GAGE AND BYERS Why climate litigation could soon go global ANDREW GAGE AND MICHAEL BYERS Contributed to The Globe and Mail Published Thursday, Oct. 09 2014, 7:53 AM EDT Last updated Thursday, Oct. 09 2014, 11:01 AM EDT Andrew Gage is Staff Counsel and head of the Climate Change program at West Coast Environmental Law. Michael Byers holds the Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia. Climate change is no longer a distant threat. Peer-reviewed science has already linked climate change to drought in Texas and Australia, extreme heat in Europe, Russia, Japan, and Korea, and storm-surge flooding during Hurricane Sandy and Typhoon Haiyan. Climate change is already causing about $600-billion in damages annually. Here in Canada, the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy estimated that climate change will cost Canadians $5-billion annually by 2020. Canadian oil and gas companies could soon find themselves on the hook for at least part of the damage. For as climate change costs increase, a global debate has begun about who should pay. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu recently called on global leaders to hold those responsible for climate damages accountable. “Just 90 corporations – the so-called carbon majors – are responsible for 63 per cent of CO2 emissions since the industrial revolution,” Tutu said. “It is time to change the profit incentive by demanding legal liability for unsustainable environmental practices.” So far, the fossil fuel industry has successfully opposed litigation for climate damages, brought in the United States by victims of hurricanes and sea level rise. But new areas of litigation often fail at first; in the 1980s, tobacco companies were still boasting that they “have never lost a case to a consumer, have never settled, and do not expect that picture to change.” As the tobacco industry learned, changes to the interpretation and application of laws sometimes occur quite rapidly. Nor is litigation in the U.S. or Canada the only thing the fossil fuel industry should worry about. It is becoming increasingly likely that companies could be sued by victims of climate change overseas, in countries with quite different legal systems. There, they might face lawsuits based on constitutional rights to a healthy environment, strict liability for environmental harm, or any number of other legal principles that don’t currently exist in Canadian law. FULL Article: Visit here. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/why-climate-litigation-could-soon-go-global/article21002326/#dashboard%2Ffollows%2F