A British jurist is proposing the establishment of an international tribunal to enforce environmental agreements as well as a broader vision of environmental rights. The proposal is a classic example of the kind of overreaching that has come to define the global climate change movement.

Like most of international law, the proposed tribunal would rely on moral authority rather than physical coercion to be effective. The hope is that the new court would “shame” states into enacting and enforcing high standards of environmental protection. The problem with this vision, however, is that the global climate change and environmentalist movement has long since forfeited its credibility in differentiating real problems from exaggerated scenarios. Climate change scaremongers have recently been found to have fabricated scientific data to support their claims, for example. Moreover, they have attempted to suppress scientific dissent and counter-evidence, including even open threats to strip dissenters of their faculty or government positions. In light of these events, the proposal to establish a tribunal looks like just another ham-handed attempt at ideological thuggery rather than a serious attempt to improve international law.

But more important is the difficulty in using courts to alter policymaking. Even to the extent that climate change and other global environmental problems are real, the barriers to governments’ willingness to comply with environmentalists’ prescriptions are material more than moral. Environmentalist demands that Western countries accept draconian and even crippling economic costs as the price of “saving the planet” are simply unpersuasive, especially when other countries such as China and India are exempted from similar demands. Critics that fear environmentalist “totalitarianism” correctly note the environmentalists’ goals, but overlook the impossibility of them achieving them using such clumsy techniques as an international court. It is worth noting that even those countries that signed on to the now-defunct Kyoto framework utterly and brazenly failed to meet their targets for reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. The reasons for these failures were predictable — it was easy to sign up for moral posturing with Kyoto, but no one is wiling to follow through with economic suicide. During this time of global economic distress, willingness to embrace environmentalists’ demands is likely to only decrease. And a global economic tribunal will not have the resources to change this calculation in any significant way.

Unlike domestic laws which are often grounded in explicit code and precedent, international law is often grounded in custom — what has become the habit of states is reasonably expected to continue to be the foundation of future state behavior. And states have no custom of sacrificing their economic health just because some self-appointed group of international activists demands it. In order to succeed, the global environmentalist movement needs to stop looking for ways to bully its opponents into line and start finding ways to seriously address the concerns that many people have about their science and their policy ideas. Persuasion may succeed in building a global response to environmental challenges, but creating an international court to enforce a purist environmental vision would only be an exercise in futile arrogance.