Oh, this is dreadful! It's the main reason I steered away from climate change as a career.
Environmental concerns embrace a number of romantic concepts regarding nature that sometimes approach religious intensity, as well as embracing scientific thought and insight. But science and religion belong in separate boxes and to have this cross-pollution between the two boxes, in a court of law no less, is just going to cause lots of trouble. But we've been asking for such trouble for a long time. Concepts such as James Lovelock's 'Gaia' place the two boxes right next to each other. Hermetic isolation might be better, but we're not going to get it:
A British judge rules belief in climate change deserves the same workplace protection as religion or philosophy.
Manna from heaven for the climate skeptic brigade: A British judge has ruled that a man can sue his employer for unlawfully termination based on his "green views" on the grounds that environmental beliefs deserve the same legal protection as religious or philosophical beliefs.
The case is complicated, but not for those who believe human-caused global warming is a hoax, and that environmentalists who urge action restricting greenhouse gas emissions are just trying to impose their anti-capitalist Marxist agenda on society. They are cheering: See, we told you global warming was a religion!
The backstory: Tim Nicholson, head of "sustainability" for the property firm Grainger PLC, says he was attempting to come up with a "carbon management" program for the company, but couldn't get Grainger to give him the necessary information to determine the firm's carbon footprint. He claims he was eventually fired because of his belief that action needed to be taken to stop global warming. Grainger contends that "that Mr Nicholson's redundancy was driven solely by the operational needs of the company during a period of extraordinary market turbulence."
In 2003, the UK enacted a law that prohibits discrimination against employees for "religious or philosophical beliefs." In his ruling, Justice Michael Burton declared 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".
Oddly, Grainger's lawyer had been arguing, reports the Daily Telegraph, "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.'" Which would seem to be saying that it would be OK to discriminate against an employee for views based on science, but not on religion or philosophy. Which is just plain weird.
Nicholson's own reaction to the verdict seems nuanced and reasonably clear-headed.I'm delighted by the judgment, not only for myself but also for other people who may feel they are discriminated against for their belief in man-made climate change. This is a huge issue and the moral and ethical values that I have in relation to the imperative to do something about it, but crucially underpinned by the overwhelming scientific consensus, mean that to have secured protection in this way is, I think, a landmark decision ... It's a philosophical belief based on my moral and ethical values underpinned by scientific evidence and that's the distinction [with it being a religious belief] I think. The moral and ethical values are similar to those that are promoted and adopted by many of the world's religions. But one of the key differences I think is that mine is not a faith-based or spiritual-based belief: it is grounded in the overwhelming scientific evidence and it's the combination of that scientific evidence with the moral and ethical imperative to do something about it that is distinct from a religion.
No comments:
Post a Comment