UK Judge: Man-made climate change is a religion

[DarrinS]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/6494213/Climate-change-belief-given-same-legal-status-as-religion.html





In a landmark ruling, Mr Justice Michael Burton said that "a belief in man-made climate change ... is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations".

The ruling could open the door for employees to sue their companies for failing to account for their green lifestyles, such as providing recycling facilities or offering low-carbon travel.

The decision regards Tim Nicholson, former head of sustainability at property firm Grainger plc, who claims he was made redundant in July 2008 due to his "philosophical belief about climate change and the environment".

In March, employment judge David Heath gave Mr Nicholson permission to take the firm to tribunal over his treatment.

But Grainger challenged the ruling on the grounds that green views were political and based on science, as opposed to religious or philosophical in nature.

John Bowers QC, representing Grainger, had argued that adherence to climate change theory was "a scientific view rather than a philosophical one", because "philosophy deals with matters that are not capable of scientific proof."

That argument has now been dismissed by Mr Justice Burton, who last year ruled that the environmental documentary An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore was political and partisan.

The decision allows the tribunal to go ahead, but more importantly sets a precedent for how environmental beliefs are regarded in English law.

Mr Nicholson, 42, from Oxford, told a previous hearing that his views were so strong that he refused to travel by air and had renovated his house to be environmentally-friendly.

But his beliefs led to frequent clashes with Grainger's other managers, while he said that Rupert Dickinson, the firm's chief executive, treated his concerns with "contempt".

Once Mr Dickinson flew a member of staff to Ireland to deliver his Blackberry mobile phone after leaving it in London, Mr Nicholson claimed.

Mr Nicholson hailed the Employment Appeals Tribunal ruling as "a victory for common sense" but stressed climate change was "not a new religion".

He said: "I believe man-made climate change is the most important issue of our time and nothing should stand in the way of diverting this catastrophe.

"This philosophical belief that is based on scientific evidence has now been given the same protection in law as faith-based religious belief.

"Belief in man-made climate change is not a new religion, it is a philosophical belief that reflects my moral and ethical values and is underlined by the overwhelming scientific evidence."

His lawyer Shah Qureshi, head of employment law at Bindmans LLP, argued that if the ruling had gone against them, "the end result would be that the more evidence there is to support your views, the less likely it would be for you to enjoy protection against discrimination".

Grainger now plans to contest Mr Nicholson's claim of unfair dismissal at tribunal.

Dave Butler, its corporate affairs director, said: "This decision merely confirms that views on the importance of environmental protection are capable of amounting to a philosophical belief.

"We are looking forward to addressing the issues at tribunal level and demonstrating that there was no causal link between Mr Nicholson's beliefs and his redundancy."

The grounds for Mr Nicholson's case stem from changes to employment law made by Baroness Scotland, the Attorney General, in the Employment Equality (Religion and Belief) Regulations 2003.

The regulations effectively broaden the protection to cover not just religious beliefs or those "similar" to religious beliefs, but philosophical beliefs as well.

[Winehole23]

This put me in mind of Charles Galton Darwin's rumination on the significance of "creeds".



"In future history the constancy of human nature makes it certain that man will continue to be dominated by enthusiasm for creeds of one kind or another; he will persecute and be persecuted again and again for the sake of ideas, some of which to later ages will seem of no importance, and even unintelligible. But there is one much more valuable aspect of creeds that must be noticed. They serve to give a continuity to policy far greater than can usually be attained by intellectual conviction. There are many cases in history of enlightened statesmen who have devoted their lives to carrying through some measure for the general good. They may have succeeded, only to find that the next generation neglects all they have done, so that it becomes undone again in favour of some other quite different way of benefiting humanity. The intellectual adoption of a policy thus often hardly survives for more than a single generation, and this is too short a period for such a policy to overcome the tremendous effects of pure chance. But if the policy can arouse enough enthusiasm to be incorporated in a creed, then there is at least a prospect that it will continue for something like ten generations, and that is long enough to give a fair probability that it will prevail over the operations of pure chance. Thus a creed may have the rudiment of the quality, possessed by the genes of mankind, of being able to produce a permanent effect on humanity.

If the history of the future is not regarded as the automatic unfolding of a sequence of uncontrollable events - and few, of us would accept this inevitability - then anyone who has decided what measures are desirable for the permanent [emphasis in original] betterment of his fellows will naturally have to consider what is the best method of carrying his policy through. There are three levels at which he might work. The first and weakest is by direct conscious political action; his policy is likely to die with him and so to be ineffective. The second is by the creation of a creed, since this has the prospect of lasting for quite a number of generations, so that there is some prospect of really changing the world a little with it. The third would be by directly changing man's nature, working through the laws of biological heredity, and if this could be done for long enough it would be really effective. But even if we knew all about man's genes, which we certainly do not, a policy of this kind would be almost impossible to enforce even for a short time, and, since it would take many generations to carry it through, it would almost certainly be dropped long before any perceptive effects were achieved. That is why creeds are so tremendously important for the future; a creed gives the best practical hope that a policy will endure well beyond the life of its author, and so it gives the best practical hope that man can have for really controlling his future fate." http://informationliberation.com/?id=25020

[Höfner]

Just like Star Wars, Megan Fox and the Beatles have bonafide religious followings.

[Winehole23]

Yes, Darrin, I know he was president of the Eugenics Society. Please try to keep to the point. There's something in there for you too, if you can possibly get past ad hominems.