371: Whose Side Is the Law On? How the Courts Became a Climate Battleground

00:15:19.360 --> 00:15:20.420

Catherine Higham (guest): And yeah, about 50%.

00:15:20.620 --> 00:15:24.040

Christiana Figueres: That have actually filed in favor of climate action.

00:15:24.040 --> 00:15:24.620

Catherine Higham (guest): Exactly.

00:15:24.620 --> 00:15:25.000

Christiana Figueres: Okay.

00:15:25.000 --> 00:15:27.900

Catherine Higham (guest): And that's a range of different types of decisions, right? So it might be a case that would have been really negative for climate action that got thrown out. For example, in Canada, we had these challenges by some of the provinces to the carbon pricing system and that was thrown out by the courts. And they said, no, the federal government can introduce a carbon price. So that's kind of one of the types of cases that we might look at. Or it's these are gender style cases where communities are saying, you've got to do more. So it's a range of different things.

00:15:57.560 --> 00:16:03.920

Joana Setzer (guest): And this or gender style cases, the way we would define is that there are cases that are seeking ambition or implementation. And these we have 163 cases around the world, which is huge if you think that it started very small in one, with one decision in the Netherlands. And these would, if they're successful, they, the results can be significant. So it's back to the Netherlands, it means phasing out coal. How would you do that without the litigation? It would take longer, maybe, to negotiate that in parliament, and require more investments, funding, institution building. So these cases can really result in an impact in the whole economy of a country, asking governments to do more.

00:16:41.180 --> 00:16:42.060

Christiana Figueres: Absolutely. What trend do you see? Is there a similar trend in cases against corporations, be they state-owned corporations, or actually privately-owned corporations? Is there a similar trend?

00:16:57.960 --> 00:16:58.220

Catherine Higham (guest): Yeah. So this is an area that is much less mature than the area of cases against states. We had a few early cases in the US in the mid 2010s that were dismissed. But since then, we have had a number of cases being filed against companies. We classify them into different groups. There's a group of forward-looking claims, like the case of Milieu de Foncie and Shell, which was filed in the Netherlands, actually in the wake of the Urgenda case, where the NGO Milieu de Foncie were basically arguing, look, the government has this obligation to reduce emissions in order to protect Dutch citizens and their human rights, and shouldn't that extend to companies that are responsible for huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions? That case is currently on appeal to the Supreme Court of the Netherlands. We also have these backward-looking cases that say, look, companies have contributed to climate change for a very long time now, and they have known for a very long time now, that what they're doing is causing harm to others, and we have a whole area of law that generally deals with cases where you do harm to others through your activities. Why don't we try and use this area of law to hold these companies responsible and get them to actually pay for the costs of either the damage that's already been sustained, or the damage that we anticipate communities and individuals having to engage with?

00:18:23.220 --> 00:18:33.880

Christiana Figueres: Why do you think there are less cases against corporations, and do the cases against governments and corporations reinforce each other, or are they completely parallel?

00:18:34.360 --> 00:18:36.200

Joana Setzer (guest): Yeah, they're two very good questions. So less cases against corporations. On one hand, I think it's logical in the sense that if you are to have a real impact in climate, you need governments to set the rules, right? So if you want governments to be more ambitious, then that will result in companies having to respond to that ambition. So the governments are the critical initial node, at least, or a node in many moments where you need to set directions. So corporations then come in because they are the major contributors. And of course, you also want to show that they are responsible and eventually get them to pay. And this is where it becomes also more challenging because for a court, it's already hard to tell a government you're not doing enough. There's the whole thing with separation of powers and you try to be careful about that balance. But then to tell a company, open your pocket, open your wallet, and pay, especially because it's not going to be a one-off, right? You're going to pay to this person who says that they're experiencing loss, but then they're going to be a few hundred thousand million more asking for that same compensation. So courts realize that these cases might sound important, that they might have a case, but also...

00:19:58.900 --> 00:20:00.160

Christiana Figueres: Huge consequences. Yes. It opens a huge gate.

00:20:02.720 --> 00:20:03.120

Joana Setzer (guest): Yeah. So especially for the cases that ask for compensation, these are very difficult battles that have been fought for the last 10 years in a serious way, advancing slowly, but it's...

00:20:17.980 --> 00:20:19.240

Christiana Figueres: They will continue.

00:20:19.280 --> 00:20:20.860

Joana Setzer (guest): They will continue. But then also there are many victories with... I'd want to say easier in the sense that I'm saying they're not important, but the greenwashing, the climate washing, those we've seen success. We've seen several examples. We have in the last report 65% as the success rate for cases that are raising... showing that there is miscommunication, that whatever you say is net zero can't be demonstrated. So those are not only easier to prove and win, but also we have seen results that have made withdraw of campaigns or even compensation for miscommunication. Now, Kate can tell you about how things have traveled between the two, which is a very good question, and it's something new in the report.

00:21:10.200 --> 00:21:10.980

Catherine Higham (guest): Yeah, absolutely. So we were curious about this question. How many of the corporate cases are citing or drawing on the cases against governments? And we put 25 of the cases that make these kind of forward-looking claims saying, okay, this company needs to do more to act on climate change. They have some kind of legal responsibility to do so through an LLM and asked it to look for references to any government case anywhere in the world. And we found that more than 70% of the claims make reference to these government cases. They're actually drawing explicitly on those decisions. And we have this really interesting example in Switzerland recently. So this is a case of four claimants from Indonesia who are filing against a Swiss company Holcim, cement manufacturer. And they're arguing that Holcim has contributed a small percentage of global emissions but should be responsible for paying for the associate commensurate percentage of adapting their homes to climate change. And there are some kind of backward looking claims about losses they've already suffered. And that case has just been accepted by the Swiss courts in Zug, in the Cantonal Court in Zug, and they've said, yeah, okay, we can hear this case. And in making that decision, they cite, the court cites the Clima Signorinan decision from the European Court of Human Rights that came out in 2024. And they say, well, this could be relevant to how we understand the obligations that private parties owe to each other. So that's part of the kind of landscape that is going to go into deciding whether or not Holcim has to pay some of these costs.

00:22:56.720 --> 00:23:07.440

Christiana Figueres: So and then there is a level on top of that, right, which are the three international advisory opinions, ICJ being the latest one. But there are three international advisory opinions that are also being referenced by national courts, question mark?

00:23:18.660 --> 00:23:19.140

Joana Setzer (guest): Yes. So if you think in the time of the law and legal cases, usually it's a very slow, slow pace story, right? I know that. Everyone knows that going to court is going to be slow. And what we noticed is in this year after all these advisory opinions were issued, very quickly litigants picked it up and started mentioning those in their filings, which is not surprising, you know, they were all very much waiting for that. But what we also notice is that courts are engaging. Now, you would ask, would a court decide differently had not been the ICJ said so? That's hard to tell. But the fact is that the ICJ has that authoritative power, that if a judge is concerned, oh, should I go as far as give that remedy that is being seeked to say the government is not doing enough back to the care that maybe a court would have in terms of interfering? Well, you have the ICJ giving you that clarity, saying yes.

00:24:23.200 --> 00:24:25.740

Christiana Figueres: Even if it's an advisory opinion and not a decision?

00:24:25.740 --> 00:24:27.680

Joana Setzer (guest): Yeah, it has authoritative power. That's what it has. That's its power. So we have seen immediately courts picking it up, citing in different ways. Some are very high level, not really engaging, it's a footnote. Some will engage a bit more. It depends on the jurisdiction. Also it depends how different countries' courts engage with international law. So there are differences like that. But the fact is that courts have picked up and it's helping judges in their decisions.

00:24:59.780 --> 00:25:05.940

Christiana Figueres: I have two questions that do not contribute to my excitement, to put it mildly. The first question is, your report also covers anti-climate cases. What are those? Why are they in your report? And how should we understand, is there also a trend there? How dangerous are they? What is the dynamic there? And what do we mean by anti-climate?

00:25:29.480 --> 00:25:32.220

Joana Setzer (guest): So anti-cases, there are different types. One is a case that is directly challenging legislation that is requiring, for instance, disclosure. And you have litigation challenging that piece of legislation. You will also have anti-litigation in a Slapsuit, so a strategic lawsuit against public participation. So we bundle in this anti-category every type of litigation that is trying to either stop legislation or stop participation or create costs to litigators, legislators, etc. Now, we used to also consider within that the cases that are not exactly the main reason of the litigant is to stop climate, but is you're thinking of communities that are suffering the impacts of climate policies. Think about communities that are affected by solar panels and wind farm, and they are challenging those developments not because they're against climate policies, but because they think that is unfair, that that's on their land, for instance. We used to bundle those together, and the fact is that this last year, the anti became so strong. It's so, we were talking about it's so nasty, clearly wanting to stop litigation, stop protests, stop climate action that we have separated. Now, we talk about just transition litigation, which is the example I was giving you, indigenous communities suffering with wind and solar in their land. We separate also what we call green versus green, which is, well, you want to protect that bird or that bat, but also you want the wind turbine, how you deal with these conflicting interests, from the anti, where you're really trying to stop the legislation and the policy and the action.

00:27:28.660 --> 00:27:30.440

Christiana Figueres: Okay, so you're making that difference there.

00:27:31.160 --> 00:27:38.620

Catherine Higham (guest): Yeah, I suppose increasingly one of the things we're also seeing is this anti-activity against the litigation itself. So it's a sort of force countering some of the cases that have been filed that we would say might be good for climate action. And a good example of that is the US federal government actually getting involved in trying to block lawsuits that are being filed by US cities and states against fossil fuel companies. We've seen a number of cases taken by the US administration to that end recently. And we're also starting to see this related phenomenon, which is laws that are coming out that would actually try to block these lawsuits from getting any further in courts. And that's a response, I think, to the success of some of the cases against companies. So we do see, although there aren't any successful judgements, where a court says, this company has to pay these costs.

00:28:29.520 --> 00:28:30.600

Christiana Figueres: Yeah, no orders.

00:28:30.600 --> 00:28:31.080

Catherine Higham (guest): No orders. But we see them starting to get past the first procedural gateposts, if you will. So we're starting to see courts saying, yeah, these guys maybe have an arguable case. We want to hear a bit more evidence about it. And in response, we're starting to see proposed legislation that would shield companies from any kind of liability in the US, in New Zealand, and in Germany. This has been proposed.

00:28:57.240 --> 00:29:18.080

Christiana Figueres: So that leads me to my other question that doesn't fill me with enthusiasm, which is, could there be a backlash against participation in international agreements such as the Paris Agreement? Could a country or countries all of a sudden say, pfft, we're getting hit by litigation left and right, and the companies are putting pressure on us because we're part of the Paris Agreement, and therefore we're just going to withdraw because we can't deal with all of this. Is that a possible backlash? I almost don't dare to ask the question, but I think it has to be asked.

00:29:46.000 --> 00:29:47.580

Joana Setzer (guest): I think it has to be asked. It has to be also thought by the litigants. So when you file a case, even if your intention is the best possible intention of driving policy, of moving action, you have to think about unintended consequences. You have to think about backlash. And even a victory, so we have already examples where back to the Netherlands where you see you have that big victory in court. And what follows is investors' state dispute settlement, where then the state is being sued by companies who lost the right that they had to explore coal where in principle they would have that right. So that's an immediate backlash that maybe you didn't intend that when you won the case and got the government to be more active and phase out coal. You didn't want the government to be paying taxpayers' money to the company because they are...

00:30:40.020 --> 00:30:41.060

Christiana Figueres: Absolutely, yeah.

00:30:41.060 --> 00:30:42.120

Joana Setzer (guest): But that might happen. And also...

00:30:43.540 --> 00:30:45.440

Christiana Figueres: How do you prevent that as a litigant?

00:30:46.060 --> 00:30:54.940

Catherine Higham (guest): Well, this is actually one of the things that we find most interesting about what we're seeing in this year's report, which is the rise of what we're calling protective climate litigation. It's the kind of case where you're not saying the Dutch government needs to do more on climate change. The South Korean government needs to do more on climate change. You're saying, this is the commitment that's already been made. Now you have the obligation to uphold that commitment, not to walk it back and to keep this kind of consensus that we have around the science and the law.

00:31:19.180 --> 00:31:25.820

Christiana Figueres: Yeah, but what if the government turns around and says, oh, well, I made that commitment way back wherever in prehistory, but I'm walking away from it now. That's my anxiety.

00:31:27.920 --> 00:31:31.760

Catherine Higham (guest): I mean, I think that's something that courts are going to be confronted with potentially. Is that within the political?

00:31:34.540 --> 00:31:36.780

Christiana Figueres: Yeah, because that's a political move. It's not legal.

00:31:38.060 --> 00:31:43.000

Catherine Higham (guest): But in a lot of countries, we do have climate targets set into legislation.

00:31:43.020 --> 00:31:43.620

Christiana Figueres: Yes, we do.

00:31:43.620 --> 00:31:58.820

Catherine Higham (guest): So unless you are able to get a sufficiency of the parliamentarians, the legislators to agree to walk back those targets, then you actually are going to face potential legal challenges. And we also have this kind of emerging consensus that human rights are affected by climate change, that there are constitutional obligations that countries have to take into account. So these aren't like silver bullets. They're not going to stop governments from walking back commitments, but they are going to make it harder for them to do so. They're going to make opportunities for people to come together and say, no, actually, you made this commitment in law or you need to think about how that policy change is going to affect the rights of those children. And if you can't give us a good answer for how you're going to protect those children's rights, then that's an arguable legal case. And so this, I think, is the kind of core of the protective litigation. It's, yeah, litigation is never a silver bullet, and you ideally not have to do it. But this legal architecture that has been created in the last 10 years is going to be much harder to dismantle than just, if everything was just, you know, one politician saying, I'm going to do this today and saying, I'm going to do something else tomorrow.

00:33:00.360 --> 00:33:12.740

Christiana Figueres: It's such an interesting answer because what I derived from that is the architecture, as you called it, the legal architecture is becoming more and more robust, and hence more and more difficult to squeeze your way out of it.

00:33:13.240 --> 00:33:15.700

Joana Setzer (guest): And if you try, the litigation tries to hold you.

00:33:15.700 --> 00:33:16.160

Christiana Figueres: Yes.

00:33:16.620 --> 00:33:17.880

Joana Setzer (guest): It does create a risk. I think there is definitely, you would see companies saying, I will then promise less, I will withdraw from my commitments. And but so far, the combination, I think the golden combination is law, which sets clear targets, principles, directions, and the litigation coming in case those are not met.

00:33:42.340 --> 00:33:42.660

Christiana Figueres: Right.

00:33:43.820 --> 00:33:49.020

Joana Setzer (guest): And this should create the right incentives to hopefully one day you'd need less litigation. But that they are set in law, that is still what humans respond, I think, best to.

00:33:57.460 --> 00:33:59.420

Catherine Higham (guest): And we see this happening in practice. So one of the case studies we talk about in the report this year is the case from South Korea. So a few years ago, there were a group of cases that were brought to the South Korean Constitutional Court, first by the youth, but then the adults and the elderly people said, okay, we want to support the youth, we're going to bring our own cases alongside theirs. And they were pushing for more ambition in the climate legislation that South Korea had, and in particular, interim targets. So there was a long term 2050 target, but they said, look, we need interim targets about what we're going to do between now and 2050. And the court in that case, they accepted that not having these kinds of targets could impact the rights of those claimants. And they said, so, Parliament, the legislators, you've got to go back and come up with a better target, one that's actually going to protect people's rights. And what we've then seen is this real mobilization of civil society around this target setting, including the Parliament introducing a deliberative polling to ask Korean citizens, what do you think we should do? Is this the kind of target that you think we should have? And the results of those polls were actually that people said, yeah, we should have these ambitious targets. And so there hasn't been necessarily as ambitious a target as a result as the litigants originally wanted. But we've definitely seen more ambition from the Korean government than we would have without that litigation, without that campaign, without those polling. So it does make a difference.

00:35:37.940 --> 00:35:43.840

Christiana Figueres: Okay, ladies, thank you so much for feeding my enthusiasm of climate litigation today. Sadly, we have to come to an end, but we wanted to end this episode by playing a clip, which are some words from Trixy Elle, one of the claimants in the Odette case, speaking to Greenpeace Philippines. I'm going to read it to you. Trixy says, The case filing is a major step toward justice after what we endured during Super Typhoon Odette. I saw for myself, as a woman and as a mother, that I can fight and stand up for my children's future. Our community is proof that even if you are small in this society, there is something you can do. We are capable of action. We choose not to be afraid to speak out, to make a stand, and to fight, especially when you know you are right, and that you are a victim of this rotten system in our government. There's also a challenge. People keep asking, aren't you afraid? How will you win? You hear that a lot, but for me, just filing the case is already a huge victory. I've done something to hold these powerful, destructive companies accountable. We Fisherfolk are among those most affected by the climate crisis. Okay. What do you say to that?

00:37:28.060 --> 00:37:31.340

Catherine Higham (guest): Well, I think that's such a powerful statement. One of the things that is so intensely important about this litigation is that it elevates the voices of ordinary people who are actually having to go through this. And it gives them the opportunity to...

00:37:49.580 --> 00:37:53.560

Christiana Figueres: And who do so as mothers and for their children. Yeah.

00:37:54.200 --> 00:38:01.400

Catherine Higham (guest): I recently had a baby who's just one now, and it's been really making me think about all of these.

00:38:01.800 --> 00:38:02.320

Joana Setzer (guest): Yeah. That's why we start crying, because it is when you feel as a mother, you look and you think, what can I do? And you've suffered this, and you don't want your child to suffer this, and justice comes into mind, right? Justice. It's unfair. I need justice. And law and litigation are not the only way to seek justice, but they are a channel that is established. And this is how this litigation became powerful. This is the story it tells. I worry that it shouldn't over-promise. You can't guarantee to this woman that justice will be made, that her children won't experience, that she will win the case. But then if you see the statement, this is also something that she already recognizes.

00:38:53.900 --> 00:38:55.600

Christiana Figueres: She says, just filing it.

00:38:55.600 --> 00:38:56.260

Joana Setzer (guest): Exactly.

00:38:56.260 --> 00:38:57.540

Christiana Figueres: Just filing it. And she's making her stand.

00:38:59.960 --> 00:39:00.220

Joana Setzer (guest): Yeah. And actually we did some research at the LSE where we've been saying this point about the filing has an impact, but we decided, can we measure? And we have a bunch of economist colleagues who we work with, and we gave them the challenge. We said, can we see if in terms of financial impacts, filing cases would make any difference? And we were surprised when we gave them the challenge. We didn't think that we would have that result. But not only the first paper shows that filing a case results in the drop in share prices of companies, in this case that our paper looks, but then now we have a follow-up paper where we did a survey with over 800 investors, asset owners, where there are questions that they are prompt to say, do you actually consider litigation as a risk? And it turns out they do. So not that this is important for us. I think there are many other angles, but in terms of regulators, central banks, banks, the financial sector, if also you want to make the point that the litigation has a cost and just the filing, not even the result, we have demonstrated that it has. That's why you're right to be excited about it. There are, it is a very, not perfect, but a very powerful story.

00:40:22.120 --> 00:40:25.240

Christiana Figueres: Very powerful story on many different levels.

00:40:30.760 --> 00:40:33.980

Tom Rivett-Carnac: Christiana, what an amazing interview, what incredible people and-

00:40:35.020 --> 00:40:38.940

Christiana Figueres: Now I get to ask the two of you, what did you make out of that?

00:40:40.260 --> 00:40:54.640

Paul Dickinson: Well, I mean, I begin with the super significant work they do in tracking year after year, the progress of this because we have a new recognition from their work. They have revealed a kind of infrastructure, kind of mycelium, another connecting tissue in the great contest to get our political and our industrial and our financial systems aligned with science. We've got kind of science-based targets for everybody, but now science-based policy and science-based regulation. Really struck by their initial, most cases being on governments because of course, the duty to protect, if you go back to Hobbes, sits with the government. Our duty to the state lasts as long and only as long as it protects us, so reminding government, but then increasingly also that's spilling over into approaching companies regarding their liabilities. I suppose the biggest thing for me is just the unusual but formal, I'm going to call it almost administrative or bureaucratic character of raising these critical issues which is alongside civil society, which is alongside governments, which is alongside the business sector. It's another way of being in the climate movement and they are charting its progress to help us all better understand and I hope support it.

00:42:04.900 --> 00:42:05.320

Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yeah.

00:42:05.380 --> 00:42:06.360

Paul Dickinson: What do you think Tom?

00:42:07.440 --> 00:42:09.640

Tom Rivett-Carnac: Well, so I really like the way you phrased that towards the end there. First of all, what incredible work to attract these things, reflect it. I mean, often these things are invisible until somebody brilliant picks them up and reflects them back to the world, and this has been done so well. I would actually really encourage listeners to, we'll link it in the show notes, have a read of the executive summary of the report. It's 10 minutes, you're really well spent. But I think the point you just made, Paul, is a really important one, and it connects to your question in the interview about, could there be a moment where governments would pull out of the Paris Agreement because they're being held to account by their own judiciaries to meet the commitments that they have adhered to? It just really made me reflect on the critical element of the law and its role within an overall system of transition. We need the economic system that moves us forward and we need the laws. And we need the public opinion that enables us to keep opening the political space. Because if any one of those gets too far ahead of the other, it can create adverse impacts. So if we use the law too heavily, governments will pull out of the Paris Agreement. And we saw that with Canada pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol, right?

00:43:16.920 --> 00:43:18.140

Catherine Higham (guest): Tell me about it.

00:43:18.140 --> 00:43:19.300

Tom Rivett-Carnac: I wish you lived through it.

00:43:19.300 --> 00:43:20.560

Christiana Figueres: I received the letter.

00:43:21.500 --> 00:43:22.280

Paul Dickinson: That's so close. Oh, what's in the post today? Oh, oh, right.

00:43:25.900 --> 00:43:26.120

Tom Rivett-Carnac: Right. Tell us about that, actually.

00:43:27.380 --> 00:43:27.800

Paul Dickinson: Yeah.

00:43:28.240 --> 00:43:28.820

Christiana Figueres: Yeah. Canada, this was Kyoto Protocol time, right? And it was a punitive system, which the Paris Agreement is not. Punitive means that if, under the Kyoto Protocol, it was only the developed countries that had reduction commitments. And if they didn't meet their emission reduction commitments, they had to pay a fine. And Canada was not complying with their reduction commitment and would have received a very heavy fine on the 1st of January. And so in December, and I don't remember exactly the date, but I know it was very much like three seconds before the 1st of January. I get this letter. Yeah. A written letter. I mean, we don't get letters anymore, but this was a written letter. Dear Madam Executive Secretary, Canada withdraws from the Kyoto Protocol. And I'm like, what? How is this possible? But it is, it is possible, right? And no, all states are sovereign. This is what we have to remember. All states are sovereign. And so just like Canada pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol, the United States has pulled out of the Paris Agreement twice, and every state is sovereign. So that is a real danger. That countries can just send a little letter.

00:44:45.880 --> 00:44:46.260

Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yeah.

00:44:46.260 --> 00:44:48.620

Christiana Figueres: And say, herewith withdrawing.

00:44:48.620 --> 00:44:59.020

Tom Rivett-Carnac: And now, and with that, many of the legal cases that may take place domestically no longer have the same purchase in that country because they pulled out of the Paris Agreement.

00:44:59.020 --> 00:44:59.240

Christiana Figueres: Yeah. Well, what they said, though, is by now we have national legislation.

00:45:04.760 --> 00:45:05.080

Tom Rivett-Carnac: Right.

00:45:05.080 --> 00:45:06.320

Christiana Figueres: That supports the Paris Agreement.

00:45:06.320 --> 00:45:07.600

Tom Rivett-Carnac: So they would have to undo that as well.

00:45:07.600 --> 00:45:12.180

Christiana Figueres: They would have to undo that as well, which is what is happening in the United States, by the way. So it's not like it's not possible.

00:45:15.400 --> 00:45:15.800

Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yeah.

00:45:15.940 --> 00:45:18.240

Christiana Figueres: It is, it's complicated.

00:45:18.240 --> 00:45:18.620

Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yeah.

00:45:18.680 --> 00:45:23.200

Christiana Figueres: And should become more and more complicated to walk back from these responsibilities. But it only points to the complexity, right? That yes, the economics are moving in the right direction, the transition of the progress in the technologies are moving in the right direction. Politics is here and there, sometimes good, sometimes not. Legislation seems to be walking in, or litigation seems to be walking in a good direction. But it could be a double edged sword. I mean, what a complexity that we're trying to navigate here. Yeah.

00:45:58.000 --> 00:46:02.140

Tom Rivett-Carnac: And each of these points of leverage can only be pulled so far. And if they get pulled further-

00:46:03.960 --> 00:46:05.460

Christiana Figueres: Too far, individually.

00:46:05.460 --> 00:46:07.100

Tom Rivett-Carnac: Individually, exactly. All of them have to be pulled collectively in order for the system to tip. If you pull one too far, then you kind of break other things. And I mean, they're clearly well aware of that. They're super smart. But it just made me really realize, again, the systemic nature of this and that those pieces need to move in concert. What did you think?

00:46:24.080 --> 00:46:25.180

Christiana Figueres: It's like a Jenga game.

00:46:26.360 --> 00:46:28.620

Tom Rivett-Carnac: Jenga when you're building the tower and you pull the different pieces out.

00:46:28.620 --> 00:46:31.760

Christiana Figueres: Well, you have the tower built and then you have to pull the pieces very carefully. Because if you pull one too soon or two, the whole thing collapses.

00:46:35.920 --> 00:46:36.320

Tom Rivett-Carnac: Right.

00:46:36.320 --> 00:46:36.660

Christiana Figueres: Yeah. And nobody's orchestrating the Jenga game.

00:46:41.800 --> 00:46:42.260

Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yes.

00:46:42.260 --> 00:46:42.700

Christiana Figueres: Right. Yeah. This is somehow, I don't know, somehow is not the word, but I think it is somehow. Somehow all of these pieces move in concert with each other or in contrast to each other. And on the whole, miraculously, miraculously, we're moving forward.

00:47:02.800 --> 00:47:03.020

Tom Rivett-Carnac: Right. But that's actually a good point. And that nobody's in charge point.

00:47:06.820 --> 00:47:09.240

Paul Dickinson: They don't always end very gently Jenga games, do they?

00:47:09.260 --> 00:47:09.920

Christiana Figueres: No.

00:47:10.120 --> 00:47:11.260

Tom Rivett-Carnac: And they look until the moment...

00:47:11.260 --> 00:47:12.780

Christiana Figueres: And we want to avoid the Jenga culture crashing down.

00:47:12.780 --> 00:47:16.380

Tom Rivett-Carnac: And until the moment they fall over, they look pretty stable structurally and then all of a sudden...

00:47:16.480 --> 00:47:18.080

Paul Dickinson: 100%, 100%, 100%, 0%.

00:47:18.200 --> 00:47:19.160

Christiana Figueres: So there you go.

00:47:19.160 --> 00:47:21.320

Tom Rivett-Carnac: It's the nature of complex systems, isn't it? What did you think?

00:47:23.980 --> 00:47:26.920

Christiana Figueres: Yeah, I'm just thrilled about this. And as I said in the beginning, I'm very passionate about this topic and very ignorant. And so that's kind of it. I would say I'm irresponsibly passionate about it.

00:47:38.480 --> 00:47:39.800

Tom Rivett-Carnac: Irresponsibly passionate. I love it.

00:47:40.240 --> 00:47:52.140

Paul Dickinson: Well, from the other side of the fence, so to say, I asked AI about this and they said, human beings are tragically obsessed with borders, to your point, but reality only recognizes gradients. And I had the privilege yesterday to be on a panel with Mary Robinson, and she talked about how her journey into climate change had come through human rights. And I think it's really important for us to remember that although there may not be masses of legal precedent about the chemical composition of the atmosphere, there's an awful lot of precedent about human rights and having human rights and the respect for human rights. That's almost kind of like where so much of the principle of the law comes from. So it's again part of this kind of modifying and kind of reusing and reapplying and reformatting what we have to fit the new challenge. And, you know, you can do nothing but applaud all of those. If there's how many thousand cases, that's like 10,000, 100,000 people working really hard. And it was beautiful to hear that testimony from someone, a climate change victim, talking about how just filing the case herself was a very important action for her personally.

00:48:50.520 --> 00:48:50.900

Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yeah. Can I just say as a closing note, Christiana, just to applaud you, your willingness to go there in those moments and really feel people's vulnerability. I don't think you realize how much it kind of gives permission to everyone else to do the same. At the end of Climate Week, I've been in a lot of round tables and high level dialogues. I've not seen it from anyone. Seen a lot of like world leader type people come in. They talk about the need to reduce emissions and that we need to deal with data centers and whatever else. But I've never seen anyone like just like feel the pain of the victim.

00:49:20.680 --> 00:49:21.820

Christiana Figueres: But it's not willingness. It just, it just overwhelms me. It's not like I make a decision, okay, I'm willing or I'm not willing. It's just like, it's this wave that comes up.

00:49:30.900 --> 00:49:32.680

Tom Rivett-Carnac: That facet of who you are.

00:49:32.800 --> 00:49:34.960

Paul Dickinson: No, thank you for letting the wave come up. Somehow people stop it and that's not for the good. The permission, I think, is the perfect point.

00:49:41.120 --> 00:49:41.880

Tom Rivett-Carnac: Thanks, guys. Lovely to see you. See you all next week. Bye.

00:49:44.620 --> 00:49:44.960

Christiana Figueres: Bye.