuel efficiency of their new planes and cars, saying they produce less CO2 than earlier models.

Other environmentalists are even more ambitious, hoping that class-action lawsuits against wealthy corporations that pollute could one day be as effective as past litigation against tobacco and asbestos companies.

"Judges are finally starting to accept what scientists have long said: that greenhouse gas emissions are causing climate change and need to be reduced," said Peter Roderick, co-director of Climate Justice Program, an activist group in London.

Few, if any, of the cases have led to big victories, leading some analysts to call them quixotic and predict they will be as unsuccessful as suits that U.S. cities filed to try to hold gunmakers responsible for gun violence. In cases against individual corporations, it is extremely difficult to prove any one company is a villain responsible for environmental damage.

CALL FOR ACTION

But environmental litigation may already be making progress on a more modest goal: persuading government officials and more citizens to call for action against global warming.

"The main purpose of litigation may not be to persuade courts to determine greenhouse gas emission policy, but to attract public attention and pressure governments to reach political solutions, including treaties and domestic law," University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner wrote this year in a paper titled Climate Change and International Human Rights Litigation: A Critical Appraisal.

Hari Osofsky, an assistant professor at the University of Oregon School of Law, said it's important to remember that such litigation is still in its early stages, and that most of it is seeking regulatory action, not damages.

The most effective legal route for green campaigners has been trying to prove that government agencies aren't adequately enforcing existing regulations designed to protect the environment.

That tactic has been tried in Australia and the U.S., which didn't sign the Kyoto Accord, and in Canada, which did but has failed to meet its targets for greenhouse-gas emission reductions.

In Canada, which has failed to meet its CO2 emission requirements under the Kyoto Accord, Inuits and Friends of the Earth have both put together global warming cases.

INUIT PETITION

An organization representing 155,000 Inuits living in Arctic regions in Canada, Alaska, Russia and Greenland travelled in March to Washington to present a petition to the 34-nation Inter-American Commission on Human Rights saying U.S. carbon emissions have contributed so much to global warming that they should be considered a human-rights violation.

The group asked the commission's assistance "in obtaining relief" from the impact of global warming, and made specific reference to the United States as the country most responsible for the problem.

The commission lacks the legal authority to compel the United States to take action. But Posner said: "If a plausible claim can be made that the emission of greenhouse gases violates human rights, and that these human rights are embodied in treaty or customary international law, then American courts may award damages to the victims."

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CHRONOLOGY OF LAWSUIT AGAINST THE CANADIAN FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

- May 29: Friends of the Earth, an international environmental activist group, launches a lawsuit against the federal government for not acting on the Kyoto Accord, which Canada signed, to reduce greenhouse gases.

- June 22: Pablo Rodriguez, a Liberal member of Parliament, succeeds in getting his private member's bill, the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act (KPIA), passed by the Senate, which forces the federal government to set specific targets and deadlines to reduce greenhouse gases.

- Aug. 9: Friends of the Earth suspends its lawsuit, in anticipation of the government's new Climate Change Plan.

- Aug. 21: The Minister of the Environment releases his Climate Change Plan, which fails to comply with the requirements of the KPIA.

- Sept. 14: The Governor General, at the request of PM Stephen Harper, adjourns Parliament thereby eliminating any chance of Bill C-30, the Amended Clean Air Act, returning for approval by Parliament.

n Sept. 20: Friends of the Earth launches a new lawsuit against the federal government for failing to comply with the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act.

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- California, U.S.: A lawsuit was filed by the state in 2006 against GM, Chrysler, Ford, Honda, NIssan, and Toyota motor companies for contributing to global warming. The lawsuit was recently dismissed.

- Ecuador: Lawsuit filed in 2003 against Chevron oil company for allegedly dumping 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the Amazon rainforest from 1964 to 1992. The suit is expected to resolve in 2008.

- Canada: Lawsuits were filed in 2007 to get the federal government to act on reducing greenhouse gases, a commitment the nation made by signing the Kyoto Accord (see sidebar).

- Gulf states, U.S.: A lawsuit was filed against the Federal Communications Commission to protect endangered birds from cell towers.

- India: Over 6.5 million farmers from every state in India are asking the Supreme Court to let them join a lawsuit against Monsanto, saying the seeds of genetically modified crops have contaminated their fields.

- Africa: Hundreds of Ivorans have joined a British lawsuit against a Dutch-based oil trader, Trafigura, saying it illegally dumped tons of waste in the Ivory Coast in August, 2006.

- Australia: In 2004 and 2006 respectively, state courts challenged the expansion of one coal mine and the opening of another. The coal mining companies won.