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A New Push to Make Ecocide an International Crime

74 points by djrogers 5y ago

MattGaiser 5y ago
These people would achieve more if the time were spent picking up plastic in a park.
- cryptoz 5y ago
  This is honestly an extremely rude and unnecessarily mean comment. I also strongly disagree with it. Large scale actions are needed. Small scale good-samaritan efforts do not move the needle on large issues that require international, inter-organizational efforts.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    This is not action at all. The ICC is an institution that incinerates money while doing nothing significant to prevent any of the crimes already under its jurisdiction.
    - cryptoz 5y ago
      > This is not action at all. I mean, it is, though? Did we read the same article? > incinerates money while doing nothing significant to prevent any of the crimes already under its jurisdiction. They should improve their actions to prevent the crimes under its jurisdiction, then. I'm not sure how this is relevant to the topic. Your extreme use of language is making me doubt your points, by the way - I am certain the ICC does not do anything I would approximate with incinerating money.
- RosanaAnaDana 5y ago
  I realize you are a espousing an extremely unpopular opinion, but something people need to begin to recognize is that laws are only as meaningful as they are enforced. Passing laws to make things 'legal' or 'illegal' are worthless outside of the scope of their enforcement.
  - version_five 5y ago
    > worthless outside of the scope of their enforcement. Not quite, it makes them so they can be selectively enforced against people or things that whoever is in charge doesn't like. This is what is most worrisome about vague laws or those related to social control. They lead to extreme unfairness where enemies can be legally punished and rulers get to do what they like (see drugs)
istorical 5y ago
Mass environmental destruction that persists beyond a single human generation should be seen as worse than mass human murder, a human life is ~100 years but many forms of environmental destruction tangibly damage the planet, its life, or its capacity to support life in ways that will affect multiple generations of humans.
FridayoLeary 5y ago
Find some Ents. They would support this law.
cryptoz 5y ago
I think this is a great idea. Long overdue. Better late than never, however.
version_five 5y ago
> The draft defines ecocide as "unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts." Sounds good, until you consider that people will want to use this as a wedge to declare driving cars, eating meat, heating your homes etc to be crimes against humanity. Having billions of people around has a substantial likelihood of wide spread, long term damage to the environment. We should collectively work to mitigate this, while preserving our quality or life and rights to happiness etc. This declaration doesn't help that, it just provides silly cover for a political agenda.
- carapace 5y ago
  Yeah, I'm an eco-fanatic and this seems unproductive to me. The first thought I had was "Do cars count?" as they seem to fit the description. FWIW, I think the most useful political-economic thing to do would be to attempt to measure and account for "ecosystem services" both on the degradation/cost and improvement/benefit sides of the balance sheet.
  - cryptoz 5y ago
    Are cars really driven by individuals who amount to "reckless disregard for the damage which would clearly be excessive in relation to the social and economic benefits anticipated"? I honestly don't even think it's close. Cars have such enormous benefits that I do not think it is "clear" as it would have to be to fit the definition. Something close would be Exxon lying about climate change, or VW cheating emissions tests to produce high-pollution cars at scale without punishment, etc. Not individual drivers. I think that's pretty clear in the definition. Edit: I'm an eco-fanatic and this seems productive to me.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      > Are cars really driven by individuals who amount to "reckless disregard for the damage which would clearly be excessive in relation to the social and economic benefits anticipated"? Depends on the timeframe you choose to measure the social and economic benefits and costs.
JamesBarney 5y ago
We don't really enforce rules against genocide, I'd be surprised if there was enough international will to enforce ecocide rules.
- cryptoz 5y ago
  That's a good argument in favor starting to enforce rules against genocide then, not a reason to stop progress elsewhere. I guess we may as well let the world burn at the hands of corporations, rather than bother to even say something about it. I'm really surprised at the defeatest attitude on HN about climate issues. This isn't the end. Time is still going, the clock is ticking.
  - version_five 5y ago
    > defeatest attitude on HN I see defeatest as accepting that we have to reduce our quality of life, or otherwise compromise in order to live sustainably. Many are, and more should be, aggressively pursuing technologies that let people do what they like while providing economically viable ways to make sure we don't cause long term harm.
  - quickthrowman 5y ago
    It’s not defeatism, it’s realism. Cooperation on climate change is a prisoner’s dilemma type situation. You seem to assume there is a supranational entity that can force nation-states to comply with rules, but there isn’t. A set of rules that no organization can enforce is worthless. I would like if we can all come together and cooperate on climate change, but it isn’t likely. Here is a comprehensive list of global problems that humans have cooperated on a global scale to solve:
    - version_five 5y ago
      > Here is a comprehensive list of global problems that humans have cooperated on a global scale to solve: I think that food scarcity could be on your list. If we were globally connected 100+ years ago, we might have collectively worried that there was no way to feed our growing population, advocated rules about reproduction, about what we could eat, about how many calories we burned... turns out we really did collaborate globally so that most of us are fed well enough for population to keep growing, and for global quality of life to increasr. And the solution was technological, not dogmatic. Telling nations and individuals globally that they have to make sacrifices for climate change, and that only the selected few will be able to tell them what they can do, is completely untenable as you say. Working together to come up with more efficient ways to live is not.
beaconstudios 5y ago
That's a great idea, maybe we should also make murder illegal so people won't do that either! Climate change is a wicked problem - we can't just legislate it away. We need to solve many many problems like reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, allowing/helping nature to rebound from centuries of industrialisation, and probably numerous other things, on a global scale without losing out to unscrupulous international competitors (both national and business). All without giving up too much of our present lifestyle (because people will resist such efforts). [edit]: Wicked problems, for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem
- frereubu 5y ago
  Your first sentence implies that we shouldn't have laws against murder because it happens anyway, which isn't a great argument.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    That wasn't my argument, but I say see how it would come across that way. My point is that you can't just legislate away complex misaligned incentives. You decrease murder by attacking the causes of murder. Murder has been illegal for a long time but murder hasn't gone away. We need ecocide to go away, and fast. A more effective approach is needed.
- teawrecks 5y ago
  We don't have a rampant murder problem, though. There are exactly two ways to address climate change: * wait for a natural feedback loop to kick in, i.e. wait for people to start dying. Necessity is the mother of invention, etc. * artificially stimulate the feedback loop early through legislation, taxes, and real penalties. One way or the other, the goal is to disincentivize unsustainable behavior such that the people who would be willing to resort said behavior no longer find it worth the risk/expected cost vs the estimated payoff. Yeah, people still murder, but they are a small exception. The goal is to get to that point for ecological damage too. Personally though, I think it should already be considered a Crime Against Humanity.
acituan 5y ago
Unfulfilled religiosity is liable to displace rationality with rote purity codes and magical thinking. No NPR, incantation of 165 words will not conjure our will to save the environment into existence. Understanding the root causes, the game theory behind multinational escalation of externalities and the logos behind this complex emergent phenomena will. Shame might be a pragmatic technology to bring individual people in line, but it can not steer planet scale collectives of people any more than it can steer our cars. In fact shame-politics stupefies people by asking them to relinquish their own rationality with the fear of painful non-conformity. It makes children out of adults. If there is a religious action to be taken, it is creating a reciprocal faith in rationality and virtuosity of the mature individuals, who can also trust that others will do the same.
- Dracophoenix 5y ago
  Inasmuch as I agree with your flawless assessment, how does one go about achieving this oxymoron of "rational faith?
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  the people who already have a faith in rationality do not, by and large, appear to be learning about complexity theory on their own. Mostly they are stuck in reductive modes of thought that have already been outdated for almost 100 years (in the sciences). Individualism isn't a viable route to collectivism because holding out for everybody to become rational actors is just as much magical thinking as thinking that laws will fix misaligned emergent incentives.
skissane 5y ago
I doubt this is going anywhere. The "Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide" is a private group with no official status. As the article does explain, one of the governments who have ratified the Rome Statute of the ICC has to formally propose it, and then two-thirds of those governments have to vote in favour of that proposal. Close to zero chance you would get two-thirds votes for this. Few governments are going to support turning the International Criminal Court into an international environmental regulator. Its existing expertise is in investigating crimes against humans (genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity); it has little expertise in environmental issues.
greggeter 5y ago
They're coming for the mono crops! Few things are as destructive as soil depletion.
dominicl 5y ago
I can't help but to see this two ways at the same time. 1st this is totally what we should think and do in terms of moral standard and 2nd this in international law is the perfect vehicle for all kind of end-of-humanity scenarios. Feed this into an AI and it will find the optimal solution to this problem (which might not include human existance anymore), or give this to a lunatic politician and he can use it for his war of aggression. The intention is good but what is the balancing power? How much human life is worth how much CO2/*? And who are the judges?
daxuak 5y ago
As long as the developed world continue to not appreciate labors in the rest of the countries and gatekeep IPs, evironmental resources will be exploited as, well, resources. Why would they do otherwise? Would anyone care about the future a century away when they can't live a life today? Are capital investments immune to the clause or they will assume responsibilities (probably not imo)? Criminalization is lazy and probably won't actually help since the definitions invovled are vague and prone to subjective opinions.
pyuser583 5y ago
I’m also confused … why does the UN play a role in this process - the ICC is not a UN body.
fractallyte 5y ago
It was Scientology's L Ron Hubbard who said: "You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion." Saving ecosystems? At this point, I think only a that kind of fanaticism will be effective long-term. The combination of technology and industry is simply too deadly; it needs to be deeply socially unacceptable to cause harm to ecosystems and 'the environment'. We have the knowledge: political science, propaganda (Nazism was an incredible achievement of myth-building), epidemiology (memes as 'idea viruses')... And the right time is during periods of instability and uncertainty - in this case, environmental rather than political!

74 points by djrogers 5y ago

MattGaiser 5y ago

These people would achieve more if the time were spent picking up plastic in a park.

cryptoz 5y ago
This is honestly an extremely rude and unnecessarily mean comment. I also strongly disagree with it. Large scale actions are needed. Small scale good-samaritan efforts do not move the needle on large issues that require international, inter-organizational efforts.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  This is not action at all. The ICC is an institution that incinerates money while doing nothing significant to prevent any of the crimes already under its jurisdiction.
  - cryptoz 5y ago
    > This is not action at all. I mean, it is, though? Did we read the same article? > incinerates money while doing nothing significant to prevent any of the crimes already under its jurisdiction. They should improve their actions to prevent the crimes under its jurisdiction, then. I'm not sure how this is relevant to the topic. Your extreme use of language is making me doubt your points, by the way - I am certain the ICC does not do anything I would approximate with incinerating money.
RosanaAnaDana 5y ago
I realize you are a espousing an extremely unpopular opinion, but something people need to begin to recognize is that laws are only as meaningful as they are enforced. Passing laws to make things 'legal' or 'illegal' are worthless outside of the scope of their enforcement.
- version_five 5y ago
  > worthless outside of the scope of their enforcement. Not quite, it makes them so they can be selectively enforced against people or things that whoever is in charge doesn't like. This is what is most worrisome about vague laws or those related to social control. They lead to extreme unfairness where enemies can be legally punished and rulers get to do what they like (see drugs)

istorical 5y ago

Mass environmental destruction that persists beyond a single human generation should be seen as worse than mass human murder, a human life is ~100 years but many forms of environmental destruction tangibly damage the planet, its life, or its capacity to support life in ways that will affect multiple generations of humans.

FridayoLeary 5y ago

Find some Ents. They would support this law.

cryptoz 5y ago

I think this is a great idea. Long overdue. Better late than never, however.

version_five 5y ago

> The draft defines ecocide as "unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts." Sounds good, until you consider that people will want to use this as a wedge to declare driving cars, eating meat, heating your homes etc to be crimes against humanity. Having billions of people around has a substantial likelihood of wide spread, long term damage to the environment. We should collectively work to mitigate this, while preserving our quality or life and rights to happiness etc. This declaration doesn't help that, it just provides silly cover for a political agenda.

carapace 5y ago
Yeah, I'm an eco-fanatic and this seems unproductive to me. The first thought I had was "Do cars count?" as they seem to fit the description. FWIW, I think the most useful political-economic thing to do would be to attempt to measure and account for "ecosystem services" both on the degradation/cost and improvement/benefit sides of the balance sheet.
- cryptoz 5y ago
  Are cars really driven by individuals who amount to "reckless disregard for the damage which would clearly be excessive in relation to the social and economic benefits anticipated"? I honestly don't even think it's close. Cars have such enormous benefits that I do not think it is "clear" as it would have to be to fit the definition. Something close would be Exxon lying about climate change, or VW cheating emissions tests to produce high-pollution cars at scale without punishment, etc. Not individual drivers. I think that's pretty clear in the definition. Edit: I'm an eco-fanatic and this seems productive to me.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    > Are cars really driven by individuals who amount to "reckless disregard for the damage which would clearly be excessive in relation to the social and economic benefits anticipated"? Depends on the timeframe you choose to measure the social and economic benefits and costs.

JamesBarney 5y ago

We don't really enforce rules against genocide, I'd be surprised if there was enough international will to enforce ecocide rules.

cryptoz 5y ago
That's a good argument in favor starting to enforce rules against genocide then, not a reason to stop progress elsewhere. I guess we may as well let the world burn at the hands of corporations, rather than bother to even say something about it. I'm really surprised at the defeatest attitude on HN about climate issues. This isn't the end. Time is still going, the clock is ticking.
- version_five 5y ago
  > defeatest attitude on HN I see defeatest as accepting that we have to reduce our quality of life, or otherwise compromise in order to live sustainably. Many are, and more should be, aggressively pursuing technologies that let people do what they like while providing economically viable ways to make sure we don't cause long term harm.
- quickthrowman 5y ago
  It’s not defeatism, it’s realism. Cooperation on climate change is a prisoner’s dilemma type situation. You seem to assume there is a supranational entity that can force nation-states to comply with rules, but there isn’t. A set of rules that no organization can enforce is worthless. I would like if we can all come together and cooperate on climate change, but it isn’t likely. Here is a comprehensive list of global problems that humans have cooperated on a global scale to solve:
  - version_five 5y ago
    > Here is a comprehensive list of global problems that humans have cooperated on a global scale to solve: I think that food scarcity could be on your list. If we were globally connected 100+ years ago, we might have collectively worried that there was no way to feed our growing population, advocated rules about reproduction, about what we could eat, about how many calories we burned... turns out we really did collaborate globally so that most of us are fed well enough for population to keep growing, and for global quality of life to increasr. And the solution was technological, not dogmatic. Telling nations and individuals globally that they have to make sacrifices for climate change, and that only the selected few will be able to tell them what they can do, is completely untenable as you say. Working together to come up with more efficient ways to live is not.

beaconstudios 5y ago

That's a great idea, maybe we should also make murder illegal so people won't do that either! Climate change is a wicked problem - we can't just legislate it away. We need to solve many many problems like reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, allowing/helping nature to rebound from centuries of industrialisation, and probably numerous other things, on a global scale without losing out to unscrupulous international competitors (both national and business). All without giving up too much of our present lifestyle (because people will resist such efforts). [edit]: Wicked problems, for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem

frereubu 5y ago
Your first sentence implies that we shouldn't have laws against murder because it happens anyway, which isn't a great argument.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  That wasn't my argument, but I say see how it would come across that way. My point is that you can't just legislate away complex misaligned incentives. You decrease murder by attacking the causes of murder. Murder has been illegal for a long time but murder hasn't gone away. We need ecocide to go away, and fast. A more effective approach is needed.
teawrecks 5y ago
We don't have a rampant murder problem, though. There are exactly two ways to address climate change: * wait for a natural feedback loop to kick in, i.e. wait for people to start dying. Necessity is the mother of invention, etc. * artificially stimulate the feedback loop early through legislation, taxes, and real penalties. One way or the other, the goal is to disincentivize unsustainable behavior such that the people who would be willing to resort said behavior no longer find it worth the risk/expected cost vs the estimated payoff. Yeah, people still murder, but they are a small exception. The goal is to get to that point for ecological damage too. Personally though, I think it should already be considered a Crime Against Humanity.

acituan 5y ago

Unfulfilled religiosity is liable to displace rationality with rote purity codes and magical thinking. No NPR, incantation of 165 words will not conjure our will to save the environment into existence. Understanding the root causes, the game theory behind multinational escalation of externalities and the logos behind this complex emergent phenomena will. Shame might be a pragmatic technology to bring individual people in line, but it can not steer planet scale collectives of people any more than it can steer our cars. In fact shame-politics stupefies people by asking them to relinquish their own rationality with the fear of painful non-conformity. It makes children out of adults. If there is a religious action to be taken, it is creating a reciprocal faith in rationality and virtuosity of the mature individuals, who can also trust that others will do the same.

Dracophoenix 5y ago
Inasmuch as I agree with your flawless assessment, how does one go about achieving this oxymoron of "rational faith?
beaconstudios 5y ago
the people who already have a faith in rationality do not, by and large, appear to be learning about complexity theory on their own. Mostly they are stuck in reductive modes of thought that have already been outdated for almost 100 years (in the sciences). Individualism isn't a viable route to collectivism because holding out for everybody to become rational actors is just as much magical thinking as thinking that laws will fix misaligned emergent incentives.

skissane 5y ago

I doubt this is going anywhere. The "Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide" is a private group with no official status. As the article does explain, one of the governments who have ratified the Rome Statute of the ICC has to formally propose it, and then two-thirds of those governments have to vote in favour of that proposal. Close to zero chance you would get two-thirds votes for this. Few governments are going to support turning the International Criminal Court into an international environmental regulator. Its existing expertise is in investigating crimes against humans (genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity); it has little expertise in environmental issues.

greggeter 5y ago

They're coming for the mono crops! Few things are as destructive as soil depletion.

dominicl 5y ago

I can't help but to see this two ways at the same time. 1st this is totally what we should think and do in terms of moral standard and 2nd this in international law is the perfect vehicle for all kind of end-of-humanity scenarios. Feed this into an AI and it will find the optimal solution to this problem (which might not include human existance anymore), or give this to a lunatic politician and he can use it for his war of aggression. The intention is good but what is the balancing power? How much human life is worth how much CO2/*? And who are the judges?

daxuak 5y ago

As long as the developed world continue to not appreciate labors in the rest of the countries and gatekeep IPs, evironmental resources will be exploited as, well, resources. Why would they do otherwise? Would anyone care about the future a century away when they can't live a life today? Are capital investments immune to the clause or they will assume responsibilities (probably not imo)? Criminalization is lazy and probably won't actually help since the definitions invovled are vague and prone to subjective opinions.

pyuser583 5y ago

I’m also confused … why does the UN play a role in this process - the ICC is not a UN body.

fractallyte 5y ago

It was Scientology's L Ron Hubbard who said: "You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion." Saving ecosystems? At this point, I think only a that kind of fanaticism will be effective long-term. The combination of technology and industry is simply too deadly; it needs to be deeply socially unacceptable to cause harm to ecosystems and 'the environment'. We have the knowledge: political science, propaganda (Nazism was an incredible achievement of myth-building), epidemiology (memes as 'idea viruses')... And the right time is during periods of instability and uncertainty - in this case, environmental rather than political!