Monday
Nov252013
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Pat's progress
Nov 25, 2013 Climate: Parliament Energy: wind 
Pat Swords writes with news of his attempt to have the Irish government's renewables plans deemed illegal under the terms of the Aarhus Convention.
Readers will probably remember that the Compliance Committee overseeing the convention has ruled that Irish government is out of line. This decision will now go to a Meeting of the Parties to the convention:
The Meeting of the Parties (MoP) is when the 45 or so of the countries which have ratified the Convention come to a Treaty conference, which is held every three years. Currently plans are in place for the coming one in June 2014, such that each country has to prepare an implementation report. From a legal perspective, if/when the MoP endorses the Compliance Committee's findings it is then a recognised treaty violation. In EU law, the breach of a treaty which has been ratified by the EU is automatically recognised as a breach of EU law. It is the same as a ruling of non-compliance in the European Court of Justice.
Meanwhile, the court action against the Irish government has taken a surprising turn:
The Irish State's Statement of Defence is now in finally and it is denying everything, including that it did not comply with Article 7 of the Convention, even though the Compliance Committee ruled that it blatantly did.
This is truly bizarre and smacks rather of desperation. It will be interesting to see what happens if and when the MoP endorses the decision of the Compliance Committee.
Reader Comments (10)
...The Irish State's Statement of Defence is now in finally and it is denying everything...
Best policy. Play for time. Try to declare the other side mentally incompetent to plead, or claim that national security is involved. Discuss the fundamental nature of truth. 'Yes Minister' is full of these techniques...
You can't trust these deniers of everything. The Irish Government must be in the pay of big wind.
Have you ever tried to pull a pig's nose out of a trough. Very hard.
Swords is a fe*king hero.
I read that Wikipedia describes the Aarhus Convention as focusing "on interactions between the public and public authorities" in environmental matters.
"The public."
Out of interest, when the Meeting of Parties comes round every three years, do all the environmental NGOs invite themselves to that conference too, like Stalin and the Wehrmacht got invited into Poland?
Blackadder (whispering): 'Deny everything, Baldrick'.
Lieutenant George: 'You are Private Baldrick?'
Baldrick (confidently): 'NO ...'
To find out if anything on Wikipedia has any validity you have to check the cited source, if any, to make sure it says what the Wikipedia editor says it does and that the source itself is credible. Better then to do the original search with "-Wikipedia" appended to your search term which filters out the rubbish.
The last, but highly dangerous, reflexive spasm of a dying monster...
OF COURSE the Irish government will deny everything in connection with this Convention, because, like the Westminster government, they have wholeheartedly embraced the 'green is good; renewables are the way to go' mantra - and therefore to have to stop dead in their tracks amounts to a massive dose of egg on face...
Stick it to 'em, Swords..!
(Did you see what I did there..?)
NW,
Thanks for the advice, but I already do take Wikipedia with a huge grain of salt. Like everything else, it is never going to be 100% correct or unbiased. In particular, I never trust anything William Connelly may have had his grubby hands on, i.e. anything to do with the immediate science related to global warming, especially if climate crops up in the text.
However, regarding the stated intentions of the Aarhus convention, the words
crop up in the text from the EU itself here
When a site, organization or person is trying to deceive you, the detail of the important lies comes after the stated intention. The stated intention is merely just that, a stated intention.
"...smacks of desperation..."
As does this: http://scotlandagainstspin.org/2013/10/snp-ministers-ignore-court-ruling-large-wind-farms/
These people won't give up without a fight: there's too much £££ at stake for them and their chums,