QUITE often when someone has broken the law and they are surprised at their sentence, there is often a comment from the judge to the effect that "They should have thought of that when they committed the crime".
Sometimes the offender hasn't the nous to follow through to the consequences
of their actions, which were possibly done on a whim.
What about the crimes by the major contributors to climate change, the fossil fuel industries who have been shown to spend about $1 billion a year on a climate change counter movement succeeding in "institutionalising delay" (Robert Brulle, sociologist at Drexel University quoted in the Listener)? This is not the action of an ignorant offender but those of multinationals with a deliberate outcome in mind - business as usual and damn the consequences.
But those consequences are dire. The continued use of fossil fuels at the current rate creates a climate that will bring more weather like the droughts in Canterbury and California, and notably hurricane Patricia, which was graded a category 5 hurricane, with winds higher than 252km/h and is about 43km/h stronger than a category 4, but Patricia was 325km/h, 73km/h stronger.
In the last few months many leaders, notably the Pope, have voiced their concern about climate change. President Obama commented that "We are the first generation to feel the effect of climate change and the last generation who can do something about it... I believe there is such a thing as being too late."
