Industrial Revolution

• The entire process was controversial and the two us who are on the subcommission (chair Jan Zalasiewicz and vice-chair Martin Head) even refused to cast a vote as we did not want to legitimise it.
• In any case, the proposal ran into opposition from longstanding members.
• Many geologists, used to working with millions of years, find it hard to accept an epoch just seven decades long – that’s just one human lifetime.
• He and his colleagues were perfectly aware that humans had been doing that for millennia.

It makes no sense, Crutzen said, to use the Holocene for present time. He conceived the Anthropocene as the time when human impacts intensified, suddenly, dramatically, enough to push the Earth into a new state. The science journalist Andrew Revkin (who thought up the name “Anthrocene” even before Crutzen’s inspiration) aptly called it the “big zoom”.

Flesh on bones

• We’re part of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) that has been gathering evidence to put geological flesh on the bones of Crutzen’s concept.
• The AWG had a mandate: to assess the Anthropocene as a potential geological time unit during which “human modification of natural systems has become predominant”.

• It’s a nicely laid out, easy-to-understand picture that summarises the changes caused by human activity over the last million years.
• But what is lost here is any sense of the quantified rate and magnitude of change, other than by a little shading.
• The Y-axis is what scientists use to show the magnitude of measurements such as temperature and mass.

• They show that Crutzen’s Anthropocene is real, evidence based, and represents an epoch-scale change (at least).
• The repercussions cannot fail to last for many thousands of years – and some will change the Earth for ever.

Epoch vs event

• So the Anthropocene as an epoch is very different from the “event” of Erle Ellis and others, which encapsulates all human influence on the planet (and so is about a thousand times longer than the epoch, and differs in many other ways).
• ), it could perfectly well complement an Anthropocene epoch.
• That’s the Anthropocene as an epoch.

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• Colin Waters is Chair of the Anthropocene Working Group.
• Martin Head is part of the Anthropocene Working Group and the Quaternary Subcommission.

• The Supreme Court overturned lower court rulings which had struck out Smith’s ambitious claim seeking to establish civil (tort) liability for those emitters’ contributions to climate change.
• With the Supreme Court decision, Smith has won the right to present his full case before the High Court.

The case against the corporate emitters

• Smith argued the activities and effects of the corporate defendants amount to three forms of “tort” or civil wrong: public nuisance, negligence, and a new form of civil wrong described as a “proposed climate system damage tort”.
• Read more:
  Children's climate change case at the European Court of Human Rights: what's at stake?
• The first two causes of action – public nuisance and negligence – have long lineages in the common law.
• A key plank of the corporate emitters’ argument was that the courts “are ill-suited to deal with a systemic problem of this nature with all the complexity entailed”.

The challenges of establishing causation

• Questions of causation and proximity have been stumbling blocks for litigants overseas attempting to bring similar tort claims to Smith’s.
• In this case, the seven corporate emitters are associated with around 30% of total New Zealand emissions.
• The court suggested that there may be scope for adjusting the causation rules to better reflect the nature of modern environmental issues like climate change.

What role for tikanga and where now?

• Recent Supreme Court decisions have accepted and applied tikanga as the “first law of New Zealand” including in relation to environmental protection.
• The Court followed that approach in this case, accepting that crucial aspects of Smith’s case rely on tikanga principles.
• The court pronounced that “addressing and assessing matters of tikanga simply cannot be avoided”.

Vernon Rive has previously received funding from the New Zealand Law Foundation.

• IperionX Limited (IperionX) (NASDAQ: IPX, ASX: IPX) is pleased to release a letter to shareholders from the Company’s Chief Executive Officer Anastasios Arima.
• In October, we received a Letter of Interest from the U.S. Export-Import Bank for the provisional sum of US$11.5 million.
• I would like to thank the IperionX team for their relentless efforts and remarkable achievements in 2023.
• I also want to express our appreciation to all our stakeholders, including our long-term shareholders, our customers, suppliers and government associates.

• WattCarbon, a platform for Energy Attribute Certificate (EAC)-based clean energy procurement, has closed its first-ever hourly renewable deal of 500 MWh in collaboration with West Virginia developer Solar Holler.
• LAFAYETTE, Calif., Jan. 16, 2024 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- WattCarbon, a platform for EAC-based clean energy procurement, and Solar Holler, a developer of renewable energy based in West Virginia, have completed an initial purchase and transfer of more than 500 MWh of hourly Energy Attribute Certificates (EACs).
• "EACs are the future of clean energy, unlocking new procurement strategies that value environmental impacts, not just MWh generated."
• As a regulated energy market reliant on coal for power generation, procurement in West Virginia represents a uniquely high impact and untapped opportunity for clean energy buyers.