Court rules Australian minister has no climate duty of care

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — An appeals court on Tuesday overturned a groundbreaking ruling that Australia’s environment minister had a duty to protect younger people against climate change.

Three Federal Court judges ruled for a variety of reasons that the court should not impose on Environment Minister Sussan Ley a duty of care.

Eight Australian teenagers took Ley to court in 2020 in a bid to prevent her from approving the expansion of a coal mine.

They lost their attempt to stop the Vickery mine’s expansion in New South Wales state, but their lawyers claimed victory from the judge’s ruling last year that Ley had a duty to prevent future climate harm.

In the ruling, Justice Mordy Bromberg noted that the expansion of the Whitehaven Coal-owned mine would lead to an additional 33 million metric tons (36 million U.S. tons) of coal being extracted over 25 years and 100 million metric tons (110 million U.S. tons) of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere.

Chief Justice James Allsop and Justices Jonathan Beach and Michael Wheelahan, in siding with Ley's appeal, ruled for a variety of reasons that the court should not impose on Ley a duty of care in considering the mine’s extension.

Ley argued that some of Bromberg’s findings were incorrect and “reached beyond the evidence,” the appeals judges wrote. “The Court is unanimously of the view that these complaints are unfounded."

Allsop said the plaintiffs’ evidence was not challenged by Ley. “The threat of climate change and global warming was and is not in dispute between the parties in this litigation,” Allsop wrote in the first line of his judgment.

One of the activists, Anjali Sharma, said floods described as a one-in-500-year event that have devastated communities in northern New South Wales in recent weeks were...