Justice Philip Jeyaretnam: Keynote address at the launch of the Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Private Law

Wednesday, 4 November 2026

The Honourable Justice Philip Jeyaretnam*

Judge of the High Court

Supreme Court of Singapore

President, Singapore International Commercial Court

I. Introduction

1. Congratulations on the launch of the Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Private Law. 

2. The Handbook proceeds on the scientific consensus that anthropogenic climate change is real and potentially devastating to humanity. Short-term profit has been the engine for exponential growth over the past five hundred years but today, it threatens to lead us to our collective doom – an irreversible planetary tragedy of the commons. And the law that made such growth possible rested on the Roman law conception of dominium, which included the right not just to use what one owns but also to abuse and dispose of it without legal repercussion. You may recall the famous scene in Steinbeck’s novel of the Great Depression, The Grapes of Wrath,_¹ where corporate growers deliberately destroyed massive stocks of food to keep prices up while millions starved. But this calamity wasn’t just a consequence of private law, public law played an ignoble part too. In 1933, the US Congress passed legislation to mandate government subsidies for farmers to destroy crops and leave fields fallow.² Well, the climate crisis today has revealed human folly in almost as breath-taking a way as the Great Depression did, with denial, obfuscation and disregard to the fore. 

3. So, is the handbook the answer? Certainly, at least, the Handbook’s compendious analysis of how to remake private law to be fit for the purpose of restraining or mitigating harmful human activities, and to enforce corporate honesty and combat the misleading of consumers through greenwashing – all that is timely and urgent. It is a unique and important contribution to legal thought in this field. Reading the Handbook, I have to confess that I have been depressed by some chapters, such as Chapter 28 which describes the obstacle posed by investment protection treaties to host nation’s attempts to change domestic energy policy so as to counter climate change. But at the same time, I have also been inspired by other chapters, such as Chapters 7 and 15, which reach beyond the mainstream inheritance of Roman law that I have mentioned to non-Western systems of law, such as Tikanga Māori and the customary laws of other First Peoples for an alternative legal relationship with the land and our environment.

4. The Handbook is big and heavy and rightly so. It is filled with weighty scholarship. And after all, climate change is not a single problem that can be assigned to or addressed by a single legal doctrine. It is a network of interconnected problems, and the answers – if there are answers – cross multiple doctrinal boundaries. So, the Handbook does not present a single tidy thesis or a simple set of prescriptions. Instead, it maps a diverse terrain and puts different areas of private law in conversation with one another. And all of this with the aim of helping to free us from old ways of thinking as we try to develop legal solutions and pathways.

5. Unfortunately, even as the planet literally catches fire, not everyone respects the science. Chapter 35 details some of the anti-environment, sustainability and governance laws implemented in many US states. One element of contestation goes to the substance – the laws, the regulations and so forth. But another goes to language and vocabulary. Language and the terms of debate in turn impact the substance. Thus, I give two examples: 

(a) In May 2024, then Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law legislation that erased most references to climate change from Florida’s state statutes.³ This restructured Florida’s energy policy so that addressing climate change was no longer a legislative priority. Words referring to “climate change” were simply removed. 

(b) In March 2025, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration ordered federal agencies to eliminate terms including “climate crisis”, “climate science”, “environmental quality” and “pollution” from their public-facing websites.⁴

6. An example of a substantive change that has followed in the wake of such controls over language has occurred in the regulation of the motor industry. In February 2026, the US’s Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) rescinded its earlier finding that greenhouse gases from motor vehicles endangered public health and welfare under the Clean Air Act.  For years, this was the EPA’s statutory basis to regulate greenhouse gas emission standards in vehicles and engines. But the EPA has now stated that even the elimination of all greenhouse gas emissions from all vehicles in the US would have “no material impact” on the global climate.  The old “it makes no difference” argument. Today, US engine and vehicle manufacturers have no obligation to measure, control or report the greenhouse gas emissions of any engine or vehicle on US roads.

7. Unfortunately, greenhouse gases don’t respect national boundaries any more than the haze does. Neither does disinformation. Climate disinformation is not just a communications problem. It is a structural impediment to climate action. Modern disinformation, which is now amplified by algorithms and online echo chambers, has the direct effect of expanding and accelerating the spread of false beliefs, often for the benefit and profit of a particular industry. No prizes for guessing who might be implicated here. It also has an indirect effect of creating an increasingly polarised information environment. This in turn breeds cynicism and tribalism, making the kind of consensus-building that effective climate action requires harder and harder to achieve.

8. Climate change is a global problem and so too is climate disinformation.  

9. Now, let’s turn to Singapore. Singapore is especially vulnerable to rising sea levels, which is one of the consequences of man-made climate change. Fortunately, Singapore is a polity where reasoned discourse is valued, and it is possible to build political consensus for effective responses to such existential threats. Some of you might travelled from overseas. On your way from the airport, you may well have driven along our low-lying East Coast. Later this year, a major project of coastal protection commences work, which is to reclaim an aptly named Long Island that will rise higher than the existing coast and will also enclose a new fresh-water reservoir.⁷

10. Examples like Long Island of adapting to or protecting against the effects of climate change as well as enacting and implementing legal and regulatory changes that will reduce the emission of greenhouse gases – all of this depends on constitutionally protected reasoned discourse and putting into place legal and other measures to combat disinformation. There is no doubt that the law and the courts can help in that battle against climate disinformation. 

III. The role of the courts

11. The potential role of the law and of the courts to protect reasoned discourse based on facts and evidence is not limited to Singapore. In June this year, the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment reported that “climate-washing” cases, that challenge inaccurate narratives about climate action, are now the most common type of case involving corporate actors.⁸ Cases challenging disinformation campaigns that seek to discredit climate science have also increased significantly – at least 226 cases have been filed globally, 31 of which were new cases filed in 2025.⁹

12. Let me add one more point about the role of the courts. It is important to remember that courts do not just adjudicate climate-related disputes,  they also engage generally in objective evidence-based fact-finding. Time and again, the benefit and value of judicial methods of arriving at the particular truth of an individual case has been demonstrated. When a court makes findings of fact, for example about what a company knew, when it knew it, and what it chose to say or not say about what it knew, those findings carry weight and legitimacy.  They enable the wider public to have a more meaningful, fact-based conversation about what is actually happening to our planet, and who is contributing most to the man-made climate change crisis.¹²

IV. Conclusion

13. In conclusion, as the climate crisis gathers pace, the brunt of it is felt by poor people, who may be displaced and forced to migrate through rapidly deteriorating economic circumstances. Their plight is horrific. We do need urgent changes in international law and in the domestic public law of many nations both to try to avert the worst and also to deal with the likely consequences of having, at the global level, already failed this escalating crisis. We still need to try to achieve greenhouse gas reductions while mitigating and adapting. Private law is important too, and the Handbook plays an important role as I have said in aiding our thinking about how private law may do so, either in its existing terms or with change and reform to it.  There really is so much to do and so little time to do it in. But I will just return to Steinbeck and the book I had mentioned earlier. You must remember his words – though, of course, he was not talking about climate change at that point. The devastation to the countryside came from other sources. But when nothing is done and if climate injustice prevails, then the “souls of the people” will fill and grow heavy with “the grapes of wrath.”  And that is what is coming down the road. 

14. The Handbook offers guidance that may help us avert the worst and mitigate the likely. So, let me end by commending what you have all done so far, and by urging you to keep at it. Keep at it, especially the contributors and editors. Keep up the good work!