UK Road Plans Must Be Compatible With Paris Agreement-Legal Challenge
By Paul Homewood
Just to update on the legal bid to block the UK’s road building programme, I’ve got hold of the legal submission from Leigh Day.
These are the relevant sections as far as the Paris Agreement is concerned, although the Net Zero Target is also heavily featured:
![image_thumb[2]](https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/image_thumb2.png "image_thumb[2]")
Even though Paris has no statutory basis in UK law, they argue that government decisions must take it into account. Moreover they go beyond the Nationally Determined Contribution, which only sets a target for 2030. Instead they expect government decisions to be compatible with the temperature based goals of 2C and 1.5C, even though Paris contains no agreement as to how this should be achieved and how individual nations should contribute to them.
We must await what the courts decide, a process which could take years. Given the Heathrow judgement, which found that the government had not taken into account its own firm policy commitments on climate change under the Paris Agreement, the omens are not good.
It does seem strange that the government must take into account its policy commitments (even when they were taken on board by a previous administration), when the effect is to stop another of its policy commitments, road building!
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Vexatious litigation
I have just emailed my MP to ask why money is being wasted on developing the Didcot and Surrounding Areas Infrastructure Improvement plan which includes major widening of the A4130 which have no chance of approval unless the Climate Change Act is repealed – highly unlikely in the present climate.
This would seem to be the obvious outcome of ignorant people making stupid decisions without any understanding of their consequences.
Paris, for what’s its worth which is very little, put exactly the same onus on everyone signing up for it. So for instance Japan’s recent proposed route must also contain these same temperature specific ‘volume under the curve’ requirements, no? If not how is it right to hold the UK government to requirements not shared by its international colleagues? Either Paris can be used because its an international binding requirement, or its not in which case their main argument folds.
So when China and India signed on, was their onus to just keep building fossil fuel plants?
Tell France to focus on its country and fuck off attempting to interfere in UK Sovereign decision?
What exactly have the French done that is interfering in UK sovereign decisions? You’ve lost me!
So – what price “democracy”? Very high, I’d say!
Is this the same Leigh Day which represents terrorists and terrorist groups?
That’ll be the one, so I hear.
So we have ‘temperature- based’ goals?
And we are reducing our Carbon (Dioxide) Emissions?
No-one knows the bit in the middle enough to spend over £1 trillion pa, but who cares, as long as we feel good about – the misinformed will, and have contempt for us, to put it diplomatically.
Given the Heathrow judgement…the omens are not good.
Indeed, but the airport’s appeal is in the pipeline. UK and other governments are now seeing the results of tying their own hands with stupid ‘climate commitments’ that have no intrinsic value.
Yes, it all comes down to the stupid Government making Net Zero law last year. We can expect this with every infrastructure project, which will mean nothing will get done. Mind you I hope there is a similar challenge to HS2, that needs to be shut down.
I wonder if our stupid MP’s have woken up to the fact they opened a total can of worms with Net Zero. Probably not. Looking at the way they are handling the Chinese virus issue we are being run by a bunch of second rate muppets.
That was dear Theresa May, after conversations with Christiana Figueres, who these days is based in London and probably popped round for tea. Of course, there was no opposition from all those MP’s who supported democracy by delaying Brexit with knee jerk instant laws.
Keith, Very well put. Our MP reps. are no longer fit for purpose.
This is all Alice in Wonderland stuff – nay Franz Kafka stuff.Get me outta here!
What we should be doing now is getting Leigh Day to oppose the Government’s Electric Car and Renewable Energy proposals on the basis of the irreparable environmental damage they will cause due to increased levels of Lithium and Cobalt mining and child slave labour that will be necessary as highlighted in Amnesty International’s recent report.
When all this is over and done with – proved beyond doubt that CO2 has FA to do with global temperatures and their inane prattle about “keeping temperatures below 2 C” … ‘they’ are going to look foolish, guileless, clueless, ignorant imbeciles in the extreme. But I wouldn’t mind betting that, in line with other examples, they will most likely be knighted, feted and promoted!
I doubt that I’ll be around by then but I intend to rub it in by having the inscription on my tombstone something like: “I was right about the climate change hoax along with many other sceptics who, at the time, were ignored and ridiculed.”.
I too would like to see the government’s calculation of how much difference to the 2050 global average temperature their £multi-billion ‘net zero’ policy will make.
Why has there been so much fuss over getting to zero carbon, as in the latest climate change act, when a reduction of 80%, as opposed to 100%, has been law for the last 12 years? If anyone took that one seriously, we would have done virtually all that is now being demanded of us, in pursuit of the original 2008 act, passed under Ed Miliband, with only 5 MPs voting against it (3 votes, 2 tellers).
Note also that Paris accepted that China and India would go on growing until about 2029 – and then, and only then, start reducing their CO2 output – from that enhanced base!
Plus by this year, the developed West would be giving the less developed nations $100 billion a year, by way of compensation for “destroying the planet”.
So let’s get on with road and rail building and ignore the protesters!
Well, from a long way west — 120° West Longitude — it appears
the UK has its knickers in a twist.
[ I think I’m using that idiom correctly.]
so we wont be allowed any new roads.. purely hypothetical anyway since if this lockdown doesnt end in the next week the economy will be such a basket case we wont be able to afford to build any new roads … the end is nigh!!!!!
Fortunately, under the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy, Parliament can make laws concerning anything, but no Parliament can pass a law that cannot be changed or reversed by a future Parliament).nor can a valid Act of Parliament be questioned by the courts.
Conclusion is that when it all gets too difficult, Parliament can change the law to get itself out of the pickle of its own making. The problem being, will that bunch of numpties have the gumption to change the law? Given the tsunami of opposition from ER, Guardian, NGOs and all those in the Establishment with their noses in the trough (you know who you are), the chances of that happening are close to zero.
Hoist by their own petard. A truly sorry and undignified spectacle.