The U.S Is Living in Climate-Denial Fantasies and Delusions

As in many other contexts, on climate, the U.S. and the rest of the planet are now in “completely separate worlds.”

Excerpt: "Last month, the world’s highest court issued a long-awaited opinion on how international law should regard climate harm. The International Court of Justice concluded, unanimously, that states have binding legal obligations to act to protect the climate system, and failure to do so—by continuing to produce, consume, and subsidize fossil fuels—may “constitute an internationally wrongful act.” In other words, curbing greenhouse-gas emissions is not merely voluntary in the eyes of the court; failure to do so is illegal.

A week later, the U.S. government proffered an entirely opposite picture of legal responsibility. It announced a plan to rescind one of the most important legal underpinnings of the federal effort to combat climate change. T

he Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding for greenhouse gases, from 2009, says quite simply that these emissions endanger the public and qualify as harmful pollution; they can therefore be regulated under the Clean Air Act. This finding is the legal basis for power-plant rules, tailpipe-emissions regulations, and almost every other action the executive branch has taken to curb the release of carbon dioxide and methane. And the U.S. EPA would now like to throw it out.

The United States and the rest of the planet are now in “completely separate worlds” in terms of legal understanding of climate responsibility, the human-rights attorney Lotte Leicht, who works as the advocacy director of the nonprofit Climate Rights International, told me.

“I think almost nothing could have painted a starker picture,” Nikki Reisch, an attorney and the Climate and Energy Program director at the Center for International Environmental Law, agrees."