ABSTRACT
What kind of law is climate change law (CCL)? This chapter clarifies its nature by contrasting it with environmental law. The aim of CCL, properly understood, is to sustain economic growth and human well-being in a simulacrum of the present world through a comprehensive reordering of energy and forestry resource-use to arrest climatic change. CCL is a growth-oriented anthropocentric law directed at climatic control. It follows that principles of environmental law will not necessarily be shared by CCL. To see the true face of CCL, imagine Earth’s habitable zone around 2060 under a scenario of avoided runaway climate change. It is a planet-sized contraption powered by arrays of solar-radiation and wind-energy collectors extending to the horizon, blanketed with carbon sinks (ersatz forests), GMO-enhanced biofuel croplands, and installations that capture carbon dioxide or scrub the atmosphere of it and pump it into underground reservoirs. Everywhere there are nuclear-power plants and the shuttered relics of the fossil-fuel age. Most of today’s environmental law has been dismantled.
