Court rules climate change “duty of care” to future generations exists
I believe in strong environmental laws, but the idea that you have to protect people from "future harm" is absurd. How exactly do you do that? I understand that this is in Australia so their laws may be different, but the idea that you can sue someone because of possible future damage is legislating predicting the future.<p>In SF, when the DA refuses to prosecute a criminal and that criminal goes on to kill another person, did that DA fail to protect that victim from future harm? How far does this protection from the future go on?<p>The idea also seems to go in the face of abortion, because a fetus will grow into a human. So does that mean that you need to protect the fetus from harm now because it will be a person in the future?<p>There are just too many absurd situations that this result opens up, I agree that we need strong environmental laws but this is going too far into prophecy and fortune telling and opens up a lot of unintended consequences of what it means to "protect the future".