Thread by @AndrewLRJackson

THREAD Pt 1

1/ For those travelling to the Four Courts in Dublin to hear judgment delivered in @climatecaseire today (or just interested from afar), here’s a bit of background to the case & what to watch out for in court.

2/ The case was born of a frustration with court challenges to fossil fuel projects. Successful project challenges tend to be procedural, owing to the nature of judicial review as a remedy.

This means developers can lose a case, remedy the procedural issue & get permission. TFW:

3/ Consider Providence’s plan to test-drill for oil in 2013.

Working for @AnTaisce at the time, we (with John Kenny BL & James Devlin SC) secured the surrender of Providence’s licence.

The government had screened out the need for EIA based on a mistransposition of EU law.

4/ Providence didn’t reapply but they could have and could still.

Next came @AnTaisce’s successful challenge to Edenderry peat power station’s application for permission to continue operating.

An Bord Pleanála hadn’t done an EIA of the peat extraction fuelling the plant.

5/ An Taisce won the case but Bord na Móna had put in a ‘fallback’ planning application to cover the eventuality of losing.

When they indeed lost, BNM quickly got fresh planning permission, having supplied evidence of the effects of peat extraction to allow for a proper EIA.

6/ What these project challenges showed is the difficulty of securing systemic change via project-by-project challenges.

It’s still vital that such projects are challenged for reasons of climate & biodiversity breakdown, but something different is needed for systemic change.

7/ Roger Cox’s book “Revolution Justified”, published in 2012, pointed one way forward.

Not so much the detailed argument, more the basic idea that the law has an important role to play in tackling climate breakdown systemically & also the thought that lawyers can’t look away.

8/ The publication of the Oslo Principles in early 2015 was another lightbulb: theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

9/ But the most influential thing was the hearing of @Urgenda’s climate case by the District Court in the Netherlands in April 2015.

bbc.com/news/world-eur…

Here was something tangible: someone not just talking about using the law but actually *using* the law to effect change.

10/ Like many others (I guess), I spoke with @DennisvBerkel at this time. @Urgenda already had a clear sense of the international importance of their case & made English translations of some key documents available.

11/ But when Urgenda’s amazing win came in June 2015, it was principally based on Dutch tort law - an inspiring victory but hard to see it at this time as a direct precedent for a case in Ireland.

theguardian.com/environment/20…

12/ In the aftermath there was much talk of emulating the Urgenda case in Ireland. A Facebook group appeared to this end but no case emerged.

13/ A lot of attention was taken up in this period by the debate over long-promised domestic climate legislation.

When the Climate Act 2015 was finally adopted it was very weak but it did at least require the government to produce a National Mitigation Plan every 5 years.

14/ The occasion of UCC’s Law and the Environment conference in 2017 gave cause to focus on the Urgenda case & whether/how something similar could be achieved in Ireland.

My conclusion: look closely at plan-making in Irish climate policy.

15/ The day before the UCC conference - on 26 April 2017 - a rushed public consultation regarding the draft National Mitigation Plan had closed. The public & the Climate Change Advisory Council were given very little time to comment.

The final version was published in July 2017.

16/ The window for a legal challenge was narrow: 3 months from July 2017.

There was a real sense that someone needed to step up. The lead-in times for litigation are long & it would be 5 years until the next Mitigation Plan.

@FIEIRELAND stepped up, as it has so many times.

17/ Ireland was attracting international attention at this time, not only for its poor domestic performance on climate (high per capita emissions & emissions rising not falling) but also because of the negative influence it was perceived to be playing on the international stage.

18/ This led to a reconnection with Urgenda’s brilliant lawyers, @DennisvBerkel & @tessakhan. Here’s Tessa in @TIME magazine this month! time.com/5669038/women-…

19/ Urgenda played a vital role, offering advice & assistance & emphasising the importance of a strong campaign around a climate case.

Here’s their CEO @marjanminnesma speaking in Dublin in support.

20/ Drafting of @climatecaseire was finalised as ex-Hurricane Ophelia battered Ireland in October 2017. Three people died in the storm: rte.ie/news/2017/1016…

21/ The case launched on 19 October 2017 & raised three main groups of arguments: under the Climate Act, the Constitution & the European Convention on Human Rights.

22/ From the earliest procedural steps the case attracted public support, from the early diehards...! @Tscherny_ @kweeva_ @PoppyDolliver @OrlaKelleher92

23/ ...to a small crowd...

24/ To an amazing 18,000 members of the public who signed #InMyName on the website in support of the case climatecaseireland.ie

....continues in THREAD 2!