The Absurdity of Climate Reparations

Yet one more reason to abolish the United Nations and its kangaroo "courts"! The ICJ has told the West, "meet your 'environmental targets' or be sued", and we know which way the court will rule in those cases.

From The European Conservative

By Lauren Smith

The UN’s top court wants to punish the West for the ‘historic’ pollution that created the modern world as we know it.

If an international court told the Western world to jump off a cliff, would we do it? We may be about to find out. The UN’s top court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), ruled on Wednesday that wealthy nations must meet their environmental targets, or else face being sued by the states most affected by climate change.

The case was brought to the ICJ by a group of law students from the Pacific Islands—where countries like Vanuatu are particularly at risk from rising sea levels—and was supported by 132 nations in total. As part of the ruling, Judge Yuji Iwasawa also called climate change an “urgent and existential threat,” said that a healthy environment is a human right, and declared that “states must cooperate to achieve concrete emission-reduction targets.” Those who fail to reduce their fossil fuel consumption could expect to cough up “full reparations to injured states in the form of restitution, compensation and satisfaction provided that the general conditions of the law of state responsibility are met.”

The decision is not legally binding, but it could still prove influential. Campaigners and climate lawyers hope that it’ll pave the way for Western nations to pay out ‘compensation’ to countries most affected by climate change. Experts have warned this also opens the door to lawsuits over historic emissions, as less developed nations vie for ‘climate reparations’ from countries like the UK, where the Industrial Revolution began. 

Judge Iwasawa did, however, warn that it would be extremely difficult to assign historic blame and quantify the damage done by various nations over the last few hundred years. This might be the one sensible point he makes. After all, it would be ridiculous to calculate the environmental impact of the steam engine while disregarding the far greater positive impacts it has had on the world. Should we be weighing up the climate harms of mass manufacturing without accounting for the benefits of people not having to sew their own clothes? Are we supposed to attach a numerical cost to the invention of the vaccine, the sewage system, or the lightbulb, while pretending that no good has come of them? Any right-thinking person understands that the gains from these innovations far outweigh the environmental damage they may have caused.  

Not that the logistics of this really matter. The fanatical green activists demanding reparations have already judged the entire West to be guilty. Now, they want us to apologise for creating the modern, developed world. It doesn’t matter that the much maligned Industrial Revolution also gave birth to an age of global transportation, higher standards of living, better health care, and longer life expectancies. Never mind that those supposedly Satanic mills lifted billions out of poverty, paved the way for social progress, and helped to deliver iced oat matcha lattes into the hands of eco-zealots the world over. If it were up to them, we’d still be living in 17th-century squalor and balancing our humours.

Proponents of historic climate reparations seem to believe that countries like the UK were simply pumping emissions out into the atmosphere for the hell of it back then—rather than with the purpose of propelling the world forward technologically and scientifically. Not to mention the fact that the phrase ‘climate change’ did not exist in the vocabulary of any 18th-century industrialist or Victorian inventor. It hardly feels fair to criticise our forebears for not considering a problem they were literally unaware of—and it’s doubly unfair that today’s taxpayers should be held responsible for the past’s carbon footprint. 

As the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, the UK will be firmly in the sights of eco-conscious states in search of reparations. For starters, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has made himself an easy target for these non-binding judgements. He chose to follow ICJ opinion when he needlessly and recklessly handed over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius last year, for example, at a cost of around £30 billion. Given Starmer’s track record of rolling over in the face of ‘human rights’ and international law, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if he immediately caves and decides to pay out billions of pounds to atone for our supposed climate sins. 

Contrast this with countries like Russia, China, or the U.S.—all of which exceed the UK’s historic carbon emissions, even when that contribution takes into account emissions produced in all British territory at the height of the Empire. How much can we expect Putin, Xi Jinping, or Trump to fork out because an international court told them to? Last I checked, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine wasn’t exactly in line with international law, nor are China’s various human rights abuses. When these countries are willing to commit such egregious violations, we can hardly expect them to abide by something as absurd as green reparations. If anyone is going to be held ‘accountable’ for past environmental transgressions, it’ll be the grey-suited, managerial Keir Starmers, Friedrich Merzes, and Ursula von der Leyens of the world. 

That is, if anyone ends up paying climate reparations at all. It’s far more likely that this is a purely symbolic threat, designed to guilt-trip the West into introducing yet more unrealistic Net Zero targets. Perhaps the one ironic silver lining to this is that, as these policies are already setting many European nations on the road to bankruptcy, blackouts, and deindustrialisation, there might not be any money left in the pot for idiotic schemes like this.

Regardless, the West shouldn’t be punished for lifting its populations out of pre-industrial misery and into the modern age. If anything, a thank you wouldn’t go amiss for the many, many contributions today’s developed nations have made to science, technology, medicine, and general global prosperity. Not that we can expect anything of the sort from green activists, who would rather humanity leave no trace on the Earth at all—even if that means inventing nothing, building less, and aspiring to very little at all. This bleak future is exactly where insane schemes like climate reparations will lead us.