Andrea Macdonald, founder of ideaXme interviews James Thornton, CEO of ClientEarth to talk of how legal action could save the planet.
ClientEarth
ClientEarth is a non-profit international environmental law firm which employs over 200 people who work in more than 60 countries. The organisation uses the law to bring about end-to-end systemic change: informing, implementing and enforcing the law, drafting and advising decision-makers on policy, building legal expertise, and ensuring citizens’ access to the laws that defend them. 
They take governments and corporations to court – and win. Moreover, force polluting industries to shut down.
Law Protects the Planet
ClientEarth protects all living things, forests, oceans, air and vulnerable species. They empower people and NGOs with the legal rights to bring forward environmental battles of their own. Using the law means that they create real, long-lasting and embedded change.
They work to secure a lasting civilisation, an ecological civilisation (as termed by the Chinese government) in which people and nature thrive together.
ClientEarth lawyers work in partnership across borders, systems and sectors, ingeniously using the law to protect life on Earth.
Their work now is particularly important given that we are now in a race against time to clean up the planet. Their objective now is to ensure that governments and companies who have said that they are committed to change and to deliver a green recovery post Covid-19 actually do so.
In this interview James talks of:
His journey to founding ClientEarth.
The innovative methods he and his colleagues use to bring both governments and companies to justice.
His global work with governments and the legal profession in over 60 countries – creating law, training prosecutors and judges.
The key areas that must be addressed to fight climate change, pollution and loss of biodiversity and save our planet.
The people who have helped him create ClientEarth and move his human story forward, including his rich relationship with his husband Martin Goodman with whom he co-authored the book: Client Earth.
He informs us of David Gilmour’s generosity in donating £21 million to ClientEarth.
Conversation between James Thornton and Andrea Macdonald
Andrea Macdonald, Founder, ideaXme: [00:09:37] Welcome, everybody to another episode of the ideaXme show. I’m Andrea Macdonald, the founder of ideaXme.
Andrea Macdonald, Founder, ideaXme: [00:09:45] ideaXme is a global network, a podcast, creator series and mentor program. Today, we’re going to look at the green recovery and the obstacles to building back better. Can law save the planet?
Andrea Macdonald, Founder, ideaXme: [00:10:05] We’re here with the founder of ClientEarth, maybe he can answer this question. In your words, who are you?
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:10:16] Well, it’s great to start any meeting with a *Kōan and somebody who’s been studying Zen for a long time. Who am I is the big Kōan, so you’re asking a Kōan. So, where I am in the world at the moment is that I’ve been practicing law for many years now, decades, to try and save the planet. That’s really what defines my being in the world, saving the planet. (*Kōan (pronounced KO-ahns) are cryptic and paradoxical questions asked by Zen teachers).
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:10:44] When I was a very young person, I thought it was going to be as a scientist and then I realised that I would study everything and watch it go down. My father happened to be a law professor and there really was no environmental law to speak of when I was coming out of university. So, I went to law school anyway because I thought it was a very strong set of tools. I thought if I became a lawyer, I’ll figure out what to do and indeed, in subsequent years, I did figure out what to do. So, I’ve been using that law for the planet for a very long time. It’s for the planet and for people. The lawyers tend to get kind of abstract, but the reason I’m doing it is to take care of human beings and all living things.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:11:34] As a Buddhist, you take a vow to save all sentient beings and being a literal minded fellow, I see being an environmental lawyer as doing exactly that. So, you and everyone who is listening and the Earth itself and all the things living on her are all my clients. That’s why we call it ClientEarth. So, saving all sentient beings for me becomes the daily job of trying to look at the big systems of the world and the small systems and save civilisation, save sentient beings.
Andrea Macdonald, Founder, ideaXme: [00:12:11] You have a charity, a law firm, an international law firm of 200 people. As part of the charity, the objective is to enforce law, help adapt existing laws, train prosecutors and train environmental judges.
The Green Recovery and Building Back Better
Andrea Macdonald, Founder, ideaXme: [00:12:41] Could you talk to us about the entity and why it is such a powerful tool, especially at the moment, to address building back better?
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:12:55] Sure. So, we call it ClientEarth, as I was just saying, because really the concept is the Earth and everyone who lives on her really are the clients. So, you’re all the clients and that’s very different from how most lawyers act. Most lawyers will sit in an office and help you with the problems that you go and present, whether it’s a big lawsuit or buying a house or whatever it may be. If you’re IBM, you want one thing and if you’re buying a house, you want another thing, but you’re always asking for a certain type of help.
The Earth as Client
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:13:25] Now, the Earth can’t ask you directly for this sort of help, and people often also don’t know what they need. So, we start with the science. The idea is how will you interview your client if you’re taking the Earth as your client? And the answer is through science. So, you talk to scientists, study science and see what the ecosystems and people’s health need and then you shape policy and then you go to legislatures, say, in Brussels or in London or many places, Beijing, Warsaw and you help write laws. So, you actually work with lawmakers, work with governments to try and make sure the laws capture what you’ve learned the people and the world ecosystems need so that you have a good law which people agree on and therefore becomes the norm.
China and ClientEarth
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:14:23] So that law is then meant to capture what the culture can agree that it needs to do and then when people, say governments, say companies, don’t follow it, then you can enforce the law. Then you go to court and hold governments to account, hold companies to account. That’s the part that gets the most attention because it’s an awful lot of fun. You’re in a life-or-death struggle and we generally win. But China has taken us and this will get us into the build back better discussion, too.
Writing New Law
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:15:01] I was invited 6 years ago now into China to help the Supreme Court work on a law to allow Chinese NGOs to sue polluting companies. This is an amazing thing. This is in China. So, I helped them write that law and that’s a longer story if you want to get into it, but that developed the relationship. Then I went back a few months after working on this law, and I had met in Beijing with the senior members of the Supreme Court and the Congress and then back in London, we went back and forth, exchanging ideas and exchanging documents.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:15:47] I went back 3 or 4 months later and the senior Supreme Court judge sitting in the Supreme Court building said to me: James, we liked what you were proposing for this law so much that we took all of your ideas and wrote them directly into the Chinese law.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:16:02] That was amazing for me, truly amazing. This wasn’t a conversation you have with the Supreme Court in London or Washington or Paris. This was Beijing. Then the question was: What would you like to do now for the environment in China? I thought: Well, you have just done another amazing thing, 3000 environment court judges, unlike anything else in the world. If they really want to get the country creating law and following environmental law to a high standard, the 3000 judges will need training and the senior Supreme Court judge said: you couldn’t be more right, will you train them?
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:16:46] I honestly was astonished, but you have to be entrepreneurial. So, I said, of course: Where shall I start? He said: With us, and I said: Really, with the Supreme Court? And he said: Yes. I said: Certainly, but what do you want to know? He said: Well, you’re one of the global experts on climate change litigation, so we want you to come back and give us a seminar on the world’s best cases that are designed to stop climate change. I said: Well, gladly but, again, why? I was trying to find out what the thought behind that question was. He said: Well, we want to learn about these because we want to decide on some of the best climate change cases in the world to help stop climate change. I was just blown away. This was the Chinese Supreme Court and once again, you don’t hear this in Washington from the Supreme Court or London or Paris. That started this very deep relationship with the Supreme Court, where we’ve been training judges and we’ve trained over 1000 judges now.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:17:48] We bring in experts from all over the world. Often from other supreme courts around the world and then advocates and a variety of experts and we discuss: How questions are posed, how decisions are made, and how do you use the courts to stop climate change and other environmental problems.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:18:11] Then after a year of that, the prosecutors came to us and they said: In that law you helped write, we got the ability, as you know, to sue the government, to stop environmental pollution or whatever it may be, but we’ve never sued the government before. As you sue governments all the time, would you train us to sue the government? Again, that was an amazing question. This is the Chinese federal prosecutors asking us to train them to sue the Chinese government. So, we went back and I brought back prosecutors from around the world with me and we started these sessions and now there’s hundreds of prosecutors.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:18:49] Since we’ve been doing that, they brought well over 100,000 cases and they’re resolving or settling or winning all of them, pretty much. So, it’s very dramatic and those experiences just take you more deeply into a culture that is rapidly changing with purpose. One of those purposes is to design an ecological civilisation. That’s their term and they have a very long-term view. What they say is we’ve been here for over 2000 years and we want to be here for more than 2000 years from now or for our descendants to be and we want them to be healthy people with healthy soil and healthy air and healthy water and not an overheated climate. So, we need to act now. We need to act immediately and very decisively, and that’s very moving. Quite unlike what you’ve heard in recent years from Washington, well maybe that’s changing this week, we’ll see.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:19:56] Then that got us into working with the Chinese on the green recovery.
Andrea Macdonald, Founder, ideaXme: [00:20:05] That’s a really interesting case history for many different reasons. You helped create a new law. You trained the prosecutors; you trained the judges. You had an impact on the Constitution.
Andrea Macdonald, Founder, ideaXme: [00:20:28] Could you also talk about the work that you have done, using two examples, in the area of coal powered power plants?
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:20:41] Yes.
Coal Power Stations
Andrea Macdonald, Founder, ideaXme: [00:20:42] The one in Poland Bełchatów, where you used the existing Polish law as leverage and the one in Germany, Datteln 4, based in Dortmund, where the courts had won in favour of the people, the government had made their pledges, but there was no action. So, you stepped in to enforce the law. Could you talk about those two case histories, please?
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:21:23] Yes, sure. So, the German one is underway. So, this is what you have sometimes, you have a law which is quite clear, you have promises. This was, in many ways the norm within EU countries. So, you would have quite good ideas, quite good agreement on what the law should be and then the politicians would stand up and take credit for it and feel very good and people would be reassured. Oh, well, they’re saying great things and they would assume that they would happen, and they often don’t. So, air quality is one of those examples in the EU as well.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:22:08] But here you have the coal companies who are mining for coal, even though Germany has promised a coal phase out and promised to go off coal, coal mining is still going on. So, they are opening new mines with the idea that we need to have new mines available 10 years from now when our current mines are depleted. But of course, that’s not what you should be doing. You should be, as a government, holding these companies to a tight timeline for a shutdown. So, you don’t want to be opening new mines today, so that they can be ready 10 years from now. It’s crazy.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:22:52] So we’re working with a bunch of citizens whose towns are being eaten away. I feel certain that we’ll be able to stop this nonsense. That’s a crazy one and you can see people’s towns being eaten away around them.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:23:05] In Poland, it’s a really interesting case and you did well with Bełchatów. I’m not capable of pronouncing Polish myself, but it’s an interesting thing. I mentioned Beijing and we now have a 15-person office in Beijing. In Warsaw, I think we now have 25 people and in Berlin, it’s only been there for a couple of years, but there’s already 10 people. So, there are very talented groups of people in these places where work needs to happen. Then the work is originated by the people in those cultures, which is ideal. We work with citizen groups, always, in every country we work in. We work in many countries, probably around 60 now that we don’t have offices in. So, then you work with citizen groups who share your interest and who want to achieve something, say stop a coal fired power station in Romania or Greece or soon all-over Southeast Asia for us.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:24:09] But they don’t have a law firm within their NGO. This thing is an unusual entity that we’ve got. So, you work with them and you bring in intellectual property, you bring in the financing from global donors to make something happen in the country. Then by this partnership that you build, you’re increasing the capacity of people there.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:24:34] Now, in Poland, we started an office as soon as we could because it was the place where the bulk of the new coal fired power stations were intended to be built in Europe 12 years ago when we opened the Polish office. We stopped every single one of them from being built, which was quite tough. Then Bełchatów is a great example of what’s next. So, after you prevent the new ones, you want to start closing down the existing ones, because as many of the people sharing the meeting with us today will know, it’s public enemy number one, coal, when it comes to climate change. So, it’s an addiction we have to get over quickly. But Bełchatów is very important because it’s the biggest one in Europe. It’s the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in Europe. It’s gargantuan. It’s one of the largest plants in the world.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:25:29] We went to court and said that in this case, there were duties in Polish law that no one had used in this way before, so that it was the obligation of the owners of the company to take care of public interest and public health. This plant, even though legal, emitting all of this schmutz (pollution), was not in the public interest and was not protecting the public health, both with respect to pollution like zinc and fine particulates and mercury, but then also greenhouse gases. Wonderfully, the judge interpreted the law to agree with us and she said: You, the owner of this largest emitter in Europe, have a duty to take care of the public interest. You have 90 days to sit down with ClientEarth and work out an agreement to close down the facility.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:26:31] Now, we’ll see if we can reach the agreement. If not, we’ll be back in court. Once she said that to them, if they were smart, they would want to reach an agreement because you don’t want to go back in front of a judge who’s ordered you to reach a settlement to close down your facility and say: I’m too stiff necked to have reached a settlement.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:26:54] Screw you, judge, is really what that would mean and she won’t want to hear that. So, this was a kind of pivot for us, certainly within Europe for a judge to say that the normal law of the country has this duty of care by companies for the wide interest of the public. The world is different. We know more and therefore reach an agreement to close down.
Andrea Macdonald, Founder, ideaXme: [00:27:25] Can you drill down a little bit more on why it is so important to work in the legal business governmental level to reach the scale of change in order to impact these targets.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:27:43] Yes, sure. So, what we’re looking for really is a structural change within the economy and within the economy globally. So, the issue really is saving civilisation or not. If we keep along the trajectory we’ve been going on, a few generations from now the civilisation as we know it will have fallen apart. That’s really quite clear now. So, we need quite radical and quick action in order to have a good future for people.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:28:16] How do you achieve that? There are a couple of components. One is knowing it, that’s the science, what needs to be done. Another is, for people to know and to care and therefore campaigning and getting to politicians is very important. In Europe, the environmental groups have developed very skilful campaigning. Then we saw the kids go on strike which very skilful campaigning.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:28:49] That is very important, but that only gets you so far because campaigns and strikes end and it’s very easy for people to get blasé and go back to normal because you have this great inertia and the incumbent industries are very strong. So, the power has been generated by fossil fuels, mainly, for a very long time and those companies are enormously powerful, at the heart of the economy and deeply connected with governments. So, they’re not going to move aside and also, they’re not the world’s smartest companies. They’re not Apple and Google. They’re not going to change willingly. Exxon is adamant that it won’t change at all. That will be forced upon it. But putting these coal burning utilities similarly aren’t the most agile, mentally, spiritually as the character of a corporation. They’re not very agile. So, you have to move them and what are you going to do? The governments are not going to move them because they’re very intertwined generally.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:30:06] Then you have, staying on energy, you have new companies that can actually offer the solution. One of the big things that’s very different for me than 20 years ago was that 20 years ago we would argue for clean energy, but people would say it’s too expensive, it’s unrealistic, they’d say that’s a nice dream you’re having, but it’s a dream. Now, you can say, well, actually, renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuel. Many people would assume that would just drive the market quickly towards the cheaper option, but not because of these incumbent industries that are controlling how things get done, who have lots of subsidies, who are deeply entwined with government and those new companies that can deliver a result aren’t set up to challenge these incumbent industries. That’s not what they do. They want to build renewable energy and give you clean energy. It’s a beautiful thing, but it’s a different thing.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:31:06] So then who is going to move these dinosaurs out of the road? That’s where the law comes in. So this is a long answer to your question but why do you need law? You can campaign against the dinosaurs, great thing, but the dinosaurs don’t care. So, you have to get there with a sword and whack the dinosaur, move it a side and then the new companies and the new industry can come in.
Enforcing the Law to Ensure a Green Recovery
Andrea Macdonald, Founder, ideaXme: [00:31:30] Many pledges have been made, especially recently, but the facts are recently the Bank of England have lent very heavily to the oil and gas industry, the aviation industry and the automobile industry. In China, also recently, local government have started to build many coal fired power stations.
Andrea Macdonald, Founder, ideaXme: [00:32:07] There are many cases. I think a huge plant in Korea, if I remember correctly, has recently been financed. So, in the context of pledges and the reality on the ground sometimes, people like you and your organisation are so critical because amongst all of this rhetoric, pledges and joining the gang to vow to deliver green economies and green recovery, you have to make people do this. 
Andrea Macdonald, Founder, ideaXme: [00:32:40] How are you going to do it to the scale that it will be necessary?
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:32:43] So your point is an extremely good one on the Bank of England financing the wrong things and it’s not just the Bank of England either.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:32:54] The EU has a beautiful dream of a green recovery and its whole green agenda. Once again, it’s a question of, does it actually mean anything? Does it actually work its way down or is it just a lovely headline?
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:33:13] One example of that, staying with the banks is that Germany and France got the EU to agree to a $750 billion injection into the economy post Covid-19. So, this is the post Covid-19 recovery package, $750 billion is a great deal of money. They will do that by buying bonds. There is a study by the Grantham Institute showing that the normal menu of when the European Central Bank and the other central banks buy bonds, the normal menu has them buying bonds which are more than 60% of them are fossil fuel related. So, it’s very much supporting the economy by supporting fossil fuel related interests, which was always the way.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:34:04] 50 years ago, that would have seemed maybe like a good idea. It’s a dreadful idea now. So how can you use law? Having done that analysis, we looked at what we think of the obligations of the European Central Bank and the other central banks. We think because the EU and all the countries signed the Paris Agreement, which said that we will align with the Paris principles, reduce emissions, and the EU defined that as being carbon neutral by 2050. So, if that’s what you’ve committed to then all of the institutions of government must work towards that goal, is what we argue. The Treaty of Europe also says that all institutions of government need to bring environmental decision making into their activities as a central plank, often ignored.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:35:01] When you put those together, you can make an argument very nicely that it’s a bad idea to have 60% of the bonds of the $750 billion be fossil fuel related. So, we said, if you go ahead and do it that way, the normal way, you will actually be violating European law and that’s, I think, an interesting argument. We can say the standard you have to apply is quite clear, and that’s no fossil fuel related bonds to bring up the economy. There are plenty of other bonds to buy and that will be a green recovery, if you go the right way, otherwise it’s a brown recovery and it’s kind of a disaster.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:35:43] So that’s a big legal argument we’ve just made last week. We sent a letter to the Central Bank of Belgium copied to the European Central Bank. If they understand their duties and act in the right way, that will be a great thing. Otherwise, we’ll have to have a serious conversation.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:36:03] Now in China, you’re right, there has been coal being built. Regarding Xi Jinping, one of the big things that happened last year is that he said we’re also going to be carbon neutral. Like the UN and like I hope America does this week (Biden has moved to reinstate the US to the Paris climate agreement just hours after being sworn in as president), he said before 2060, so that would align well with European objectives. Japan came a week later and South Korea around the same time. So, you have these statements, but then again, what does it actually mean? So, what we’re arguing and we have been for some years now, a few years, is that what China should do with its Belt and Road Initiative, which is the world’s biggest development project, linking 100 countries to China, what they should do there is to see that as a green recovery plan. If you’re spending a couple of trillion dollars to build infrastructure linking 100 countries, some of them quite poor, some of them less so, but still 100 countries to China. If you did that with green infrastructure, it’s the best way you can possibly move among so many countries to meet Paris targets.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:37:24] So if you build a coal fired power stations in Indonesia, Malaysia, India and Kenya and all of that under the Belt and Road Initiative, and there are some something like 1000 new coal plants planned, then forget meeting the Paris agreement targets. Change that and build renewable energy and you’ve brought up the economies of all of these countries and moved far towards meeting the Paris Agreement targets.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:37:55] The good news is that not only have we been arguing for this, but many people and the Ministry of Environment in China has now taken this on as their own project. We and many, many other global partners have developed a template for decision making about where the money goes in *Belt and Road projects. If that becomes the official, as I think it will, dogma, on how you make Belt and Road investments, then you’ll move all the Belt and Road investments from brown to green and have quite a big injection into green recovery. (* China is undertaking what it considers the largest project of the century — linking itself with more than 100 countries across Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania through trade. The main focuses of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) — also known as “One Belt, One Road” — are in infrastructure, transportation, and energy).
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:38:34] So if you have China doing it and the EU doing it in the right way, then you could get something massively interesting. If they do it the wrong way, bad news, but you have a legal argument with the EU and the EU, when you make legal arguments and you catch them, since the EU is nothing other than a set of legal agreements, they feel generally bound to do the right thing. China is seeing the need to do the right thing and they’re beginning to see, I think quite clearly, that they’ll make more friends globally if they make a green investment rather than a brown investment. That is in their own self-interest, to make this change. So, I’m quite hopeful there as well.
Andrea Macdonald, Founder, ideaXme: [00:39:20] We’ve spoken about investment, stimulating the economy. Can you talk to us a little bit about the damage that subsidies can do and diverting funds away from international development into climate change projects?
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:39:42] Yes. So, this is one of those insidious ways that governments can support the fossil fuel industry and build stuff that shouldn’t ever be built. Again, maybe it would have seemed a good idea 50 years ago, but not now.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:39:57] You have subsidies that are in all of the European countries and then all the wealthy countries use foreign aid to subsidise things that shouldn’t be subsidised as well. So, for example, we had a case in Spain about subsidies to the coal industry that we won. We had a big argument, also won, in the UK in which the UK was using an arcane mechanism called a capacity market, which is a way of keeping the lights on in order to give money to the fossil fuel industry. You had the EU itself giving what was 6 billion euros worth of subsidies to the coal fired power stations that we didn’t want to see built in Poland, so we had to whack those subsidies by making the right legal argument, which then made the coal plants much less attractive. So even in the EU, the subsidies are very much one of the ways in which these incumbent industries stay in control. If you and I got together and set up a little company and I wanted to do anything, we’d make quite a lot of profit if somebody gave us a billion in subsidies. We’d do quite well. It doesn’t have to be a good thing to do.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:41:23] Similarly, as you were saying with the Bank of England, the UK has given billions in subsidies to fossil fuel projects since signing the Paris agreement. Now, they’ve said they won’t do that anymore and I hope that’s right.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:41:38] Subsidies play an enormous role in making fossil fuel look like a good and profit-making thing still, when if they were all taken away tomorrow, it would become truly apparent not only the damage they’re doing, but what about business interest they are.
Andrea Macdonald, Founder, ideaXme: [00:41:59] You’re incredibly creative generally and incredibly creative as a lawyer. Could you talk about the case history where you took your pursuing of organisations which negatively impact the environment to the point of actually buying shares in an organisation, company with the objective of protecting the Earth against its activities?
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:42:15] This is one of my favourites actually. I didn’t invent this. The good news for me is that as ClientEarth has grown quickly, all of these very creative people have come on board, and I think it’s about 70% women, so a new perspective and then quite a lot of young people.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:42:38] A young guy from New Zealand came up with this idea. The Polish government wanted to build what they were calling the last new coal fired power station in Europe, suggesting that, the good guys are winning. They wanted to build one more and they wouldn’t listen to reason. So, we commissioned an economic study and, as I mentioned earlier, now the renewable energy is generally cheaper, even in the Polish market. It is simply be a much better investment. Forgetting the environment completely if you want to invest X number of euros, clean energy is a better investment.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:43:26] So we got an independent economic study making that really clear and showing that this big investment wasn’t going to make money except through subsidies. They were going to rely on subsidies, to make a profit. So, they were going to suck in European money and call it a profit. Anyway, they wouldn’t listen to reason and they own the slight majority of the government to the shares. So, we bought shares, €30 worth of shares and we said we’re not going to bring an environmental case, this is a business case, a pure business case. This is a bad investment and you; we sued the officers and directors of the company. We said that they were making a bad business judgment to our detriment. You’re violating your basic duty of care to us as shareholders. You’re going to ruin our €30 investment with a stupid decision and the good news is that we won. The judge agreed and the next morning, the share price went up almost 4%. So, the market agreed to and that’s beautiful.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:44:32] Immediately board rooms’ corporate lawyers had been telling us that that went across boardrooms all over and people were listening and boards of directors were saying: How do we avoid this kind of stuff?
[00:44:45] And where they don’t, I hope we’ll be able to bring such cases again.COP26 and COP15
Andrea Macdonald, Founder, ideaXme: [00:44:50] There are some important summits and conferences happening, one being the One Planet Summit which is just taking place. Can you go through the important events? COP15, COP26 and what they hope to achieve and the part that you are playing in any or all of these events?
The Paris Agreement
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:45:14] In November of this year in the UK is the next big global climate meeting. It’s a very important one because it’s the one where countries are supposed to increase their ambition in terms of their own actions in meeting the Paris Agreement for reducing their emissions. They’re supposed to come in with more ambition to reduce their emissions. It’s being hosted by the UK. in this interesting moment where it’s just left the EU and is looking for a place on the global stage. So, my hope is that Boris Johnson will see it’s in his advantage to be very aggressive in terms of saving the climate and that this is certainly a stage on which he could make a wonderful demonstration that the UK wants to be a leader in this. The EU has, as I said earlier, come out with the 2050 net zero carbon a while back, and the UK has matched that and in leaving it said we’ll stick with that, that’s very good.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:46:28] He’s come out with a 10-point plan for the environment. It’s the first time such a thing has happened. So, there’s certainly a good discussion. But as we’ve been saying, it starts with a good discussion and then what are the things that actually happen?
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:46:44] The Paris Agreement is a beautiful achievement, that the world’s countries agreed to protect the climate. Not that much has happened yet. What the agreement says is, we all go home and then within our own legal system, within our own economic system, in Costa Rica and France and Russia and everywhere, we come up with our own plan determined by us to reduce our emissions. So far, those aren’t so great and they need to be greatly enhanced and that’s the opportunity for the climate COP (COP 26) in November to enhance these and for the UK to take a real leadership role.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:47:33] Now, the role we’ll be playing there is largely on working on the finance side. So, we’ve been working on developing a very strong climate finance program for the last five years. It’s a unique program among any environmental group in the world, to have a group of corporate law experts saying how can we use securities law, company law, insurance law, bond law and pensions law to address the money flows so that the money starts flowing in the right direction. We start inhibiting the money from going in the wrong direction, like subsidies and fossil fuels, and going in the right direction, like renewable energy. So, getting pension funds to say we need to invest for the future and that is in a clean future, renewable future. We’ve been working on a pensions bill with the government and many others in the UK, which would be a good step in that direction. That would be the first time that pension funds or anywhere are required to fully disclose the climate impacts of the investments so that investors and pension fund members begin to understand what their money is actually buying. Are you buying climate change or are you buying reduction in climate change? That’s the kind of work that I will be doing more of on the route to the climate COP.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:49:05] Then the one in China (COP 15) also in November is the biodiversity global meeting. It has the potential of being as important for biodiversity or for nature as the Paris Agreement for climate. The way I think of it is that the temperature curve is going up and the biodiversity curve is coming down. So, these curves are going exactly in the wrong direction and nature is really suffering. If you read stories that appear in the paper, you will have seen this. It’s well understood now that we’re losing nature quickly and much can be done, but the current global agreements on it aren’t enough.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:49:56] So here you need countries to come together in China in November and reach a global agreement that will greatly slow the loss of nature and begin to allow it to build back up. It can still build back up, of course if you lose a species, you have lost a species. But nature is still in the position where it can build back up relatively quickly if we take care of it.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:50:22] The big simple headline there that many countries are agreeing on is to protect 30% of the terrestrial surface and 30% of the marine environment by 2030. If you protect that much, nature begins to heal. You could get a beautiful, virtuous circle because as you protect nature, it helps stabilise climate. Both of the two are deeply intertwined and if it’s understood and if those agreements mesh in the right way, it will put us on a very good path. When people start to see that that’s possible and that there is a good future for nature and for people that we can create together, I’m quite hopeful that will come out of both of these meetings with real achievements. In the one we’re working closely with a number of governments to help get the ideas lined up in the right way.
David Gilmour, Pink Floyd
Andrea Macdonald, Founder, ideaXme: [00:51:29] In 2019, David Gilmour, former Pink Floyd guitarist, donated $21 million of auction proceeds from the sale of his guitars to ClientEarth. Could you talk to us about that?
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:51:46] Yeah. Boy, that was a wonderful surprise! I got a call from my friend Rosie Boycott, who is Baroness Boycott and a wonderful woman. She said: Hi, James, I was talking to David Gilmour yesterday and he and Polly are thinking of putting their guitars on sale in the auction house. They’re wondering who to give it to because they want to stop climate change, you’re the natural group to give it to, so David will be calling you in an hour.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:52:19] So David Gilmour called and said: I hear planet Earth is the best group globally to give the money to because you achieve enormously high leverage impacts by using law in this big way with governments and companies. I have a question, are you? Convince me I’m not wrong?
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:52:44] So we had a wonderful meeting and indeed, they generously gave us the proceeds of the sale. So that’s like getting a whole year’s budget and we’re still a relatively young organisation. We’re in our 14th year and we’re a charity, so we beg for every penny and it takes a long time as a charity to get a reserve fund together that grows living on the edge of bankruptcy if you don’t have any reserves. It’s very hard to get enough money to have a kind of venture capital fund for new ideas.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:53:25] So you see a problem that needs to be solved or an opportunity. Right now, Japan, for example, just announced it’s coming out with a new climate change law quickly and that’s a country we’ve just started working in. Now, in the old days before David and Polly’s gift, we would have had to go around to foundations and individuals and say, we have only one lawyer in Tokyo, we need to start working on this climate change legislation to make sure it’s really good and up to global standards and we have some ideas about that, can you give us the money? When you start to have those conversations, it often takes a year even if people are very willing to get the money there. With David and Polly’s gift, not only were we able to create a reserve fund so that we were secure forever as an institution, but we were able to create that kind of venture capital fund, if you will. So, we were able to say this lawsuit, that climate project, this forestry project are ones that need to start happening now and we can spend some of our money to get it going.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:54:43] For example, I mentioned all these coal fired power stations in Asia. I’ve been talking to donors for a couple of years. When you look at China and the rest of Asia, it’s like 2000 coal fired power stations that are either planned or existing and they all need to be shut down as quickly as possible. I talked to big donors for a couple of years and they said, great idea but we’re not quite yet ready to go. I said, well, come on, they’re getting built and we’ve got to stop them. When David and Polly gave us the gift, we were able to say, oh, great, we can allocate some of that money to get going on that immediately, which we did. Then another donor came in and said, I’ll give you a three-year grant on the back of that, so you’ve got three years’ money to get it going. So, it has completely changed what we’re able to do and singlehandedly, David and Polly, with that enormously generous gift, put us in a position to essentially catapult into being a really global organisation. It’s been wonderful.
Andrea Macdonald, Founder, ideaXme: [00:55:52] If a huge amount of money came in again, hopefully it will, you’ve been extremely successful in all the different things you’re doing to date, are there other things that you would add? For example, an international environmental law 2.0 or an international court for the environment in the same way we have an international court for human rights. What are the additional things, if any you would do?
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:56:25] Well, the immediate things I would do would be to use the existing frameworks. There’s so much more that you can do with what exists and what you can build up in countries. We’ve scoped out this big energy project for Asia, which is to close down all the coal and to move the economy towards renewable energy. There are 350 million people in Asia who don’t have electricity. So, the goal is not just to close down coal, the goal is actually to give 350 million people who don’t have it, clean energy and then everybody else to move off fossil into clean. The goal there is always a positive goal and that’s a big challenge. So, I figure that’s £100 million over 10 years, so a lot more needs to come in to make that work.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:57:19] I’d like to have a similar scale project on protecting forests and biodiversity. So, you have three big basins of tropical forest, the Amazon, Central Africa, West Africa, the Congo basin and then in Asia as well, and those are the three where there’s a lot left. They’re under threat and we all know that they’re being chipped away, but there’s a lot left and it must be preserved.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:57:52] What the science tells us is that keeping the existing forests is as important as planting or more important than planting trees. So, I’d really crucially do that and that’s where the biodiversity is. So, you’re saving nature as well as taking care of carbon. That’s a global project that I’d like to do on the same scale as our global energy project. This year, I’d like to design that project and then have, if they’re generous donors, have them come in and support it. We’re working now in Africa for the last 10 years on forests. We’re working a bit in Asia now but it needs to go way up. We’ve been invited to Brazil by high officials, members of the Supreme Court, the woman who was the chief prosecutor of Brazil, and a whole bunch of NGOs who said: Look, we do lots of good work, but we don’t have your legal capacity and we don’t have your legal creativity. We need that in Brazil.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:58:55] So I’m fairly desperate to get a good project going in Brazil as well as Africa as well as Asia and all at the same time, because time is really running out for the forests. We need to save them within 10 years.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [00:59:14] Another project that I really want to work on is to do with chemicals and plastics in a global way. We’ve been working on chemicals in Europe, but there’s a big new push now on plastics by the fossil fuel industry which they call their plan B. They see it coming that they’re not going to be able to sell, forget coal, but oil and gas, they foresee that they’re not going to be able to sell as much oil and gas because we need to stop burning them but they want to maintain their sales. So, they intend to shift all that into making more plastic because those – oil and gas are the feed stocks for plastics. So, there is another one that I really want to do is on the drawing boards. There is a whole set of enormous new plastics factories that would produce immensely more plastic using the oil and gas as feedstock. That’s got to be stopped. That’s like the next set of coal fired power stations in a way, because they produce huge greenhouse gases, actually they are worse. Out of a coal fired power station at least you get useful electricity, out of a plastics factory, you get plastic which winds up in the ocean and everywhere else.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [01:00:36] We’ve just done our first one of these. We’re preventing the growth of new plastics factories in Belgium, the first big new one in Europe under this b plan. There’s a 3-billion-euro factory in Belgium by INEOS, the biggest plastics manufacturer in Europe. They’ve just cancelled it as a result of these lawsuits that we won against them. So, I’d like to basically transform the world’s energy system, number one. Save forests and biodiversity, number two, and then deal with plastics and toxics. But I haven’t even talked about the oceans and you need to do that for the oceans too. So, the work is big.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [01:01:19] The cool thing about the way we’ve designed the organisation is that it’s very modular so that you have these program areas with brilliant people running them, brilliant people in them, and then an overall way of creating a global strategy through the way we cooperate. Essentially, all you need is the funding to make this work and that’s what I hope we will be getting more of in the next year or so.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [01:01:51] The vision is always quite positive. It is where do you want to go? Which is to build an ecological civilisation. It’s what the Chinese have been saying. I write poetry and I was going back to my poetry a few weeks ago and I found the term ecological civilisation from 2009. So, I was dreaming of an ecological civilisation way back then and that’s it. So, if you produce clean energy and you produce sustainable agriculture, you preserve fish stocks and you preserve forests and biodiversity, you’re beginning to create an ecological civilisation which could be here and thriving, you know, 2000 years from now.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [01:02:36] That’s really the goal. It’s not just to save civilisation. You can only save it by helping it evolve into the next stage, which becomes the ecological civilisation, and these areas that we’ve just been talking about are our key areas to move quickly and there’s a positive solution for every one of them now, which is the really exciting thing.
Andrea Macdonald, Founder, ideaXme: [01:02:57] You have a reverence for nature, which comes from your beliefs. Could you talk to us a little bit about the people that you have met during the course of your life with whom you have connected with richly in order to move those beliefs forward, move your human story forward and your crusade for nature.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [01:03:38] I’ll start with a woman called Miss Alice Gray. I was in New York as a boy, I lived in New York and she was an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History, a very august institution and she was terrific. I called up when I was about nine, looking to get a tarantula because I wanted to breed tarantulas. Back in those days, no one did this, and we became friends. She invited me to join the Junior Entomological Association, which was a kids’ branch of the very august American Anthropological Association, which had heroes of mine, like Alexander B. Klots, the guy who wrote the Butterfly book and Roman Vishniac, the great photography and so on. 
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [01:03:53] Alice was a wonderful teacher. She loved kids and she was brilliant and very eccentric. She believed in me and she was the first person outside my family and my school from the completely big world out there who I developed a deep relationship with and I fell in love with Alice Gray. She was fabulous and she told me, you could be a great scientist and that was deeply moving and changing for me, so she was a great teacher.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [01:03:53] In a way, the next great teacher was my Zen teacher. I met him later on, I was about 33-year-old and at that point, life was making no sense at all and the only thing I could think of was Zen because I tried studying Western philosophy and being an environmental activist and falling in love and bringing 60 cases at once but none of these things were answering the meaning of life question for me. So, I was in an existential slough of despond. I needed to find the way. I thought, well, there’s Zen and I had just read a book then by American writer Peter Matthiessen, who later did become a friend and he died a few years ago, but he was a big prize-winning author and very well-known American writer. He wrote about nature and he had become a Zen master over the course of the years and just when I needed it, a book came out by him, which indicated that his ultimate teacher was this Japanese guy in LA. I was living in New York, so I moved to California and I met this Japanese teacher and I also fell in love with him. He was wonderful and he became my teacher for 10 years until he died and I lived in the Zen Centre in Los Angeles while I was setting up the environmental organisation that I set up there.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [01:06:57] He also gave me great confidence in myself and the practice gives one great confidence in life. So, he’s another one who’s very important. I wanted to be ordained and he kept saying, no, being a priest is just another job. You are a lawyer. He’s the one that said you have to set up something in Los Angeles because there are a lot of problems here and I did because he requested it. He was a wonderful man.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [01:07:09] Then two people I worked with a long time ago came back to me 15, 16 years ago when I was just looking to do something in the UK. I moved here because my husband was English and couldn’t stay in America. So, I was here and wondering what to do and these old friends who were funders from America showed up in London and we had dinner. Michael and Winsome McIntosh, and Winsome said they’re philanthropists and they funded my work in America and Winsome said, couldn’t you do some environmental law here in the UK. I looked around and I saw that nobody was really doing it in the way that I would do it. So, they then stuck with me and funded me and that old friendship reappearing at that moment of real openness in my life and her idea, Winsome’s idea, of: Why don’t you set up something here, is where ClientEarth came from.
Martin Goodman
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [01:08:27] Just one more. Martin Goodman, my husband, is the one who for the last 16 years with ClientEarth I’ve talked to every day about. He’s the one who’s helped nurture every single idea, big and small and kept me going in some not too easy situations. Setting up a global thing with essentially no money in a new continent was not so easy. So, in that relationship we are able to discuss everything and turn everything over until the bright surface appears is the other one, really. It is those rich relationships that have been so important to me.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [01:09:15] Then the cool thing about ClientEarth is then all of these great people started to show up. All of these people who wanted to do this. A few years ago, I met now a very senior lawyer, but he was then a young Italian lawyer. I said, well, why are you joining? Now we have lawyers in 26 countries, but we didn’t have those 5 or 6 countries then. He said, what do you mean, why am I joining? We study your cases in law school. I said, really? I had no idea, because we were only like 5 years old at that point as an organisation. So, you’ve got these wonderful people showing up and then they bring all of their deep cultural knowledge and it becomes a continuous creative process in which we are examining issues together and immediately have many points of view that examine any particular problem so that you can come up with the highest leverage and most helpful solution.
Andrea Macdonald, Founder, ideaXme: [01:10:26] James Thornton, it’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for your time and thank you for moving the human story forward.
James Thornton CEO, ClientEarth: [01:10:38] Thank you. It’s an honour to meet you and be with you and thank you for your deep questions and your amazingly skilful listening. I appreciate it very much.
If you enjoyed this interview, please check out ideaXme’s interview with John Englander, President and Founder of Rising Seas Institute.
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