Australian Court: Environment Minister Has No Responsibility To Protect Kids From Global Warming
The federal environment minister, Sussan Ley, has successfully appealed against a high-profile court decision that found she had a duty of care to protect young people from the climate crisis when assessing fossil fuel developments. Eight teenagers and an octogenarian nun last year sought an injunction to prevent Ley from approving a proposal by Whitehaven Coal to expand the Vickery coalmine in northern New South Wales, arguing that the minister had a common law duty of care to protect younger people against future harm from climate change.
Justice Mordecai Bromberg found the minister had a duty of care to not act in a way that would cause future harm to younger people, but he did not grant the injunction as he was not satisfied the minister would breach her duty of care. The full bench of the federal court on Tuesday overturned that judgment, deciding that while Bromberg’s findings were “open to be made”, the duty of care should not be imposed on the minister.
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In his remarks in a streamed court hearing on Tuesday, the chief justice, James Allsop, said nobody involved in the case had disputed evidence presented to the court about climate change and the “dangers to the world and humanity, including to Australians, in the future from it”. That evidence included that the expansion of the mine could lead to an extra 100m tonnes of carbon dioxide – about 20% of Australia’s annual climate footprint – being released into the atmosphere as the extracted coal was shipped overseas and burned to make steel and generate electricity.
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In his initial judgment, Bromberg concluded it showed the potential harm children could face due to global heating “may fairly be described as catastrophic, particularly should global average surface temperatures rise to and exceed 3C beyond the pre-industrial level”. “Perhaps the most startling of the potential harms demonstrated by the evidence before the court, is that 1 million of today’s Australian children are expected to suffer at least one heat-stress episode serious enough to require acute care in a hospital,” he said.
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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/mar/15/sussan-ley-does-not-have-duty-of-care-to-protect-young-from-climate-crisis-appeal-court-rules?CMP=soc_567&fbclid=IwAR0DnKsWHvzBKLRoRb_G2Bbo7ak7uAtJP_Q7LO5cBnKtZTuLyddWHqQUPiE