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The dangerous slippery slope of activist-driven climate lawsuits

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4 minute read

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Joseph Quesnel 

Canadians should be concerned climate activists are pushing climate change litigation – or climate change tort cases – at the U.S. state and local levels.

We should all be prepared if this bizarre new legal trend introduced by climate change alarmists comes to Canada.

Canadians have noticed most extreme climate change-inspired ideas – like banning natural gas furnaces – originate from liberal parts of the United States and eventually find their way northwards to our provincial legislatures or city halls.

Lawyers – supported by climate change alarmist organizations – are inventing new legal theories to allow state governments to sue energy companies for alleged contributions to global climate change. Lawyers even attempt to link oil companies to specific extreme weather events.

American observers became alarmed when the Hawaii Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling in that state allowing oil companies to be sued in state courts for their alleged contribution to climate change.  U.S. Legal critics were concerned how this climate change litigation could turn state courts into regulators of global climate change. They argued this was improper given that inter-state and foreign energy policy and commerce is federally regulated.

Canadian judges will have to deal with similar federalism/jurisdictional issues if these nuisance lawsuits come to our courts. Green activists on both sides of the border are determined to handicap the energy sector through the courts and lower levels of government.

Lawyers are basing their legal theories on unjustified certitude regarding climate change.  The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – the most prominent so-called “authority” on climate science – actually presents a nuanced and cautious view of this topic. Politicians and journalists often blame specific weather patterns or events on climate change with little evidence.

Canadian author Joanne Marcotte, in her book Inconvenient Doubts: Climate Change Apocalypse: Really? reminds us that so-called experts miss three key points about IPCC reports: 1) They include varying degrees of confidence and probabilities, rarely mentioned by the media; 2) Some statements refer to specific regions but are often generalized globally; and 3) An extreme weather event becomes a disaster only if a region cannot respond effectively.

Lawyers pushing these anti-oil lawsuits are really saying courts can determine with certitude these oil companies are causing climate change or they can be blamed for specific weather events.

Activists are pushing their anti-energy agenda in the courts because they are losing the war of ideas in democratically elected legislatures. Canadian voters are rejecting these unnecessary and costly green policies because they are being economically crushed by spurious and environmentally pointless carbon taxes that unnecessarily inflate all basics including food and gasoline prices . Activists realize this and want unelected and unaware judges to become arbiters on an incredibly complex and nuanced issue like global climate change.

Drivers should be wary because once courts allow provinces to attack oil companies they may come after them.  Activists know transportation is the second biggest contributor to carbon emissions after the energy sector.

Canadian litigants raised climate change at the Supreme Court of Canada when several provincial premiers challenged the constitutionality of the carbon tax – a clever way to bypass democratic legislatures and impose their anti-energy policies on courts and lower levels of government.

Canadian consumers should be able to choose energy sources best for them.  We should not allow activists to use courts – as they have in the United States – to impoverish everybody through by imposing extreme and unscientific anti-energy climate policies through the backdoor.

Joseph Quesnel is a Senior Research Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

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Business

EU Tightens Social Media Censorship Screw With Upcoming Mandatory “Disinformation” Rules

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From Reclaim The Net

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This refers not only to spreading “fact-checking” across the EU member-countries but also to making VLOPs finance these groups. This, is despite the fact many of the most prominent “fact-checkers” have been consistently accused of fostering censorship instead of checking content for accuracy in an unbiased manner.

What started out as the EU’s “voluntary code of practice” concerning “disinformation” – affecting tech/social media companies – is now set to turn into a mandatory code of conduct for the most influential and widely-used ones.

The news was revealed by the Irish media regulator, specifically an official of its digital services, Paul Gordon, who spoke to journalists in Brussels. The EU Commission has yet to confirm that January will be the date when the current code will be “formalized” in this way.

The legislation that would enable the “transition” is the controversial Digital Services Act (DSA), which critics often refer to as the “EU online censorship law,” the enforcement of which started in February of this year.

The “voluntary” code is at this time signed by 44 tech companies, and should it become mandatory in January 2025, it will apply to those the EU defines as Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) (with at least 45 million monthly active users in the 27-nation bloc).

Currently, the number of such platforms is said to be 25.

In its present form, the DSA’s provisions obligate online platforms to carry out “disinformation”-related risk assessments and reveal what measures they are taking to mitigate any risks revealed by these assessments.

But when the code switches from “voluntary” to mandatory, these obligations will also include other requirements: demonetizing the dissemination of “disinformation”; platforms, civil society groups, and fact-checkers “effectively cooperating” during elections, once again to address “disinformation” – and, “empowering” fact-checkers.

This refers not only to spreading “fact-checking” across the EU member-countries but also to making VLOPs finance these groups. This, is despite the fact many of the most prominent “fact-checkers” have been consistently accused of fostering censorship instead of checking content for accuracy in an unbiased manner.

The code was first introduced (in its “voluntary” form) in 2022, with Google, Meta, and TikTok among the prominent signatories – while these rules originate from a “strengthened” EU Code of Practice on Disinformation based on the Commission’s Guidance issued in May 2021.

“It is for the signatories to decide which commitments they sign up to and it is their responsibility to ensure the effectiveness of their commitments’ implementation,” the EU said at the time – that would have been the “voluntary” element, while the Commission said the time it had not “endorsed” the code.

It appears the EC is now about to “endorse” the code, and then some – there are active preparations to make it mandatory.

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National

Canada’s Digital ID Drama Heats Up as Regulators Sidestep Parliament

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From Reclaim The Net

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These dangers range from data security, and cost of implementation, to various ways centralized databases containing people’s most sensitive personal information can be abused.

And those, again, range from security – to the risk of digital IDs getting turned into effective tools for government mass surveillance and control of the entire population’s behavior.

Canadian regulators plan to move ahead with introducing national digital ID without the parliament’s involvement.

Leaving the process out of the parliament in terms of approval and oversight is sure to add to the existing controversy around the issue of digital ID, which was in the past criticized and even rejected precisely by a number of Canadian MPs and parliamentary committees.

On the other hand, this might explain why the regulators might rather take a route bypassing the lawmakers, despite the risky – in terms of proper democratic process – nature of such maneuvering.

Critics are now calling this (another) example of Canada’s Liberal government’s overreach.

Reports about these goings-on are based on Shared Services Canada (SSC), a government IT agency, recently announcing how the work on setting up a digital ID system for the whole country was progressing, while presenting this as essentially no different than current forms of obligatory ID (for instance, Canada’s equivalent to the social security number in the US).

But opponents in the parliament, and beyond, have been consistently for years reiterating that the scheme is fraught with dangers that are not comparable to those affecting traditional ID systems, neither in depth nor breadth.

These dangers range from data security, and cost of implementation, to various ways centralized databases containing people’s most sensitive personal information can be abused.

And those, again, range from security – to the risk of digital IDs getting turned into effective tools for government mass surveillance and control of the entire population’s behavior.

But SSC and other digital ID backers address these issues almost in passing while selling the benefits to the public as more convenience via unified access to government services, and even as something “empowering” citizens.

However, what the most prominent individuals and organizations that push for global digital ID adoption (like Bill Gates, Tony Blair, the EU, and the WEF…) present as a way to usher in more equity and equality is seen as creating exactly the opposite effect.

“Segregation and discrimination” is how one report out of Canada put it, the context being recent: Covid vaccine “passports” and the treatment received by citizens who decided against taking the jab.

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