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.
Why don’t they just destroy all Shell’s US assets? US courts have already ruled ecoterrorism legal under the “necessity” defence.
Many of the large international corporations, especially “big oil” have played this game, donating tens of millions to environmental groups. I even had a summary of a meeting by big corporations on how to address the threat of organized environmentalists. After reading I came away with several conclusions, first they were grossly underestimating the organized environmental community, especially how ruthless the movement was. Second they believed that by donating lots of money annually, that they would compromise the organizations, at least the leadership, because they would get addicted to the money. They truly believed that the environmental movement would fade away. They certainly failed to realize that major political actors would use the environmental movement to attack Western democracies and capitalism.
That’s where you CANNOT let big capitalists organise defense and long term survival against ideological threat. You need to get the government involved in the issue of suppressing these threats.
Government is many times worse than big capitalists.
Oil companies need to do more to cut CO2 emissions! The easiest way would be to stop selling their product in countries that are trying to lower there emissions. Problem solved!
Shell should redirect all of that money going to the greens towards nuclear power.
Royal Dutch Shell has already bought a company that makes electric car chargers
and plans to install in its stations.
“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,”
Cigarette/tobacco use = increased risk for cancer, emphysema, bronchitis, asthma, heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, stroke
Increasing CO2 emissions = Greening planet, record world crop production, slight beneficial warming, best weather/climate for most life in the last 1,000 years, increase in high end rain events/flooding.
Compare this:
http://www.lung.org/our-initiatives/tobacco/reports-resources/sotc/by-the-numbers/10-worst-diseases-smoking-causes.html
To this:
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth
http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/csdb/en/
The analogy to big tobacco is a big fat false narrative. The products inhaled from cigarettes are incredibly toxic and harmful to the human body.
CO2 is beneficial gas, on a planet that had dangerously LOW levels of it at just 280 parts per million(405 ppm is still only around half of the optimal level).
Carbon pollution?
Carbon is a solid. CO2 is a (beneficial) gas. Is H2O hydrogen pollution?
Don’t give them any ideas! You know they’ll need something scary to replace carbon with when people figure out the jig is up. Hydrogen would fit the bill! It already sounds scary, being associated with the Hindenburg disaster and all.
Reinvesting 5% of Shell’s profit in renewable is a token. This is the real thing – Bahrain discovered 80 billion barrels of oil. That’s enough to feed US oil production for 25 years
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Bahrain-Says-Giant-Discovery-Holds-80-Billion-Barrels-Of-Oil.html
Note to Exxon: You’re next.
It’s entirely Shell’s fault. 1) they choose to house their headquarters in a country infested with green NGOs. 2 they have always back down to threats. 3) they have spent €millions on pandering to the greens every need.
But the reality is that, based on the paleoclimate record and the work doen with models, the climate change that we have been experiencing is caused by the sun and the oceans over which mankind has not control. There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate and plenty of scientific rational to suppor the idea that the climate sensivity of CO2 is zero. The AGW conjecture is based upon a radiant greenhouse effect provided for by trace gases in the Earth’s atmosphere with LWIR absorption bands. Such a radiant greenhouse effect has not been observed anywhere in the solar system including the Earth. The radiant greenhouse effect and hence the AGW conjecture are both science fiction. There is no action that any of the oil companies can take which will affect climate.
The oil companies are not the ones putting CO2 into the atmosphere. It is those that are making use of fossil fuels that are adding CO2 to the atmosphere. If is their money that is keeping the the fossil fuel companies in business. If using fossil fuels is so bad then governments should make it illegal to make use of any goods and or services that involve the use of fossil fuels. If government did that were I live most of the people would either have to leave or perrish.
In many countries, government has no right to tell a private corporation how it must invest its profits but rather is is up to the private corporation’s elected board of directors. If a particular private company does not want to get into the renewable energy business it is their right. There are plenty of other companies in that business already..
As the greens in Holland want to turn the clock back and having made the government do it now have their sights set on Shell it might be time to get rid of all those dykes and pumps that keep the sea out so they can experience what it was like before cheap reliable power generation and oil powered machinery for building.
James Bull
Appeasement doesn’t work. It only keeps the thieves coming back for more. I wouldn’t buy shell stock, or their gas, because it’s to expensive.
From the article:
” The Dutch government was forced to live up to its green rhetoric.”
Not so. It was a show process with an incompetent politicized judge, cowardly going along with those social justice warriors of “Urgenda”. He can afford his stupidity as a judge, completely incompetent to judge in this case, because nearly all parties involved that would influence his career are incompetent in this matter. Also he can afford this stupidity because it is meaningless, apart from some pretty hollow political implications. Yes, the politicians are paying some lip service to it for the show (as a judge can’t force their hands by law)- “we’ll study this judgment” blah blah. It is of no real consequence because this government was already well on its way with multidecadal communist style energy transition planning, more windmill fields at sea, etc.
Another example where greens are admitting that renewable cannot provide energy economically. The watermelons are forced to sue a profitable company that produces products that consumers willing purchase, and use the extortion funds to prop up an industry that cannot survive without subsidy. And they are too stupid to see that you can only hold your finger in the dyke for so long, before the water wins.
Countersue. Make sure they never have another penny they can call their own for the rest of their lives.
You simply can’t placate someone whose stated intention is to destroy you.
I agree. The greens have become simply ignorant zealots, outraged at whatever they unknowingly dislike the sound of , who risk the health wealth and happiness of developed societies to boost their own ignorant egos, and need serious culling. Absolute maximum prejudice so they have NO money or power to influence ever again. Those corporations they attack should set aside the millions required to fund organisations whose sole aim is to destroy the green cancer on society in co-ordinated intelligence based and sustained operations, personally and collectively, by whatever means is legal – so their evil sociopathic beliefs can no longer threaten the future of our developed society. In the best commercial interests of the company shareholders and the technological development of their customer’s economy. Bankrupt, intimidate and generally ensure greens cannot get work anywhere the corporations threatened have influence, boycot and obstruct, buy and shut down their businesses whenever possible. Promote disinformation against them as they do their targets. Get them banned by government as extremists organisations they are, as in India, Russia, etc. where possible. It’s only what they have done to those good people who have tried to counter their torrent of stupid deceit regarding technology and the environment for years. They must be destroyed, as reason that benefits the majority is not their plan. Perhaps we can recreate a rational body from the ashes of the corrupt one that is actually interested in protecting the environment, versus imposing their delusional in fact ideologies on people, at their avoidable expense. Trying to change the greens is like trying to persuade ISIL to be reasonable. IMO
I don’t care what they say about “fascism”. I have had enough.
I say attacks their lawyers. Defending a person accused of something is one thing, defending an organisation continuously breaking the law to push it’s product, a protection racket, is another. Lawyers should only defend past alleged cases, not continuous illegal behavior.
We shouldn’t have to witness an organisation breaking the law then attacking the owner of a nuclear plant over trivial violation of the strictest regulation there is (stricter than pharmacy – THE domain where regulation used to serve a purpose – and finance).
Attack the “journalists” if they are channel propaganda by integrating with the organisation PR system.
Freedom of the press is not freedom to promote illegal operations which are promotional advertising operations. In France you cannot even alleged health benefits of smoking pots (France has no real freedom of press or of speech), that’s considered promoting an illegal activity. But promotion of Greenpiss breaking the barrier of a nuclear plant with a ram truck is OK. And we have had members of the government promoting the destruction of GMO fields, even of taxpayers funded studies of GMO plants. We have anti-GMO activists in our national institute of agriculture study (INRA).
It’s illegal to relay ISIS propaganda; but “greens” are more dangerous than even ISIS. Why is it OK to relay propaganda made by breaking and entering in nuclear plants and GM fields?
(Also, “GM” can mean whatever they want to mean at any point. It used to mean DNA modified by adding a gene from another specie, now it’s any “artificial” genetic modification.)
Money and true “renewable” don’t fit together.
Money is for what’s limited. What’s inherently unlimited (like the sun) is free.
You cannot invest in renewables. You can only invest in non-renewables.
The sun is free.
Getting any energy from the sun takes money, (corrupt) political connections, money, more environmental damage, money, lost opportunities and wasted money, more money, and more environmental damage as you try to store that energy for the 3/4 of each day when the sun don’t shine so good.