This is part 10 of A Climate Counternarrative.
Notice: if you came here via an external link to the legal campaign, the updated legal campaign page has more recent and practical information.
The only real emergency in the end is stopping misguided environmental actions. Debunking the climate narrative has yet to stop them. Pulling the rug from under it might. Crowdsourcing is needed for the activities that follow to succeed, because there are too many moving parts for a single person or a small team to stay on top of.
Defanging the narrative in court makes sense. The accounting chicanery that this work brings up is straightforward to understand and verify: read the treaties; the rest is basic accounting, biology, and common sense. The corruption, the profiteering, the environmental malfeasance, and the racist land grabs that the narrative is fueling likely make it indefensible in court. This work is therefore set to be of interest to a number of environmental lawsuits. I’ve reached out to an anecdotal sample of such cases, and the strategy to use when reaching out to them varies with the type of lawsuit.
Some lawsuits are transparent legal charades. These are the cases that aim to vilify and defund fossil fuel corporations. You can find these using climate change litigation databases. The court filings invariably reveal the law firms. Anecdotally, I’ve yet to come across a single case where either side wanted to get the case dismissed. This is not surprising, since the same interests tend to fund both sides of these cases. File amicus briefs that bring up this work to help spoil their party.
A subset among these lawsuits aim to force governments to take climate actions. They make use of statutes or precedents to that end, like those in Germany or the Netherlands. These are especially interesting in that they could backfire spectacularly. A no-nonsense judge with a sense of humor could well rebuff the narrative and force governments to have farmers and loggers clean up their acts.
Other lawsuits are defending against land seizures tied to carbon offsets, nature reserves, carbon dioxide pipelines, mining, or green tech projects. You’ll usually hear about those through defense groups, non-profits that help them, and occasional news articles. The difficulty is that defending parties tend to shut down upon hearing climate change (farmers) or reject the idea of dismissing it (environmental and indigenous groups). So stick with saying that you’ve information of use to their lawyers when reaching out. That will usually be enough to put you through.
The last batch is looming. It is tied to liberty restrictions. The defending parties in these cases typically welcome any help sent their way. But the modus operandi seems to be to justify movement restrictions and social credit scores using health or social benefits. Those justifications should be straightforward to pick apart because unconstitutional or because the would-be benefits build on shaky foundations.
Sending cease and desist letters to enablers makes sense too. This builds potential liability, in that the recipients can no longer claim that they did not know. If you’re an attorney, help draft sample letters that others can send. (Include instructions.) These don’t need to be thorough. They just need to sound scary enough to prompt their recipient to check out the references.
Confronting green investment funds about their misleading claims about environmental friendliness is not a stretch. Doing so would be a good way to defund misguided climate activities. There might even be jurisdictions where the carbon accounting chicanery can be construed as accounting fraud. Get standing if needed (for instance by investing in one), and join, threaten, or start a lawsuit. At minimum you’ll get the legal department’s attention and trigger internal discussions.
Confronting academics, leaders, administrators, and other puppets about the neocolonial violence that they are enabling would likely be a stretch for a court case. But it might bring them to think about what they’re a part of — unwittingly, no doubt. So send them polite if firm snail mail as well.
For the rest, rural communities could make a mockery of The Science by turning the carbon hockey stick around. Talk to farmers near you. Invite them to put in hedges on contour. Narrow bands of prairie species will work too if they don’t want to hear about trees. The point is to put plants in to soak up those soil emissions. Talk to agribusiness corporations. They could ask farmers who work their fields to do this. And talk to legislators. Tree cover can affect farm subsidies, so get those changed. Or repelled, since their main use is to put small farmers out of business.
With this being said, have no doubt that the climate narrative will continue unabated until public awareness terminates it. As such, share this work to help change the conversation, organize your community and those around it to grow food, promote food sovereignty, and care for your watershed.
A Climate Counternarrative | Next: Scheming Ecofascists
About the Author
Denis de Bernardy is the author of A Natural Language. His work exposes environmental big lies and puts solutions in front of the actual problems.
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