From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject America Is Living in a Climate-Denial Fantasy
Date August 10, 2025 12:00 AM
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AMERICA IS LIVING IN A CLIMATE-DENIAL FANTASY  
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Zoë Schlanger
August 8, 2025
The Atlantic
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_ On climate, the U.S. and the rest of the planet are now in
“completely separate worlds.” _

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Last month, the world’s highest court issued a long-awaited opinion
on how international law should regard climate harm. The International
Court of Justice concluded, unanimously, that states have binding
legal obligations to act to protect the climate system, and failure to
do so—by continuing to produce, consume, and subsidize fossil
fuels—may “constitute an internationally wrongful act.” In other
words, curbing greenhouse-gas emissions is not merely voluntary in the
eyes of the court; failure to do so is illegal.

A week later, the U.S. government proffered an entirely opposite
picture of legal responsibility. It announced
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plan to rescind one of the most important legal underpinnings of the
federal effort to combat climate change. The Environmental Protection
Agency’s endangerment finding for greenhouse gases, from 2009, says
quite simply that these emissions endanger the public and qualify as
harmful pollution; they can therefore be regulated under the Clean Air
Act. This finding is the legal basis for power-plant rules,
tailpipe-emissions regulations, and almost every other action the
executive branch has taken to curb the release of carbon dioxide and
methane. And the U.S. EPA would now like to throw it out.

The United States and the rest of the planet are now in “completely
separate worlds” in terms of legal understanding of climate
responsibility, the human-rights attorney Lotte Leicht, who works as
the advocacy director of the nonprofit Climate Rights International,
told me. “I think almost nothing could have painted a starker
picture,” Nikki Reisch, an attorney and the Climate and Energy
Program director at the Center for International Environmental Law,
agrees.

The ICJ opinion was the first time the world court has expressly
addressed climate obligations under international law, and it did so
with unusual clarity. It removed what Leicht described to me as a
legal fog that the world has existed in for decades by rebuking two of
the main arguments that high-emitting countries and companies have
made to avoid liability. The first is that the climate crisis is
simply too big and complex to attribute to any particular entity,
rendering individual accountability impractical and unfair. “The
court made clear that that is not an excuse that holds up anymore,”
Leicht said. Thanks in part to attribution science, a particular
country or company’s contribution to the climate crisis can be
assessed, and the fact that many entities are at fault is not an
excuse to evade individual liability.

The second argument—that only special climate accords, such as the
Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, could dictate their climate
obligations, and that even then those pacts were by and large
voluntary—was also struck down. In its opinion, the court wrote that
climate action is not, in fact, voluntary at all: Instead, because
climate change threatens lives, degrades health, and deprives people
of their home, both domestically and across borders, climate
agreements are legally binding, and states can be sued for failure to
uphold them.

In fact, according to the court, even if a state is not party to a
climate treaty, or if a treaty agreement is too weak to prevent the
climate harm that country is enacting, that state is still legally
liable, thanks to customary law—well-established fundamental legal
principles that all countries must comply with, such as the general
duty to protect basic human rights.

An advisory opinion such as this one is not in itself legally binding.
But the international laws it is meant to interpret are. In some
countries, including the Netherlands and Kenya, international law is
incorporated into domestic law at the point of ratification. In
others, it can take precedence over domestic law; elsewhere, it may
become domestic law through an act of legislature. Reisch told me that
she expects this opinion to be used to support climate lawsuits
against countries and companies going forward, and to justify new
legislation in statehouses and local governments. Leicht, who is also
the chair of the Council of the European Center for Constitutional
Human Rights, told me the opinion would figure in one of her own
cases: She is representing four residents of Pari, a tiny Indonesian
island, who are suing Holcim
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Swiss cement company, arguing that its outsize share of greenhouse
gases is contributing to Pari’s disappearance.

The U.S., famously, does not make much of international laws. In prior
international climate negotiations, America has tried to minimize its
responsibility as the largest cumulative emitter of greenhouse gases.
Margaret Taylor, the U.S. legal adviser to the State Department under
Joe Biden, presented commentary
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the ICJ in December in which she argued that current human-rights laws
do not provide for a right to a healthy environment, nor should
countries be financially responsible for past emissions, both of which
the ICJ ultimately disagreed with in this new opinion. The State
Department has said it’s reviewing the opinion; whether or not the
country acts on it, it does open the U.S. to new climate lawsuits and
will strengthen
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already under way, including two separate suits brought by youth in
Montana and California, arguing that the Trump administration’s
actions on the environment threaten their rights. (The State
Department did not reply to a request for comment.)

The Trump administration, meanwhile, seems ready to simply ignore, if
not outright reject, any responsibility the U.S. might have for
climate change. Its intent to roll back the endangerment finding is at
odds with recent domestic legal opinion. After the EPA announced its
intentions, various legal experts spoke, almost in chorus, about the
slim chance this plan had of making it through the likely court
challenges. Jonathan Adler, a conservative legal scholar and professor
at William and Mary Law School, said in a column that he agreed with
it on policy grounds but called
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move legally “foolish”—the Bush administration tried a similar
strategy in 2007, only to have the Supreme Court affirm that
greenhouse gases qualify as air pollutants. The EPA, in an emailed
response to questions, acknowledged the 2007 decision, but noted that
it “did not require EPA to make an endangerment finding and did not
review the logic or conclusions of the 2009 Endangerment Finding
because it hadn’t been issued yet.” It also added, hopefully, that
there have been two more recent decisions in which the Supreme Court
pulled back aspects of the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse
gases.

By attempting to abdicate any legal responsibility to provide for a
healthy environment, the U.S. is running in the opposite direction as
the global legal community. Last month, prior to the release of the
ICJ opinion, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights also declared
that the climate crisis qualifies as a human-rights violation,
triggering rights-based obligations for countries and companies in
that region. And last year, the International Tribunal for the Law of
the Sea issued an advisory opinion qualifying greenhouse gases as
marine pollution, triggering similar legal obligations for countries
to mitigate them. This trend, Leicht reminded me, will likely outlive
the current American political moment.

I found myself struck by the clarity of the final paragraph in the
ICJ’s opinion, which reminds lawyers that climate change is bigger
even than the law. “A complete solution to this daunting, and
self-inflicted, problem requires the contribution of all fields of
human knowledge, whether law, science, economics or any other,” the
court wrote. “Above all, a lasting and satisfactory solution
requires human will and wisdom—at the individual, social and
political levels—to change our habits, comforts and current way of
life in order to secure a future for ourselves and those who are yet
to come.”

Indeed, rights apply not just to the people who exist now, but to
future generations. As the U.S.’s climate liability comes into
sharper focus, so does the fact of its growing burden on that group.
The question is how long the country will disavow that charge.

_Zoë Schlanger
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at The Atlantic. She is the author of The Light Eaters
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the world of plant-behavior-and-intelligence research._

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* Climate Change
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* international law
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* International Court of Justice
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* environment
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