Regular readers of Energy Tribune will recall that in September of this year I wrote about a bizarre concept being promoted by ex-president Clinton and current president Obama called “climate justice”. If you want to learn more about this perversion of justice and how dangerous it is to our energy and ultimately economic future read “Skinning the cat with climate justice”. You can also go to the EPA’s website. They have a section devoted to it. If you believe in real justice you will be shocked by what you see.

Now, just when you thought it couldn’t get any weirder we have something called “ecocide”. It is not a new concept. References to ecocide go back to the late 1960s. Now this “crime against earth” is being promoted by an English Lawyer named Polly Higgins. She has been described as “The lawyer for Planet Earth” and “One of the world’s top 10 visionary thinkers”. Apparently Higgins has only one client and that client can’t speak, hear or for that matter even think. That client is Planet Earth. One must then wonder how did client earth contact attorney Higgins and request legal counsel? I’ll leave the answer to that question to the lawyers.

According to Attorney Higgins ecocide is “The extensive destruction, damage to or loss of ecosystems of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitance of that territory has been severely diminished.” She argues that the UN should make ecocide the 5th crime against peace. The others are Genocide, Crimes against humanity, War crimes and Crimes of aggression. She has called on the United Nations to adopt a Universal Declaration of Planetary Rights. This would, in effect, give planet earth rights along side and equal to human rights and would aim to protect it against human exploitation of its resources. It would treat the earth as a living entity. These equal rights would extend to trees, grass, fish, animals, bugs, dirt, rocks and the air. In other words everything that makes up this world we live on would be legally on par with humans.

In keeping with this one of her main goals is to completely eliminate the use of fossil fuels. The ecocide crime being that we are literally sucking the life out of the planet and in doing so, are destroying the climate of Mother Earth. The climate belongs to earth, not us. “It is not merely a matter of reducing our emissions by 50%, 80%, 100% as soon as possible, but to evolve and encourage a benign world where we no longer cause damage, pollution and loss.” I don’t know what she thinks the role of humans would be in her “benign world” but you can be sure we would be its subjects, not its ruler. It is this idea that humans are equal to inanimate objects reveals how truly dangerous this effort is. It is clearly her intent to make extracting fossil fuels from the earth illegal. She said “It is not just humans that have rights, all beings do.” Polly Higgins considers the earth itself to be a living being on par with humans and therefore should be granted rights equal to humans. Have you ever asked a rock a question and received an answer? If you have you may want to consider a phone call to someone who can treat delusional behavior.

Should ecocide legally become a crime, climate change caused by companies making energy from fossil fuels would be on the hit list of criminals against Mother Earth. Granted making this a punishable crime would be an up hill battle. It would take a two thirds majority of the 117 nations who recognize the International Criminal Court (ICC) to make such a law reality. The possibilities for prosecution are nearly endless. For instance such a law could be used to prosecute “climate change deniers.” On Higgins thisisecocide website she states “action can be taken against any individual. As an international crime against peace (climate change denial) no-one escapes liability.” In an effort to save the earth from human exploitation Higgins is looking to make laws that would put the planet first and human civilization second (or third of fourth?)

During the Cancun Climate Conference of December 2010 the Bolivian delegation, with help from Higgins, called for the formation of a climate tribunal to punish counties (and likely individuals) that do not work for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Think my way or else! Apparently freedom of speech is just an inconvenient annoyance to those who wish to make crimes against the earth law. It has never occurred to Attorney Higgins or any strident environmentalist that climate change has been with us always and always will bhttp://www.sfgate.com/m/topic/fascism" target="_blank">Fascism re-surfaces from time to time in the world but it never comes back in the same way. Fascism finds a way to re-invent itself in a stealthy way so that it is almost unrecognizable to those who are its target. Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic speaks very eloquently and directly on this subject.

Now you might be saying to yourself, this is a fringe movement with little chance of gaining any credibility in the real world. Think again. Higgins has proclaimed that such energy producing activities such as drilling in the Arctic (or anywhere else for that matter), spilling any oil, fracking for natural gas, any kind of mining and tar sand extraction are crimes of ecocide. But these are just her ideas right? Not by a long shot. As if out of some kind of science fiction movie the Hamilton Group held a mock trial at the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom to hear the charges of ecocide on September the 30th of 2011. The defendants in the case were the CEO’s of the oil companies, played by actors, operating in the Athabasca Tar Sands, located in Alberta, Canada. It took the court just 50 minutes to return with a unanimous guilty verdict against the CEO’s.

The very fact that this took place at the UK’s Supreme Court is alarming. The idea behind the trial was to show that if such a conviction were real, companies and even individuals could be put on trial and sentenced to jail or fined so severely they would be put out of business. So being that this was all for show none of this really means anything. What was real in the mock trial is that the radical environmental movement and its sympathizers are looking for ways to use laws to destroy energy producing companies across the world in the name of protecting Mother Earth. They have no regard for the entrepreneurial spirit and people’s freedom to make money and profits. To them capitalism is the great evil defiling Mother Earth. They believe in the rule of a court (or perhaps individual) who dictates over the people to protect the earth. This is a chilling, under-reported movement that has no tolerance for individual freedoms, compromise or capitalism.

Perhaps the diminished role of traditional religions in people’s lives has played a part in the thinking of those who now regard the earth itself as their God. Perhaps it is disenfranchised people who are unable or unwilling to compete in the world of free enterprise that drives them to such anti-progress and destructive philosophies. Perhaps a symptom of this lack of competitive spirit and dependence is revealed in the Occupy Wall Street crowd who seem to want everything for free but are unwilling to work. Whatever its origins, the radical environmental movement is relentless in its efforts to turn back the clock to a more primitive, shorter and painful way of life in the name of protecting earth from us. Using the earth and the climate as plaintiffs that have been victimized by our need for raw materials is an outrageous and very dangerous path for both economic and social peace reasons.