These articles and the presentations from yesterday certainly demonstrate the limitations of litigation as it seems that change only seems to happen when it is economically advantageous, such as when one of the presentations described how major Ivy League schools only divested from tobacco companies once they were not as profitable anymore. I’m also thinking about fiduciary security, which describes another way personal interests can be prioritized over the environment through economic incentives. It is made more complicated, as Malm and Kurnekawa demonstrate, to exact justice when we don’t know who to blame, although it is debatable whether blame is the best tool for climate justice. I do agree with Malm that some countries are more to blame for the crisis we are under as they contribute more to carbon dioxide emissions. However, I think we need to shift the concept of blame to responsibility. Blame entails that we spend more time trying to deflect and attack others for their carbon footprint, while responsibility acknowledges that we all have a duty to the earth, but each of us carries different responsibilities proportional to what we produce. I think it can be empowering and still valuable for individual consumers to lessen their carbon footprint, but they shouldn’t feel as if the climate crisis can be shouldered alone. We need to move beyond the politics of blame, it only stymies the ability to move forward. Further, what struck me about Malm’s piece is how the use of coal wasn’t an inevitable outcome of industrialization. Many coal mines only became so because the British forced the local people to do so, but left to their own agency, many of the coal centers of the world would not have become so, which demonstrates something that we can easily forget: fossil fuels are not the only option. Perhaps this is too optimistic, but Malm shows through historical precedent that we truly create the world we want to live in. I think Kurnekawa’s work is useful for demonstrating the limitations of litigation as Pigou’s proposed solution of taxation ignores the greater complexity of the social context of pollution, made more poignant by the fact that he didn’t even live in the city. Kurnekawa’s description is compelling: how do you tax what society fundamentally depends on? How do you tax what creates the new generations? This discussion of the limitations of litigation almost appears to bring us back to square one in many ways. But this is not to say that climate litigation does nothing. Looking through the climate litigation database, I’m given hope that people around the world are fighting for justice. Even as companies use carbon credits to assuage their own guilt, they will be contested.