Human rights law has been called upon to help with the problem of persistently high greenhouse gas emissions. An obligation on states and other legal entities to lower their emissions (mitigation) is said to be deducible from that body of law. I refute this thesis. First, I consider two practical difficulties—causality and non-triviality—that face a plaintiff who, with emission mitigation as the objective, attempts to prove a human rights violation using the regular pattern of proof for a violation. Proponents of the “human rights approach” to mitigation have held that proof of an emission “contribution” by the defendant together with proof of an “impact” by climate change on the plaintiff’s human rights are sufficient to discharge the evidentiary burden for the proof of causation. The rest of the causation chain is simply presumed. Thus, the original proof pattern for a human rights violation is abandoned. The proponents’ answer to the triviality difficulty has been to aggregate emitters into very large entities and sue them. However, aggregation can be shown to lead to a reductio ad absurdum. In my argument’s second part, I identify a more fundamental difficulty with the human rights approach to mitigation: The defendant’s emissions do not amount to a norm violation. Everyone contributes emissions without legislative or other prohibition. Treaty law on climate change itself recognizes emitting behaviour as lawful and permits the continuation of state emissions through to at least 2050. A rise in global warming from preindustrial levels to 1.5° Celsius with room for an even greater rise to close to 2° Celsius has been budgeted for by the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. The setting up of a budget affirms the normalized status of within-budget emissions. This universal license to emit denies the human rights approach to mitigation the very conditions of application of human rights law.

人权法被要求帮助解决温室气体排放量居高不下的问题。据说，国家和其他法律实体有义务降低其排放（缓解），可以从该法律体系中推导出来。我反驳这个论点。首先，我考虑了原告面临的两个实际困难——因果关系和非平凡性——原告以减排为目标，试图使用常规的侵权证明模式来证明侵犯人权的行为。缓解“人权方法”的支持者认为，被告的排放“贡献”证据以及气候变化对原告人权“影响”的证据足以免除举证责任。因果关系。因果链的其余部分只是假设。因此，放弃了侵犯人权的原始证明模式。支持者对琐碎难题的回答是将排放者聚集成非常大的实体并起诉他们。然而，聚合可以被证明会导致荒谬的归约。在我的论点的第二部分，我指出了以人权方法来缓解的一个更根本的困难：被告的排放量并不构成违反规范。每个人都在没有立法或其他禁止的情况下贡献排放。关于气候变化的条约法本身承认排放行为是合法的，并允许国家排放至少持续到 2050 年。全球变暖从工业化前的水平上升到 1.5 摄氏度，甚至有进一步上升到接近 2 摄氏度的空间已经已编入预算《巴黎气候变化协定》。预算的建立确认了预算内排放的正常化状态。这种普遍的排放许可否定了减轻人权法适用条件的人权方法。