The climate reparations racket — the Third World’s push to extort money from developed nations over changes in the weather — is getting a legal shot in the arm from the United Nations’s top court. The International Court of Justice at the Hague contends in a ruling today that countries breach international law by failing to fend off climate change and that countries harmed by the vagaries of the weather could have a right to reparations.

For now this ruling, as an “Advisory Opinion,” is, in effect, some 500 pages of hot air. It has no legal bearing, though it certainly vindicates the wisdom of President Trump taking America out of the UN’s climate convention, better known as the Paris Agreement. Yet the ruling could lay the groundwork for a new wave of nuisance litigation on the climate front. The court, too, purports to discern as a human right a “clean, healthy and sustainable environment.” 

That finding “paves the way for other legal actions,” the Associated Press reports, potentially enabling countries to come back to the ICJ “to hold each other to account” via lawsuits, or “legal instruments like investment agreements.” The court’s ruling is “a potential turning point in international climate law,” the Guardian reports. It’s more accurate to see it as the trigger for a deluge of costly litigation against wealthy nations.

America has had the wisdom to keep itself largely unfettered by the ICJ’s diktats, even if Uncle Sam has been “an active participant in cases before the Court,” George Washington University’s Sean Murphy reports. America “has never been willing to submit itself to the plenary authority of the Court,” he adds, and in 1986 “withdrew from the Court’s compulsory jurisdiction.” That could limit the damage from the ICJ’s invention of a new human right.

That said, Democrats like Senator Kerry and President Biden have been eager to entangle America in the coils of the climate racket. In 2022, the Biden White House warmed to a UN scheme to “compensate poor, developing countries for climate damage,” the Times reported. That set up taxpayers to foot the bill for “loss and damage” caused by weather, helping poor nations “cope with ongoing disasters such as storms, floods and drought.”

Senator Barrasso denounced the idea as “a U.N. sponsored green slush fund.” Even so, the push for reparations led in 2024 to the formation, under the aegis of the World Bank, of the Loss and Damage Fund for Developing Countries. The bill could prove to be steep. The UN reckons that “developing nations will require an annual financial commitment ranging from $215 billion to $387 billion” to address the world’s weather woes. 

Today’s ruling by the ICJ is likely only to whet the appetite of Third World lands for climate reparations dollars. That amounts to what these columns have called global welfare. Such handouts are not the path to prosperity for poor nations. What would help is to foster the foundations of growth, we wrote — namely, “the rule of law, private property, sound money, and respect for human rights,” none of which cost Yank taxpayers a dime.

Such notions might sound antiquated at the ICJ, whose president stokes panic over the “urgent and existential threat posed by climate change.” While American taxpayers aren’t subject to this alarmism from the Hague, leftist activists are using the courts to push the green agenda here, too. California, say, is suing oil companies for billions of dollars over pollution and climate damage. Young Montanans won a court victory in a climate case that threatens energy production.

This turn to unelected judges reflects the unpopularity of the eco-militants aiming to turn back the clock on progress. Their calls to, say, curb growth, eliminate gas stoves, replace gas cars with electric vehicles, and turn the power grid over to wind farms all lack for support among the citizenry who, in democracies, have the ultimate say over policy. So climate activists, to advance their job-killing agenda, instead have to rely on courts like the ICJ.