Hello, Hello, okay. Last month, in November, a Dutch court ruled in Shell's favor on an appeal in a big international climate case. It got loads of headlines around the world, but it wasn't quite the wind for Shell that a lot of media coverage has made it out to be. This was an appeal of a twenty twenty one ruling.
It held that Shell is required to reduce all of its global emissions everywhere that it operates, including what are called Scope three emissions, so not just the emissions of its operations, but also the emissions associated with the use of its products. The court back in twenty twenty one ruled that Shell had to reduce those emissions by forty five percent by the end of twenty thirty. It was
a huge ruling, and then and an unexpected one. Shell predictably appealed that ruling, and this new judgment is the result of that appeal. The biggest thing that the court walked back was this specific number forty five percent by twenty thirty. That's the commitment that countries have made when they signed on to the Paris Climate Accord that they would reduce emissions by forty five percent by the end
of twenty thirty compared with their twenty nineteen emissions. What the court called into question was whether that same commitment is applicable to Shell or whether it needs to be adjusted for particular companies. So that's what's been reported as
this big win. But at the same time that it said it's not quite sure about these specific numbers, the Court did reaffirm that Shell is in fact required to reduce its global emissions, including Scope three, because its failure to do so could make it impossible for the Netherlands
to meet its comments under the Paris Climate Accord. That's actually a pretty big deal, so much so that one expert I spoke with even said he would not be surprised to see Shell appeal this ruling, despite the fact that they're currently taking a victory lap in the news.
I'm Amy Westervelt today a look at what this ruling means for future attempts to use the court to hold companies and governments accountable on climate I'm joined today by Jasper Tooling, strategic advisor to the non profit Climate Litigation Network, and Noah Walker, Crawford Research Fellow with the Grandsom Research Fellow with the Grantham Research Institute of the London School of Economics.
So lawyer Defensi the Dutch and YEO, which is a branch of the Global Friends of.
The Earth network, started this case in eighteen.
This is Yasper Toolings talking about the origins of this case, and.
They were initially successful. They secured a court order which ordered Schill at the headquarter level to bring its emissions down in line with the Paris Agreement, so forty five percent reduction by twenty thirty across all of its emissions, so not just its own production, also the products itself. So that's really a groundbreaking ruling and across all of its companies across the world. That ruling has now been overturned, but in part, in fact, most of it still stands.
Yeah.
I think that's the piece that seems to be missing from a lot of the coverage. So can you explain that what has been chucked out in what remains?
No.
The only think that has not been ordered, and that's not a small thing. It is the court order that no defense he sought against Shell to reduce the emissions. But the ruling now by the Court of Appeals in the Hague contains a lot of stuff that's really fundamental and groundbreaking and will offer lots of material and fodder for climate litigation and climate obligations from years to come.
So the Court of Appeal said, there can be no doubt that protection from dangerous climate change is a human right. It is recognized worldwide that states of an obligation to protect their citizens from adverse effects of dangerous climate change. So when it comes to climate change as being a human right, and that states have an obligation, and that was clearly affirm here. But more importantly, I think this
is the other real foundation of this case. The Court help that Shell has a duty to reduce its emissions.
And I'm going to quote again, the Court of Appeal is of the opinion that companies like Shell, which contributes significantly to the climate problem and have it within their power to contribute to combating it, have an obligation to limit your two missions in order to counter dangerous climate change, even if this obligation is not exclicitly laid down in public law regulations of the countries in which the company operates. Companies like Shell thus have their own responsibility in achieving
the targets of the Paris Agreement. So that is pretty strong and unprecedented. Court couldn't do was grant and mission reduction order. The Paris Agreement applies to states, and the fort reduction that the Court in first instance order it applies at state level globally, so the Court of Appeals that we can't directly transpose that to companies like Shell.
We'll have to find.
Other norms for that, and those norms are currently not sufficiently crystallized.
So I think this is also the disappointing bit. The Court could have.
Perhaps gone for the minimum baseline that all of the reduction pathways agree on twenty five percent. This is also something that my other fancy had asked for, but it didn't and we'll just have to live with it.
This is also why many.
Have called disappearing victory for Shell, because those reduction pathways are forthcoming. They're currently being developed at sexral basis in the new context, totally a matter of time. I won't take long before those admission pathways are there and a company like Shell in court can be held accountable for it and can be forced to reduce its emissions.
I asked Noah Walker Crawford at the London School of Economics about what kind of evidence or research exactly is needed to build out those pathways to the point where a court might feel comfortable insisting that a company stick to them.
What was interesting about this decision is that the court said, you know that companies have legal obligations to reduce their missions, that companies like Shell must abide by the Paris Agreement, they have human rights obligations, which has, you know, impacts on companies climate policy, and so there's there's no doubt to the fact that they have to reduce their emissions.
The question is precisely by how much, and they are the court looking at the science, found such divergent numbers that they came to the conclusion that at the moment, there's no scientific consensus and so they can't make a legal determination. So what we need on the scientific side is more research looking specifically at how much emissions have to be reduced for different sectors. And so this is
research that's already ongoing. And if we look to some of the other ongoing cases against corporations, so they so called corporate ambition cases that are about whether companies have to reduce their emissions going forward. Some of the other cases have put forward more sector specific calculations in terms
of emissions reductions. So, for example, there's a case against the cement company Haltzeem in Switzerland, another one of the carbon majors, and in that case the plaintiffs use some data from the IPCC where the global emissions reduction target is translated into a sector specific target for cement, which
I think is forty two percent. Or there is a loss brought by Greenpeace and others against Volkswagen against VW in Germany, which is also very similar in the sense that it's about getting VW to switch more quickly towards electric cars and reduce its scope three emissions that way, and there there was a very specific calculation that was made for Volkswagen in terms of translating these global targets to stay in line with one point five degrees. So
this is possible. But in the Shell case, the CORE didn't find enough evidence to do or they found that necessary evidence to calculate it specifically for Shell hadn't been put forward. But that's not to say that it couldn't be done in the fairly near future.
Do you think that that leaves the door open for follow up case that have that calculation included.
I imagine there will be many follow up cases on this, so with the better scientist, with a bit more scientific research there, I imagine calculation of the necessary emissions reduction can be done specifically for Shell and for other companies like Shell. So it's likely that there are going to
be more cases like this in the future. Another interesting point is that the court actually raised something else which hadn't been brought up by the plaintiffs, namely that in the court's opinion, it may be not it doesn't seem to be in line with existing targets, with existing emissions budgets if Shell is producing new fossil fuels, so they basically said there may be a legal obligation for them not.
It's almost seemed like the invitation from the court, who isn't to bring new cases against Shell over oil explor exploration and production.
I asked Toolings about this evidence gap as well. It strikes me and I heard this from Noah this morning as well, that what a lot of it speaks to is the need for some additional scientific evidence, but that's not an insurmountable level to reach. What's your take on what's needed to be able to say this percentage is what's required, and here's how they are or are not hitting it. What's sort of the evidence gap?
I guess yes, you could say it's an evidence gap or a normative gap that the Court felt uncomfortable and crossing on it.
So I think part of it is science.
But the science, I.
Think mostly is already there.
It's how to translate the science, and maybe I can take a step back.
And the real win of the more defense approach.
Has been it's already been codified, it's already been adopted into more. When the Court in first instance ruled that Shell as is obligated to reduce its emissions, that basically paved the way for EU legislation all large companies too.
Not just publish their emissions and publish.
A plan to reduce their emissions, but they also have to put that plan into effect. The specific piece of regulation that contains its key provision, it's called the Corporate Sustainable Due Diligence Directive, and the Shell ruling, the initial one, paved the way for this.
So that obligation is there.
It's not just applicable to Shell, its applicable all large companies, irrespectable of what sector they operated.
That is the real win.
The European Union European Commission will also issue guidance.
That guidance will contain the sexual pathways that the Court was looking for, and those will be issued well before the directive kicks into action, which is July twenty twenty seven.
So sheall has bought itself some time, but not that much.
Here's Noah Locker Crawford again.
In a whole lot of ways, they actually lost. And even though it wasn't successful in terms of binding or obliging Shell to commit to certain emissions reductions, it did set an important precedent. So when the judge was reading out the verdict on Tuesday in the court, she first discussed all the kind of fundamental points, all the substantial points at stake here, and she said that, yes, corporations like Shell do have to abide by the Paris Agreement.
They do have to take action legally required to take action to address climate change. In the verdict itself, the judges addressed the argument that Shell made that they have no responsibility for their Scope three emissions. The Court said this argument does not hold water. So the Court made very clear that corporations like Shell fossil fuel companies have a legal responsibility for these emissions, so this is not a reason for Shell or other fossil fuel companies to
celebrate with this kind of strategic litigation. With climate litigation, we've seen in the past that these cases build on each other, much the way we saw with litigation against tobacco companies in the past, which took decades and where there were many unsuccessful cases, but with each case you could learn something and move to the next one.
I asked Walker Crawford if companies headquartered in countries that are not signed on to the Paris Climate Accord or that pull out of it the United States could also be affected by this ruling.
Yes. Absolutely, Whatever country's corporations operate on in their subject to that country's laws, and if that country says that corporations need to abide by the Paris targets, for example, that's something that they can ultimately be held liable for in that jurisdiction.
When I read this ruling, one of the things that I was thinking about was the extent to which a lot of these companies are pushing false solutions.
This particular ruling didn't really deal with ccs or a carbon dioxide remobile. It's definitely something that the fossil fuel companies are leaning on, and that the level of dependency is really problematic, especially in the long run. We need real emission reductions now and they have to be drastically
reduced to is actual exactly what the court said. What the court also said is Shell has currently lots of expansion plans, eight hundred fields they currently have in development, and that's simply I reconcile.
Currently, we're in a situation where this technology is being celebrated by a lot of actors, including the big oil companies, as a technology that will help fight climate change if it's sufficiently scaled in the future. In a sense, this gives these companies somewhat of a free card to continue emitting more based on the promise that technology will help capture lots of carbon in the future. But that's not guaranteed. We don't know whether that's actually going to be possible,
and so this is an issue. And when we're talking about emissions reduction pathways, some of the pathways that are put forward by fossil fuel companies assume that there will be significant carbon capture in the future. But since that's not guaranteed. From a scientific standpoint, we might say that's wishful thinking. If we want to be on the safe side, we need to reduce emissions more drastically. Today we can depend on technologies that might or might not be feasible in the future.
Right has estimated the potential of carbon capture actually at a much higher level than other oil majors, which is interesting in the context of a case like this where they're saying, well, you're not taking into account all the things that we're doing to contribute to acting on climate.
Yeah. Yeah, that's why it's all the more important to explain very clearly to the courts in these cases what kinds of assumptions are being made in different emissions reductions pathways. And so in this case there was a legal discussion where the plaintiffs and SEE and the others and defendant Shell we're putting forward very different figures of what kinds
of emissions of reductions will be necessary. But the problem here is that when Shell, we're putting forward arguments that was based on the idea that ccs will play a significant role in the future. But if it doesn't, then those pathways that are claiming will be possible, they won't work to keep emissions in line with the Paris Agreement targets.
That's a huge thing to look out for in the year ahead, especially as our reporting and others is increasingly finding not only that carbon capture does not live up to the potential that oil companies describe, but also that they are well aware of the technology's shortcomings. I asked Tollings what else to look out for in the next year.
There are already a number of cases that have been inspired if you will bet a shell case.
So there are cases.
Pending against Total in France, against Peariba or It's fonsil field financing in Fronce where similar measures are sought to reduce the emissions or to stop funding fossil fuel expansion, as a case pending against Volkswagen in Germany. There's a case pending against the Cement Company, one of the other carbon majors in Switzerland on the half of inhabitants of
an Indonesian ireland, where similar measures are sought. One case I find particularly interesting has been filed in Italy against any the Shell of Italy, a large fossil fuel company. And the interesting thing with them is that they are partially state owned.
About five percent of the.
Shares are owned by them is to finance and the twenty five percent are owned by the State Development Bank, and they are co defended in the case. And the demand against them is to bring their voting policy as
a state in line with the Paris Agreement. So I think that points to particularly interesting avenue where state owned enterprises are pursued via the state as a shareholder to implement those very same duties the state duties the human rights climate obligations through their voting policies.
I think that's a powerful living one that votes will for the future.
And that's it for this time. I hope you found that breakdown of the Shell case interesting and we'll definitely be keeping an eye on these and other cases as they move forward. Thanks for listening, and don't forget to check out Drilled Dot Media for more