The invaluable Mike Rowe pointed me to this article yesterday.
Well, not me, exactly. Mike doesn't know me from Adam, but he shared it online with 7 million other people, and I count myself among them.
It's a piece in The New York Times--for him, it was the international version with a different headline--that argues that several decisions by various international courts amount to outlawing the extraction and use of fossil fuels.
It's hard to argue with their conclusion because I am not an international lawyer, but let's assume that the claim is true, as it appears to be on its face.
Rulings by the International Court of Justice, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea all suggest that the climate harms resulting from the burning of fossil fuels violate international law.
Climate science is not the law: The UN's International Court of Justice has not buffed the climate science turd into any sort of popsicle, scientific or legal. https://t.co/EehzXftUEj pic.twitter.com/U6eMPn0lsN
— Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) July 24, 2025
If so, there are a lot of lawbreakers in the world, most certainly including all the people involved in these legal cases. There is not a person in the Western world who does not somehow rely on the use of fossil fuels, save a few hermits whose living conditions mirror those of the pre-industrial age. And probably most of them, too.
The I.C.J.’s unanimous opinion reinforced these conclusions and broadened their reach, stating that countries must protect citizens from the “urgent and existential threat” of climate change. When a country fails to curb greenhouse gas emissions — whether by producing or consuming fossil fuels, approving new exploration to find them or subsidizing the industry — it may be held liable for “an internationally wrongful act,” the court’s 15 judges said.
This makes it much harder for any government or company to say that rules don’t apply to them or they don’t have to act. Read together, these three landmark legal rulings leave no doubt that continuing fossil fuel production and use, let alone expanding it, violates the law. It is a cease-and-desist notice to fossil fuel producers.
No doubt the judges made this ruling just before they got into their chauffeured limos to zip off to a resort somewhere to enjoy a nice lunch.
The case before the I.C.J. is part of a growing global movement that is turning to the courts to hold polluters accountable. From the lawsuits brought by a Belgian farmer against the French oil giant TotalEnergies and Indonesian villagers asking a Swiss cement company to pay climate damages to the dozens of cities and states across the United States that have accused the fossil fuel industry of climate deception and harm, a new wave of plaintiffs is edging closer to making polluters pay.
Leading fossil-fuel-producing nations, such as the United States and Saudi Arabia, will probably argue that this I.C.J. opinion is unenforceable and thus inconsequential. But no country is exempt from the obligations the court laid out. Their duties to prevent and remedy climate harm are rooted in multiple sources of law, including principles and treaties with which all countries must comply.
Ah, globalism. I remember the days of my youth when I was told that everybody should learn Esperanto, the United Nations should replace sovereign governments, and our biggest fears were overpopulation, depletion of resources, mass starvation, the next ice age, and nuclear war.
Thankfully, I didn't learn Esperanto. I don't even like the metric system, although that is mostly because I am lazy and learned Imperial units of measurement and hate snobby Europeans. No country that uses the Metric system has landed a man on the moon, so there.
As Rowe points out, the whole "science is settled" died a miserable death in 2020-21 (well, he didn't exactly say THAT, but it did), and the whole "we understand the climate" thing is total crap. But even assuming it were true, the criminalization of fossil fuels is about as cruel an act toward human beings as has ever been contemplated. I would condemn billions to permanent poverty, early deaths, and impoverish the world.
Even if climate change is here, fossil fuels are a necessary tool to adapt to changing circumstances. Climate resilience is predicated on abundant energy, as anybody who lives in Phoenix or Atlanta knows. Or even here in Minnesota, where summers can reach 100 degrees and winters -35 degrees. These places would be uninhabitable without abundant energy. The fastest-growing metro regions in America are in places people would flock from, not to, were energy scarce.
But forget the First World, for a moment. Billions of people less fortunate than we are use wood and dung to cook their food and stay warm at night. Forget cooling. There is none. Or lighting--it's hard to come by. Life is nasty, brutish, and short (kinda like Danny DeVito in many of his roles).
A Detour to Dachau
— The Real Mike Rowe (@mikeroweworks) July 28, 2025
I was going to share some more photos of yesterday’s road trip through the German countryside, along with a few thoughts about my five-hour visit to Dachau, where it’s impossible not to reflect on just how easy it is to hurt so many by doing nothing at all.… pic.twitter.com/ok2X85TySs
Rowe asked Alex Epstein his opinion on the Times article, and I will excerpt a few choice paragraphs:
The logic behind these court rulings dangerously misrepresents our relationship with the natural world. It assumes Earth is a delicate, nurturing entity that we are harming. The truth is that nature is dynamic, difficult, and often dangerous. Human flourishing requires that we *impact* our environment to make it safer and more livable.
Fossil fuels are the key to this mastery. They power the machines that irrigate deserts, build sturdy homes, and provide heating and air conditioning that make our climates livable. Thanks to this energy-powered resilience, deaths from climate-related disasters have fallen by 98% over the last century, even as CO2 emissions have risen. Banning fossil fuels would not save us from climate danger; it would strip us of our primary means of protection.
Most people don't know this, but deaths from climate-related disasters have been dropping faster than Stephen Colbert's ratings--and that is because modern societies are resilient, whereas poorer ones are not. A magnitude 7.5 earthquake hitting in America is a problem that can kill hundreds; elsewhere in the world, the same quake might kill tens of thousands. Same with hurricanes, floods, and most climate disasters.
If you look at the roster of disasters by number of deaths--even in absolute terms and not adjusted for population increases--the drop has been around 99%, and that is attributable to our increasing wealth. With wealth comes resilience.
Instead of allowing unelected international bodies to dictate our energy future, we must fight for energy freedom. This means defending the right of individuals and companies to produce and use all forms of energy—including fossil fuels, nuclear, and any evolving alternatives that can prove their worth on a free market.
The campaign to make progress a crime must be rejected. The real work is not to “cease and desist” from producing the energy that improves lives, but to unleash the human ingenuity that will allow all 8 billion of us to flourish. We must demand policies that empower people, not impoverish them.
This point is so obvious that only a globalist technocrat or a communist who admires dictators who starve their populations to death couldn't see it.
Yet here we are, with The New York Times printing this idiocy, and international courts imagining they can eforce their dictates on the entire world.
Editor's Note: Radical leftist judges are doing everything they can to hamstring President Trump's agenda to make America great again.
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