What is the role of a human rights approach to climate change? Will human rights law be useful in situating new law or acting as the “grounds” for new policy? Or, is it only useful in mobilizing hearts and minds? Read Professor Dan Bodansky’s response and the reply by conference participant Professor John Knox, posted on Opinio Juris. What do you think?
This depends on whether you believe in man-made-global-warming or not. If, like me, you do not, then this connection makes perfect sense. MMGW is a fake emergency. It makes sense that those who exploit it would want to maximize their gains and impact by investigating what effect this could have on international agreements and laws within various nations. In most cases it appears that MMGW will be used for influential elites to seize rights from individuals.
How that plays out varies from country to country. Since MMGW is being used to place totalitarian levels of power in the hands of relatively few people it may be important to offer reassurances to the masses in the form of promises of protections through constitutional restraints and international standard models. Of course, those protections can and will be withdrawn as the need dictates but, the beauty of an international totalitarianism is that the ruling elite, (however that is determined), will be secure enough in their positions that they will probably be able to afford a wider range of latitude in tolerating criticism and behavioral deviations than was recently the case in countries like the Soviet Union under Stalin and the People’s Republic of China under Mao.
This currently fictitious realm has its uses within national politics but, I have strong misgivings about whether it should ever be given any more semblance of reality than it has today. Engaging in even just a representation of ‘international law’ invites all sorts of problems when disparity of conditions becomes associated with disparities in the application of such “law.”
My concern is that the time for this is not yet really ripe. Better in the near term to continue the system of independent nation-states and thereby maintain the expectation of disparity as a natural condition than promote an idea of international law that will only exacerbate expectations and frustrations.
This whole concept and trend also fundamentally misunderstands the role the United States plays in this process. The Progressivist effort to overthrow the American revolution and replace it with an intellectual aristocracy once again does not look likely to succeed. This will leave America in the position of continuing to present the challenge of the “limited government option.”
Moving toward an international extention of democratic-socialism will be premature. Its appeal will continue to lie with the would-be neo-aristocrats and their relatively small following of true believers. As the truth about MMGW is understood this expansion effort will only provoke a more severe reaction counterproductive to the intentions of its advocates. Simply put, the world is not ready yet for anything resembling international environmental law. As law it will be an empty gesture which will be exposed as the theory of man-made-global-warming proves unsustainable. As a tool in, “mobilizing hearts and minds,” it is likely to backfire and instead lead to mobilizing lynch-mobs.