Thursday, March 7, 2019

A climate change tort law

Let Congress define a climate change tort court and provide it 20 million to try a case.
The rules are as follows:
Plaintiffs are a spefici cclass action that attempt to prove damages due to climate change.
Defendants prove that other causes of climate change are more determinant.

The tort judge evaluate the climate of damages that is provable, then in step two awards claims such that both defendant and plaintiff proofs are equally uncertain.

So, the tort judge takes its one grandstand case on behalf of Congress, and the Supremes let it go. Who sues?  Homeowners on the gulf coast, they can prove higher hurricane insurance, they can show correlation with temperature, seal level and hurricane count, with fair uncertainty. And the plaintiffs show that many other variables increase the uncertainty of cause.

What plaintiffs? numerate them, from point of entry to distribution through refineries togas stations, all a finite countable set, big data. So all these distributors i the chain see they are on the list, and they can join the common research effort or do their own, but otherwise they have due process to avoid a charge.

The tort judge spends the 20 million on statisticians, climate experts, ocean experts, advisers, and clericals. One good court case, in public, get a lot of this stuff aired out, and information and research much advanced. Like the Scopes trial. But precision is set, and every other use and non user of fossil fuels can count benefits and costs.

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