Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Shell’s long term policy of cultivating green friends seems to have come unstuck, with a “Friends of the Earth” lawsuit which insists that Shell re-investing 5% of their profits in renewables simply isn’t good enough.
Shell threatened with legal action over climate change contributions
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Friends of the Earth Netherlands on Wednesday demanded the Anglo-Dutch company revise plans to invest only 5% in sustainable energy and 95% in greenhouse-gas emitting oil and gas.
The environmental group said this business strategy would increase the impact of climate change, especially on the world’s poorest people and those most prone to flooding. It has given Shell eight weeks to shift to a cleaner tack, after which it says it is prepared to invoke international obligations, human rights treaties and laws on hazardous negligence.
Heading the group’s legal team is Roger Cox, who led and won a landmark climate case in 2015 that insisted the Dutch government should set more ambitious emissions targets.
“This is the first case we know of in the world that seeks preventive action from a company over climate change,” Cox told the Guardian. “We are not asking for damages. We want Shell to steer away from its current course and to get in line with the Paris agreement.”
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“Currently Shell and companies like it are acting like big tobacco in decades past by failing to take responsibility for the harm that they cause,” said Craig Bennett, chief executive of Friends of the Earth England, Wales and Northern Ireland. “Shell must now move on from its history of Earth-damaging fossil fuel extraction and play a major part in the transition to a sustainable future, to keep temperature rises to near 1.5C.”
A spokesperson for Shell said the company strongly supported the Paris agreement, “but we believe climate change is a complex societal challenge that should be addressed through sound government policy and cultural change to drive low-carbon choices for businesses and consumers, not by the courts.”
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Shell has given generously to green causes for a long time. Thanks in part to all the money Shell and other big oil companies have provided over the years, greens in the Netherlands and much of the rest of Europe are politically very powerful.
In the Netherlands in 2015, greens won a shock court victory – Dutch courts ruled that the government had to do more to cut CO2 emissions. The Dutch government was forced to live up to its green rhetoric. The lawyer who won that case is now coming after Shell.
We call it “Paying Danegeld”.
Yet the extortionists keep coming back for more.
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“Yet the extortionists keep coming back for more.” – They always do!
Forcing a company or an individual to invest in any sector of the economy, or at all, smells both of National socialism and communism
An open invitation to Shell Oil to relocate corporate headquarters out of the Netherlands and into the USA with the strong recommendation to cease selling gasoline and any fossil based energy source in the Netherlands…Period
Very much like negotiating with Hitler so he wouldn’t invade more of Europe. We know how well that worked.
Call National Socialism what it really is, Fascism! The production remains in private ownership, but the government tells them what and how much to produce.
” It has given Shell eight weeks to shift to a cleaner tack, after which it says it is prepared to invoke international obligations, human rights treaties and laws on hazardous negligence.”
That sounds a lot like coercion. Using threats to force someone to do something they would not otherwise want to do.
If you have a case and have the means and motivation : sue. Making threats with “if you don’t do what I want you to do I’ll sue you” is coercion. It’s akin to blackmain, which is one form of coercion.
As is frequently mentioned on these comments, it is the consumers producing the CO2, not the oil companies.
No it is not. The tobacco companies were knowingly and actively lying about the harm tobacco products were causing.
Kipling knew this:
“And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.”
Now they are simply using societies court system to do their raiding for them.
Dead right. Danegeld.
The oil companies should withhold selling refined fuels to the countries and areas where they are despised. Let them freeze in the dark.
After Brexit I strongly recommend that the Anglo-Dutch businesses drop the Dutch parts.
This doesn’t bother me at all. I own 300 shares of BP!
First they came for Shell.
That right Shell. Just keep feeding the climate alarmist greenie eco-crocodile. That just gives the croc more incentive to eventually bite your head off. Remember what Churchill said about appeasers.
People just do not understand that feeding the crocodile just keeps it in the area until it’s tired of your piddling meals. Then it eats you and moves on. So many are totally blind to this reality.
Appeasement never works.
Churchill.. appeasement.. crocodile.
Serves them right for believing sleeping with the enemy could give them a halo.
Holland is responsible for the recent drop in crime….in Morocco
Serves them right for listening to the PR department on the subject of corporate strategy. PR is appeasement central where ‘blind them with BS’ is the only chapter in the playbook.
Shell: Feeding the crocodile in hopes it’ll eat you last.
I have no sympathy for Shell. But Shell’s payments should be redirected to Salvation Army, or some org that actually helps people and does something good.
Trying to befriend watermelons is a vain and foolhardy tactic. You give an inch, they take a mile. In climate wars, the only sane policy is to take no prisoners.
The church of global warming requires at least a tithe of 10% to make the gods happy enough to buy oceanfront property.
Shell should leave Holland because Holland has gone as mad as when they had the tulip crisis.
Can we pay for green energy with tulip bulbs? After all, the greens are all in favor of returning the days of darkness and simplicity. They should appreciate an organic currancy, don’t you think?
Sure, 10% might keep them out of “royal dutch” for a bit, but they need a virtue $ignalling “plan for the future” to appease the green mob.
As I have often said, if the seas & oceans are rising alarmingly then why do greenalists keep investing in sea-front property?
Ayn Rand’s dystopia of looters is coming true.
Trump Should Reconsider Red Team Blue Team Public Climate Debates
President Donald Trump and America have been on a winning streak lately not seen since Reagan. After 8 years of complete and absolute malaise, underachievement, sub-par everything and at best mediocre performance, President Trump has righted the directionless drifting ship and set America on a new course, a course of winning. American exceptionalism is finally … Continue reading
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2018/04/01/trump-should-reconsider-red-team-blue-team-public-climate-debates/
In many ways, co2islife, it does seem to be coming true.
Side Bar:
Your site provides a wealth of valuable information and perspectives.
Thank You, for that!
Thanks for the comment, much appreciated.
When you invite a gang of thieves into your home, don’t act all surprised and hurt when they ransack it.
Shell is following the Neville Chamberlain school of diplomacy.
Chamberlain has suffered quite a bit from history. You will find that during the 1930s the ‘Greens’ of the time were the Pacifists. Here is a Wiki on the equivalent of the IPCC of the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Disarmament_Conference
Chamberlain got into an impossible position by supporting the wishes of the country and his civil servants. They were all for disarmament and peace, and so he followed that policy. As a result, by the late 30s, when the policy was obviously failing, Britain had few weapons, no credible alliances, and was in no position to fight a war. Playing for time, which was what Chamberlain did, was the only thing he could do. Those who say that he should have prepared the country for war overlook the fact that he tried to do so when he was Chancellor, and was attacked for those policies. His major concern in the Treasury was finding the money to pay the USA for the WW1 war debt.
I can see the same thing happening today. We are ruining our economies and our energy production based on idealistic and mistaken policies promulgated by activists. The politicians can do nothing while the people demand green energy, no carbon and an end to plastics. But sometime there will be a reckoning….
But the people in terms of the majority don’t demand green policy, especially when you ask them to pay for it. It is a tiny minority that have infected government and are able to lead the ignorant politicians along.
An interesting situation is developing in the UK over how much of electricity costs are from government taxes given that the government are putting in place a price cap. A small energy supplier has just raised prices by 7.5% on fixed price contracts because the fix only relates to their own costs and not government costs, and they have clearly said why they have done it.
You also had prominent American families like the Kennedys donating to the pacifist movement in and around Chicago called the America First movement while Joe served as ambassador to Britain. Incompetence was on parade then as a stimulant for the aggressors to reach farther and faster.
China is the new Germany?
Lay down with dogs, get up with fleas…..
It’s interesting that Shell should be compared to a tobacco company. When the wind turbine craze got started in Ontario, I wrote a letter to the editor of the local daily newspaper. The Canadian wind turbine association threatened me with court action or, more precisely, they threatened the newspaper with court action for publishing my letter. The paper caved, the wind turbine association got to publish a scathing attack on me, and I could not reply. Now, doesn’t that look like the way the tobacco companies did business?
Nice to hear from you again, Andre.
There is plenty taking place in Canada at the present time.
Alberta has wind energy energy activities taking place for example. CanWEA present there as well.
CPPIB purchase of Canadian wind and solar projects too.
CPP Investment Board, Canada
Sustainable Investing
Use link to: ‘Policy on Responsible Investing’, Aug.10, 2010, ~ 6 pages.
Part 4.0: Engagement
4.2, p.3, Collaborating Engagement: Carbon Disclosure Project
4.4, p.3, Industry Dialogue: UN Principles of Responsible Investment.
http://www.cppib.com/en/how-we-invest/sustainable-investing
The Canadian Trade Commissioner, March 15, 2018
Renewable Energy – Invest in Canada Service
Re: Leading networks, research groups and support services.
http://www.international.gc.ca/investors-investisseurs/sector-secteurs/energy-energie.aspx?lang=eng
‘Alberta Wind Energy Supply Chain Study Final Report’
Prepared for: Canadian Wind Energy Association, September 2017, ~ 89 pages
https://canwea.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Delphi-AB-Wind-Supply-Chain-Study-Final-Report.pdf
When you look back, you realize the company is just a shell of it’s former image…
a pecten
R. Shearer,
Just a bit of trivia, the state of Virginia actually has a state fossil, and it’s a scallop. ‘Chesapecten jeffersonius.”
The big oil companies are not stupid or short sighted. Back in the 1970s after the Arab oil shocks, oil companies started selling photovoltaic panels. Nobody, them included, could predict the future of the energy market so they wanted to be in a position to adapt to whatever eventually happened.
Here’s a story about ExxonMobile spending a billion dollars a year on renewable energy research. That’s not appeasement, it’s taking the long view and covering their derrieres.
NPR is now engaging in a bald-faced, rumor-mongering attempt to have Scott Pruitt removed as head of the EPA.
Canadian pension makes a really, really bad investment…
https://www.windpowerengineering.com/business-news-projects/nextera-selling-ontario-wind-solar-assets/
https://www.google.com/amp/beatricedailysun.com/news/local/causes-of-turbine-failures-remain-a-mystery/article_5674ff7e-0c36-5cb7-aac2-1dfc75b46ea4.amp.html
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.desmoinesregister.com/amp/376780001
Natural Resources Canada, Dec., 2017
‘Wind Energy in Cold Climates’
The operation of wind turbines in a cold climate such as Canada involves additional challenges.
Webpage has links to other information including the results of a multi-year study on this topic.
https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/energy/renewable-electricity/wind/7321
Shell donates a lot of money to environmental causes, supports the Paris agreement and won’t question agw.
Same with all the oil companies.
They are not on your side. How do you figure you’re on their side?
The oil companies pay a lot of taxes, provide employment, contribute to my pension, and provide a very useful product at a good price. By what sort of blinkered, short-sighted thinking would I decide they were my enemy and join the opposition? Environmentalists provide none of things on the list in my first sentence.
“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”
-Winston Churchill
The people who run the major oil companies should consider Churchill’s quote.
https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2018/04/04/shell-envisions-central-role-for-solar-in-new-report/
——
Shell owns UK based First Utility.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Utility
Step-by-step instructions on how to cut your own throat — thanks, Shell, for the role model.
If you lay down with pigs you roll in the manure.
“Currently Shell and companies like it are acting like big tobacco in decades past by failing to take responsibility for the harm that they cause”
It never ceases to amaze me how warmists are able to ignore the GOOD fossil fuel companies provide.
How do they think post WWII Europe recovered?
How do they explain the phenomenal rise in living standards globally, including incredible reductions in poverty?
How do they think the west can afford a welfare state?
If not through plentiful, cheap energy?
They know all of those things came from cheap oil, and they want to get rid of all of it… except the welfare state part, but good luck getting them to explain how they think that’s supposed to work.
Shell should threaten to move its headquarters from the Netherlands to a more energy-friendly country, like the United States.The Dutch government might start missing all that tax revenue, and make some concessions to keep Shell in Holland.
The plaintiffs say that the are asking for no monetary damages – If the company, any company, puts ANY of its resources into anything other than investments intended to maximize the profits (income) then the stockholders are damaged and the company officers can be charged with failing their fiduciary responsibilities. That is quite a lot of damage, especially if the stock price drops.
Excellent comment.
It is going to come to the point when Public Companies subjected to these shakedowns will be forced to fight on behalf of shareholders.
Where the circumstances permit, actions for common nuisance and conspiracy should be made against these plaintifs.
The alternative is that the Danegeld examples mentioned here will skyrocket.
+10
Judging by the lack of competitiveness of Shell stations in my area, they have been trying to pass along higher costs to consumers. So consumer protection needs a say in the proceedings. Add in more oil companies with the same underlying green loss components and you have an antitrust case against all of them with green groups as co-conspirators.