Activists Cheer Victory in Landmark Dutch Climate Case

THE HAGUE, Netherlands — In a ruling hailed as an “immense victory for climate justice,” the Netherlands' top court ruled Friday in favor of activists who have for years been seeking legal orders to force the Dutch government into cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

Activists in a packed chamber of the Supreme Court in The Hague erupted into applause and cheers as Presiding Judge Kees Streefkerk rejected the government's appeal against earlier rulings ordering the government to cut emissions by at least 25% by the end of 2020 from benchmark 1990 levels.

The Supreme Court upheld lower courts' rulings that protection from the potentially devastating effects of climate change was a human right and that the government has a duty to protect its citizens.

Read the story from The New York Times - “Activists Cheer Victory in Landmark Dutch Climate Case.”

Want to reduce the power of the finance sector? Start by looking at climate change

In the lead-up to a revolutionary change, the status quo often seems both unyielding and untenable. The Soviet bloc in the 1980s provides a dramatic example: neither the rulers nor the ruled had any faith in the system, yet it stayed in place, seemingly untouchable. Then, in 1989, a picnic on the border between Hungary and Austria precipitated a collapse that brought down most of the governments of Eastern Europe in a matter of months, and the Soviet Union itself a couple of years later.

Where it all began: the Bank of England building in London. 

Over the past decade, two institutions that have endured far longer than did the Soviet Union and are far more central to our way of life have come under challenge: the carbon-based industrial economy and the finance-based system of global capitalism. The two have been intertwined since their near-simultaneous birth at the end of the seventeenth century. The Bank of England was created in 1694, shortly after the first major private banks, Barclays and Coutts; the first steam-powered pump was patented only four years later by Thomas Savery, and then rapidly superseded by Thomas Newcomen’s 1712 design.

For nearly three centuries, they proceeded in tandem, periodically interrupted by crises of one kind or another. Since 1945, though, their paths have diverged.

Read the story from The Monthly by John Quiggan - “Want to reduce the power of the finance sector? Start by looking at climate change.”

Rocky Hill mine plans quashed in Land and Environment Court

A new coal mine near Gloucester on the NSW mid-north coast has been refused by the Chief Justice of the Land and Environment Court, who ruled the development would increase greenhouse gas emissions at time when they urgently need to be cut.

Members of the community group Gloucester Groundswell attended the hearing.

Gloucester Resources Limited took the NSW Planning Minister to court over the matter after his delegate, the Independent Planning Commission, rejected the company's application for the Rocky Hill mine in late 2017.

The company argued the development would have created 170 jobs, with the mine expected to produce 21 million tonnes of coal over 16 years.

Read the ABC News story by Meredith Griffiths - “Rocky Hill mine plans quashed in Land and Environment Court.”