“Picture a world in which we actually managed to arrest the climate crisis—a world in which a robust and binding regime of international law worked to rein in corporate polluters, rehabilitate the environment, and preclude the worst effects of global warming”
“1972”
“the first global environmental summit in history”
“acid rain falling across Europe, industrial mercury poisoning in Japan, catastrophic drought in the Sahel, metastasizing deforestation from Brazil to Nigeria, smog killing thousands in London and Pennsylvania”
“just out of view, hundreds of cops, including mounted officers, were clashing with protesters holding signs like capitalism is the cause of environmental ravages; the police had dogs, and they halted the demonstrators before the procession reached the conference site”
“The global working class had no true representation in Stockholm. Though labor unions had fought for years to shape the conference and play a direct, consequential role, no invitations had come their way. All of civil society, in fact, was relegated to the margins of the official proceedings, mostly dismissed as a sideshow or a distraction (or beaten by the police)”
“The legal regime that emerged from Stockholm—the treaties, the frameworks, the follow-up summits, the UN environmental body—was able only to delay, not to reverse, the twentieth century’s great planetary crisis”
“Pacts supposedly binding almost every country on Earth, asserting “rights” to a clean, healthy, and just environment, have amounted to little in an economy structured by multinational corporations and a political order dominated by a handful of rent-seeking nuclear powers”
“unlike, say, the law of the sea, with its rich precedents dating back to ancient times, or the prohibition against war crimes, painstakingly constructed by jurists in Geneva, the Hague, Nuremberg, and Tokyo, international environmental law has a single birthdate (June 1972), a single birthplace (Stockholm), and a single midwife (Maurice Strong). It thus offers a singularly straightforward parable for the tragic limitations of the law”
“In the summer of 1967, Sweden established the world’s first environmental protection agency. That fall, a book titled Plunder, Famine, Poisoning—some consider it the Swedish equivalent of Silent Spring—further unsettled the populace”
“Hardly any observers anticipated that the conference would serve as a historic turning point—save, perhaps, for Walter Reuther. An erstwhile socialist, New Deal Democrat, and seasoned leader of the United Auto Workers (UAW), Reuther was still famous as the man who had led the 1936 sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan, a weeks-long wintertime battle between autoworkers and armed police that ended up transforming labor relations across the United States. As president of the UAW, Reuther immediately saw the potential of the conference”
““Walter wanted to make certain that not only governments but the people themselves, through their lay organizations, could contribute to improving man’s environment”
“the symposium sought to address the structural sources of ecological injustice by proposing that the UN assert jurisdiction over certain stateless territories, facilitate public control of national land, and form an international inspectorate to enforce global pollution standards”
“Such disregard, such erasure, would swiftly become a theme. No one from the UAW would participate in Stockholm”
“By 1971, the grandest ambitions for the UN Conference had already begun to fade. In February, the UN’s official Preparatory Committee reported that the “prevailing view” among surveyed countries was that a Declaration on the Human Environment, the conference’s keystone document, “could outline broad goals and objectives,” but it should not set out “a detailed action programme,” much less “legally binding provisions.””
“Tang Ke, chairman of the Chinese delegation, introduced a resolution calling for a wholesale reconsideration of the final draft of the declaration. The proposal, China’s first, landed like a bomb, and the major powers frantically sought to contain its blast; within a day, however, China’s pitch had won support from most African and Asian nations. Reluctantly, organizers created a special working group that would meet behind closed doors and reopen the draft declaration. By the next day, the Chinese delegation seized on its advantage and unveiled a ten-point agenda that the declaration should reflect, including calls for the world’s wealthiest nations to fund the development and environmental efforts of the poorest—a principle known as “additionality”—and condemnations of capitalism and imperialism, especially the war in Vietnam. The U.S. delegation was flabbergasted”
“representatives of the oil industry, not wanting to take any chances, were present in Stockholm, holding unpublicized meetings with delegates and passing out reams of stylish literature boasting of their environmental bona fides”
“Across town, thousands of activists, students, and other groups genuinely marginalized from the official proceedings countered with their own conferences. In a colorful array of gatherings that attracted bemused press attention, hippies, pacifists, communists, and liberal academics sought to raise verboten topics (“ecocide,” land redistribution) and lamented the sidelining of civil society”
“they agreed to a declaration that contained soaring rhetoric and no binding obligations. The declaration’s very first principle asserted a “fundamental right to freedom, equality and adequate conditions of life, in an environment of a quality that permits a life of dignity and well-being” and denounced apartheid, segregation, and colonial oppression, a significant symbolic victory for the developing countries, as was a call for additionality and a recognition of the “sovereign right” of states to “exploit their own resources.””
“But the wealthy nations, led by the United States, succeeded in blocking language demanding a ban on nuclear weapons and any mention of Vietnam”
“The 1992 Earth Summit, scheduled to celebrate Stockholm’s twentieth anniversary, affirmed the “right to development” and the “sovereign right” of states to exploit their resources but produced only nonbinding, nonspecific frameworks to address the crises of climate change and biodiversity loss”
“The 1997 Kyoto Protocol, an emissions reduction agreement, relied on a system of “cap and trade” that effectively allowed rich countries to pay to pollute as usual, and, in any event, the United States refused to ratify it”
“The 2016 Paris Agreement, its stronger and more widely adopted progeny, has been called “legally binding” but again lacks an enforcement mechanism; almost a decade on, all of the major polluters have failed to meet their agreed-upon benchmarks, the much-touted “loss and damage” fund (a manifestation of the long-deferred dream of additionality) remains embryonic, and the United States has now withdrawn. Twice”
“as the legal scholar Martti Koskenniemi recently argued, “the most important part of international law” today is the body of over three thousand treaties in which countries have agreed to resolve disputes with foreign companies in secretive international tribunals”
“When a state fails to maintain the legal conditions that existed at the time a company invested there—say, by passing an environmental law—the company can bring that state before a tribunal and collect lost profits. “More than 1,400 cases have been initiated,” Koskenniemi wrote, and, citing a Guardian investigation, he added that “more than $120 billion of public money has been awarded to firms through investor-state dispute settlement courts, including at least $84 billion to fossil fuel companies. The latter are even using the 1991 Energy Charter Treaty to sue states if they take action to decarbonize.””
“The struggles that dominated debates in Stockholm—between the right to development and the necessity of environmental protection—were impossible to overcome absent a robust attempt to rein in private enterprise and allow for the flourishing of genuine social democracy”
“They created neither the strong international pollution authority nor the public control of natural resources demanded by the UAW’s symposium”
“The agreements that emerged in Stockholm’s wake—the treaties and accords that make up this thing called international environmental law—likewise exhorted more growth and more care without addressing the conditions necessary to reconcile these goals”
“Today, international law is in tatters. Clear violations are there for all to see—the Russian shelling of Ukrainian civilians, the systematic sexual violence perpetrated by the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces, the continuing abuse that the military of Myanmar is inflicting on the Rohingya, the U.S. murders of fishermen and other civilians in the Caribbean, the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza—with little sign that any authority can or will do anything about it”
““We have to speak of this regime of rights and laws in the past tense—it existed for eighty years, but no longer,” the journalist James Robins told Jacobin last year”