Government has a legal obligation to support climate science
Foundational principles & written laws require ongoing support for climate science & other areas of research & discovery. Rights supersede powers, in principle & in law.
Climate disruption is causing real-life devastating consequences, and creating unprecedented levels of compounding risks for people, communities, industries, and nations. These intersecting and compounding risks encompass water supplies, biodiversity that stabilizes natural systems, stresses from drought, fire, storms, and floods, and ripple effects, including worsening risk of disease spillover from wildlife to humans.
While polluting interests seek to capture government agencies and heads of government, they may be running directly afoul of laws requiring open access to scientific fact and evidence. Laws requiring due process, protection of rights, and access to justice, also imply a right to beneift from the discovery and dissemination of factual evidence about risk, harm, cost, and security.
One of the long-standing legal justifications for open-market economies is that it is a violation of basic rights to deny access to the fruits of science-based discovery and ingenuity. Governments are, in many places, explicitly required to support the public’s access to both the scientific information itself and to the benefits of science-informed action.
In the firestorm of debate over competing authorities in the U.S. system of government, it is interesting to note that Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution requires Congress to advance scientific knowledge and discovery. Article II, Section 3, on the other hand, orders that the President “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”—meaning he must see the funds appropriated by Congress for science, inquiry, diplomacy, and other public services, be used as intended.
A quick review of four areas of concern shows the mounting costs from inaction to slow and reverse global heating:
Food insecurity is a sticky problem, in most of the world. Even in the United States—one of the wealthiest societies in world history—one in seven people overall (around 47 million people) and one in five children suffer some level of food insecurity. Worsening prolonged drought conditions and other climate-related phenomena are making it harder to produce enough food to establish conditions for future food security.
Biodiversity loss is depleting the natural background capacity of vital ecosystems to stabilize natural systems that make agriculture, clean air, and reliable water cycles possible. Reduced biological diversity not only destabilizes ecosystems; it also creates the risk of more random dislocations between ecosytems, inciting pathogens to jump regions, creating new risks to human health and to crops.
Watershed disruption is creating further risks to the integrity of the natural environment and the viability of food production practices, across the world. Watersheds are not just land areas; they trace the arrival of surface water, whether from mountain glaciers, or springs, or through rainfall, across the landscape, to plains and coastal regions and, eventually, the ocean. Everything in between is structured by how watersheds behave.
The Environmental Protection Agency traces critical impacts of climate disruption on water supplies and water infrastructure.
Reduced snowfall, reduced snowpack, retreat of glaciers, and other lost water storage, are making it harder to avoid drought and fire, and reducing the cost-effectiveness of agricultural systems.
The drastic decline in snowfall and snowpack since the 1980s has been connected to climate disruption, and has now led to a worsening problem of multi-year snow drought.
Shock events are starting to impose prohibitive costs in all regions. The conservative nature of intergovernmental scientific reporting means consensus reports have treated such levels of cost and disruption as more likely to begin 10 to 30 years from now.
This early arrival of prohibitive and rising disaster costs means compounding risks and costs will happen sooner, so we do not have the reserves of time and money we expected to have.
Major insurers have repeatedly warned it may soon be impossible to provide many kinds of insurance—not just those that respond directly to climate impacts and not just in the most climate-vulnerable regions.
Banks are starting to plan for a future of deep climate disruption, which means a future of constant volatility, scarce credit, and an unreliable public policy environment. That is bad news for most people, who will find themselves not rich enough in unrealized capital gains—a specific kind of wealth linked to investment in stocks, commodities, and real estate—to be of interest to banks looking for insulation against chaos.
The responsibility of banks to abide by ESG ratings, sustainability and climate goals, or the general ethical principle that one should not profit by creating preventable harm, might be more clearly defined than polluting industries would like to believe.
For one: the world’s governments have collectively recognized the universal human right to a clean, healthy environment.
Once you look closely, it is hard to ignore the fact that the Constitution of the United States aims to “establish Justice” and “promote the general Welfare”, while barring any reduction of the right to seek redress or the right to share information, guaranteeing “equal protection”, and—as noted above—requiring action to advance science and discovery.
Many other national charters are more explicit in their protection of environmental rights.
Even polluting countries enjoy the World Trade Organization’s protection when they use border adjustments to incentivize cleaner commerce.
In case after case, in country after country, including at the state and federal levels in the United States—including in states that voted for Trump—courts have found that plaintiffs have a right to be heard when presenting evidence of knowing creation of harm through climate pollution. How courts will find on the question of liability for climate damage is yet to be determined in key cases, but the right to bring evidence has been upheld.
Just as governments have an implicit responsibility to prevent acts of fraud and piracy (Article I, Section 8, also explicitly assigns this authority to Congress), they have a legal duty to provide support to science in general, and to the study of areas of concern that relate to human security and wellbeing, such as public health, environmental health, and the dynamics of Earth’s climate system. Failure means prevantable cost, waste, loss of life, and tragic constraints on human freedom and dignity. Success means a more vibrant, secure, liberated, and innovative society.
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