The Guardian is Wrong, Climate Litigation Is Not Reasonable
By
Linnea Lueken
March 25, 2024
A recent Guardian article, “Fossil fuel firms could be tried in US for homicide over climate-related deaths, experts say,” describes a “new legal theory” that claims fossil fuel companies could be tried for homicide based on the claim that fossil fuel use causes climate change and extreme weather resulting in unnecessary deaths. There are several problematic aspects with this so-called legal theory, the primary of which is that the facts don’t support the theory: people are not increasingly dying from climate change. In fact, just the opposite is true, deaths resulting from extreme weather events and temperatures have declined dramatically even as the Earth has slightly warmed.
The Guardian claims that every year “extreme temperatures take 5 million lives, while 400,000 people die from climate-related hunger and disease and scores perish in floods and wildfires.”
It is true that people die from extreme temperatures, hunger and disease, and floods and wildfires, but it is false that these are getting worse. In fact, many fewer people are dying now, since the advent of the use of fossil fuels, than died from those causes before.
https://climaterealism.com/2024/03/the-guardian-is-wrong-climate-litigation-is-not-reasonable/
