Marjan Minnesma, Director of Dutch NGO Urgenda.
Just under a month ago, Marjan Minnesma stood weeping with joy in a Dutch courtroom, as three judges handed her and nearly 900 co-plaintiffs a resounding victory in their battle to force the Netherlands government to adopt more stringent climate action targets.
Now she is in Australia with a simple message: the courts might be able to deliver citizens what intransigent politics cannot.
Her legal victory is garnering interest around the globe, with “a wide variety of people in Australia contacting me for help”, she says.
“Hopefully our case will give people courage to do something similar; those three judges deserve the Nobel prize because they did something that is going to make a difference – they knew it would be a landmark case all over the world.”
The 48-year old former academic and environmental law specialist heads the Dutch not-for-profit organisation Urgenda, which specialises in working with companies and communities on sustainability projects.
But two and a half years ago she decided citizen power alone was not making enough progress against the threat of runaway global warming.
She teamed up with a Dutch lawyer, Roger Cox, who had written a book, Revolution Justified, arguing that western legal systems could be used to spur governments into greater action. “I read his book and thought, this might be a way to go to try to force government to move quicker,” she said.
Ms Minnesma, Mr Cox and their team amassed every bit of authoritative climate science they could to lay before the court.
“Up until the last minute, for me it was 50/50 whether we would win, not because the work of our lawyers was not good enough but because I was wondering if the judges would understand how big the climate problem was,” she recalls.
But the ruling of the three judges of the Hague District court on June 24 exceeded Urgenda’s hopes. The court accepted the legal argument that the government had a duty of care to project its citizens from the effects of climate change, and ordered Dutch authorities to dramatically lift their planned cuts in carbon emissions.
Instead of a target of up to17 per cent lower emissions on 1990 levels, the court said the government had to achieve a cut of at least 25 per cent within five years.
Ms Minnesma said the case rested on relatively straightforward civil law.
“In many legal systems, there is a duty of care. The judges had to decide, is this a big danger? They said yes because the science is very clear.”
She and her co- plaintiffs have had “thousands upon thousands of reactions from people who have said, ‘you really give us hope again'” she says. “I even got a hug from the local baker.”
The case is taking on particular significance as countries finalise the individual carbon reduction targets they will take to the all-important Paris conference on action against climate change at the end of the year.
In Belgium and Norway, citizen groups are gearing up to test their governments’ targets in court.
In the United States, environmental groups like the Sierra Club are taking a different, but equally effective, tack, using legal actions on air and water quality and challenging local utilities on price hikes to help shut down uneconomic coal plants around the country. This week, the club’s Beyond Coal campaign announced it had reached a target of helping to “retire” 200 coal plants – nearly 40 per cent of the 523 US coal plants in operation five years ago.
Environmental lawyers in Australia say the Dutch case may not be an easy precedent to apply here, as Australian courts have been cautious about accepting climate change as a direct cause of current or future harm.
But Ms Minnesma says the case should be prompting every government to examine its duty of care towards its people. ” I have heard that your Mr Abbott is a Christian; well you have seen what the Pope is saying” she says. ” The Pope is demanding action on climate change because he thinks it is a moral duty. But Mr Abbott’s government is a not a leader [ in this field] it is an enormous laggard.”
She says Canberra’s current anti-wind-power rhetoric ignores the huge economic potential of the sector.
“Tell your grandchildren later that you didn’t want it because it was ugly. People have no clue that we are now on the trail to 4 to 6 degrees global warming instead of staying below 2 degrees. That is not more nice weather on the beach – that is a world that is much more unlivable.”
Revolution Justified By Roger Cox
With the fast-paced readability of a crime novel, Revolution Justified leaves no room for reassuring doubt or denial about the huge societal challenges of oil decline, climate change and the failure of democracy. Meticulously substantiated with a wide array of international scientific, journalistic and even military sources, the text draws readers into a tightening stranglehold that eases only in the final section. Here, the reader learns how the judiciary may yet rescue the climate and break through the status quo in the energy world to prevent the literal downfall of Western society.
Revolution Justified includes forewords by William McDonough co-author of the bestseller Cradle to Cradle – Remaking the Way We Make Things and Wubbo Ockels first Dutch astronaut on the 1985 US Space Shuttle Challenger and James Hansen “The world’s pre-eminent climate scientist” (Guardian)
Military reports warn that impending energy problems will endanger Western society and threaten to weaken ties between states and their citizens, undermining the very foundations of democracy and the rule of law. Energy issues will also set the stage for more aggressive geopolitics and will substantially destroy the ecosystem services on which society is wholly dependent. These are but a few of the impacts that the double energy problem of climate change and oil decline have in store for us.
In this illuminating book, attorney and pragmatic visionary Roger Cox sets out and analyzes these energy stress tests, going on to explain why neither the market mechanism nor today’s political model are capable of initiating an energy revolution to solve these issues. This deadlock situation has the potential to bring about the very downfall of Western society, as this book explains, and will at the very least put Western countries at risk of committing domestic human rights violations on a scale nobody had thought to ever see again after World War II.
Precisely this threat of human rights violations puts the judiciary in a position to step in and lead Western governments out of the dangerous deadlock. Drawing and expanding on examples and cases from the US, the UK, the Netherlands, Europe and the European Union, this book demonstrates that the West’s legal systems already contain all the elements needed to achieve an energy revolution faster and more effectively then any other alternative.
Price € 24,95
ISBN 978-90-817975-1-1
Soft cover, Cradle to cradle optimised printing
328 pages