Make a healthy climate a legal right that extends to future generations

I was going to say this will never work, but actually I think it might with a couple of additions.

You'd need this signed into international law. Mass protests could probably help with that, but you'd also need an international election drive towards green parties among the youth to get a critical mass of supporters at the UN level.

You'd also need to handle enforcement and compliance, which is where these agreements have fallen down in the past. Some nations, and a lot of people, just don't care about climate change, so you'd need hard consequences for polluters.

You'd also be parting oil-rich states and agricultural beef businesses from the source of their income. The farmers won't do much but the oil states would probably go to war over it.

On that topic I'll say this: electric cars. Yes they still need energy, no that doesn't make it "the same as driving a gasoline car" as the EV energy doesn't have to come from fossil fuels (and increasingly is not), which means you can move at a macro level away from oil and coal over time. If you remove the demand for fossil fuels you don't need to ban them.

I'm still not convinced it's impossible if we take the problem seriously and stop pretending it doesn't need a global response.

Future generations having rights is a weird concept. If we cut science spending, can someone sue on behalf of future generations that they are being deprived of a better world. Is advocating for negative population growth a hate crime against future generations since you are trying to ensure fewer will be born?

The real issue with climate change is that it is not electorally popular to do anything other than a few token gestures. The increased gas taxes contributed to the yellow vest protests in France. The Australian election upset was also spurred by concern that one of the parties would try to cut fossil fuels.

I do not know that trying to do an end around the electorate and appealing to the judiciary on a novel legal theory is going to work in the long term.

The best idea I found around this topic is https://www.ethicalsystems.org/

If there is a move from shareholder primacy to stakeholder primacy, the environment can be one of the stakeholders and there could be laws preventing businesses abusing this stakeholder.

What a nonsensical idea. You can't have judges writing environmental law on the basis of legal rights.

And there is no such thing as a healthy climate -- an unhealthy environment is caused by local pollution, not greenhouse gases.

The thing about rights is that we don't have any. We can make laws that give us rights to education, equal opportunities and a whole raft of things but society can be corrupt or fall to pieces. The wars we have had in recent years are proof of this, the UN rules on selling weapons are not enforced and it is the security council members that are doing all the preparations for war. For this reason we need to be discussing the climate without using the 'rights' word.

How is it more reasonable than making healthy food a legal right? Yet, I haven't heard about anyone of The Economist's scale seriously suggesting making healthy food a legal right. Maybe because it's too idealistic.

Sometimes the right thing to do is just the right thing to do. It doesn't need to be justified by artificial rights to people who do not yet exist.

Yang proposed a constitutional amendment to ensure climate is a priority for federal and state govts. beyond a single administration: https://www.yang2020.com/blog/climate-change/

I seem to recall the Jetsons once coming back to sue the Earth for destroying the climate, they didn't win the case however.

We can be mindful of the climate, but inevitably the sun is going to explode in roughly 5 billion years (note: the earth is 4.5 billion years old, so we're roughly half way through the sun soaked portion of Earth's existence). The Earth will continue to possibly exist, but sunlight does seem critical to supporting the food chain, and more broadly, life.

We can legislatively protect the Earth for the future --and it should be welcomed-- but the future is coming for us. Over extremely long horizons, no law will save us. And modern humans have only existed for 200,000 years -- would such a law protect generations that are no longer Homo Sapiens, but are our descendants? If we do indeed succeed in protecting our planet, with enough time (short by geological standards) we won't even exist in our current form.