A necessary new world perspective that embraces our shared inter-dependence

 The following is from the Greenpeace email yesterday, May 26, 2021

In a historic verdict today, a Dutch court ruled with Greenpeace, and against Shell, that Shell is liable for damaging the climate. It is the first time that a major fossil fuel company has been held accountable for its contribution to climate change and ordered to reduce its carbon emissions throughout its whole supply chain.

Greenpeace brought the case against Shell, along with Friends of the Earth Netherlands (Milieudefensie, who started the case), ActionAid, Both ENDS, Fossielvrij NL, Jongeren Milieu Actief, the Waddenvereniging and 17,379 individual co-plaintiffs. The only reason we were able to bring this case forward against Shell? Activists and donors like you, powering our work around the globe, and giving us the strength and resources to fight and win wherever we are needed. Thank you!

This climate case has real teeth and could set a precedent in favor of people and the planet for future climate litigation. This is the first time that a court has ruled a company must specifically reduce climate changing pollution, and Shell is one of the 10 most climate polluting companies in the world. This verdict means that Shell now has to radically change course and reduce its CO2 emissions by 45% in 2030, in line with limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees.

This verdict is a historic victory for the climate and everyone facing the consequences of the climate crisis — a victory that you made possible! This decision sends a clear signal to the fossil fuel industry. Shell cannot continue to violate human rights and put profit over people and the planet. Coal, oil and gas need to stay in the ground. People around the world demand climate justice

And then this, from Bloomberg News today:

Shell’s Court Rebuke Marks the Start of a New War Against Big Oil

Laura Millan Lombrana, Bloomberg News

 

The Dutch court ruled on Wednesday that Shell should slash its greenhouse gas emissions 45% by 2030 compared to 2019 levels. The company has only pledged to reduce emissions by 20% within the decade and reach net zero by mid-century. Shell plans to appeal the ruling. 

The outcome was a turning point for climate court cases, which boomed after 189 countries signed the landmark Paris Agreement in 2015. More than half of the 1,727 cases recorded in the past 35 years started after the nations agreed to slow global warming, according to a report by the Geneva Association. Initially, many cases challenged governments’ climate plans, but litigators are increasingly targeting companies. 

Companies operating in developed economies, mainly the U.S., U.K., European Union and Australia, face the highest risk of legal action, according to a Climate Litigation Index by research firm and consultancy Verisk Maplecroft. But climate lawsuits are breaking new ground in emerging markets, with cases filed in Argentina, South Africa and India.

While the vast majority of cases have ended in favor of polluters, lawyers and activists are learning through trial and error. In a way, what's happening in the courts echoes how investors are making bets on climate technologies—many attempts will fail, but some that succeed could make a big dent in emissions.

 

Of course, the news media will continue to “frame” the issue of global warming and climate change as a conflict between those forces dedicated to the fossil fuel sector, the carbon-centric sources of energy on which much of the life on the planet is and has been sustained for decades and the forces committed to a permanent shift away from fossil fuels and a clean environment.

And while the conflict has real and authentic dimensions, it is this period of transition, in medias res, that the world has so few, if any, real structures, processes, laws, and actors to provide the requisite guardrails, lighthouses, monitoring centres, and even international judicial institutions on which to mount an effective transition.

 

As in our collective avoidance, and discomfort, even anxiety about not knowing and not being able to point to authoritarian voices, except for individuals, who have acquired and warranted the willfully surrendered collaboration, and the also willfully surrendered jurisdiction in order to institute and then develop an international “podium” in which the best available data can be trusted and archived, and then disseminated, the best research can continue to be funded and conducted, and then the most appropriate policies, practices, with both monitoring and sanctions agreed upon by all participants, without ascribing a veto power to any single nation, or even a small group of nations, (e.g. the Group of 5+1, the Group of 7, or of 20, or the 5 Veto powers in the Security Council).

 

The world cannot entertain, and certainly cannot endure, an international patchwork quilt of courts in a few countries listening to evidence brought by Greenpeace and other ‘public advocates’ against the powerful mega-corporations whose long-term survival may well be dependent on their winning interim, temporary and transitory court battles, while at the same time, continuing to pollute the shared atmosphere, land and waters of the planet. We need to look no further than the entangled United States legal system’s many arms, legs, tangents, forces, investigators, all of them operating in a political cesspool for the last four years, as they failed in their shared goal of bringing trump to heel. Such an entangled plethora of jurisdictions, political parties, media corporations, ideological positions and perceptions and ostensibly competing economies (although without a clean environment none of their prospects seem favourable) cannot be the best the world can come up with in order to confront this shared, self-imposed set of temperature-rising gradients.

 

Although we live in a world where a court decision in the Netherlands can and will be beamed a across the globe instantly in real time, and we can digitally link the “dots” the connect the forces working valiantly to bring about a survivable planetary environment, we do not live in a world in which even a general agreement on the facts of any case is available, let alone the openness to confront what are inescapable and intractable collations of evidence that we are continuing to strangle ourselves and all living organisms at a rate that, if not slowed or stopped, will only put us all on those proverbial ventilators. Obviously, there are not and will not be enough ventilators for the 8-9 billion people on the planet, and, once again, those wealthiest among us will have assured access to whatever ameliorating processes and devices might extend their lives, if it should come to that.

 

Establishing the base line of equal and shared value for every human individual on the planet, as well as for every living organism on land and in the seas, to have free access to clean air, clean water, and uncontaminated land seems a minimum expectation for those in decision-making positions to both advocate and to adhere to, in the face of what will be excruciatingly well-funded forces of opposition. If we are to be serious about sustaining life on the planet for ourselves, and our children and grand-children (in perpetuity), then we have to start to perceive our own individual perspectives differently.

 

We can no longer justify a position of isolation, a position that says or thinks,

“Whatever happens on the other side of the world (e.g. The West Bank, or Yemen, or Lebanon, or Somalia, or Nigeria) has no bearing on my life. I just want to hunker down in my own little bunker, and let the rest of the world go to hell in a handbasket.”

We can no longer justify a personal ideology that excludes the millions of starving, diseased, and desperately migrating refugees from all sorts of lethal forces from our mental and emotional landscape. They live on the planet just as we do; they need the same amounts of water, air, food and rest that the rest of us need. They also deserve to be included in the evolving universal picture of how the world survives and grows, at the beginning of this new pilgrimage out of the slavery of parochialism, narcissism, ignorance, avoidance, denial and insouciance that threatens to impale us on our own petard.

We can no longer justify a position of superiority, in the so-called developed world, hoarding vaccines, therapeutics, equipment, oxygen, and eventually clean water from those who are battling the pandemic (currently) and/or whatever comes next.

We can no longer pay homage to the corporate greed that has ensnared public policy in too many quarters for too many decades, blowing the smoke of illusion, delusion, and dissembling, as Senator Romney did yesterday, in his utterance that all money made by the corporations go to “people”. He, of all people, a millionaire at least, knows better than to make such a statement. And yet, he us currently regarded as one of the more moderate of the Republican Senators, in that he has not drunk the trump kool-aid.

We can no longer tolerate a joint VETO from China and Russia, when it comes to Syrian president Assad’s crimes against humanity.

We can no longer tolerate a United States’ veto, again at the Security Council, to investigate war crimes against Israel.

We must not tolerate a mushy, mealy-mouthed communique from the climate conference in Glasgow later this year, that has no muscle of enforcement, for those countries/leaders who seek to hide from their responsibilities to the rest of the world.

In fact, no leader of any nation should be able to be elected with having to face probing questions about how he/she will commit to the future life of the planet, before their electors cast their votes. And as citizens, not merely of our town or village, of our city or province, or even of the nation of our birth, but now and increasingly of the WORLD, we have both a right and a duty to become acquainted with, familiar with, and engaged in the processes that will attempt to “govern” the next decades, should we all make it through them.

 

Each of us has a mind, a heart, a spirit and a voice. Each of us also has a moral and ethical “code” perhaps not written down anywhere, but nevertheless deeply buried in our consciousness and our sub-conscious, from which to draw both our motivation to learn, and to discuss, and to throw off the mantle of indifference. It will take ALL of us, in our own individual way to bring the “power” of the world’s decision-making forces and people, to heel to the needs and the will of the billions of ordinary men and women and children in every country…. Russia, Belarus, Myanmar, Somalia, Nigeria, China, North Korea, Israel, Palestine, Iran, Syria and even Saudi Arabia.

 

None of us can be exempted from the urgent cause of saving ourselves from ourselves. If the pandemic can teach us anything, it is that there is no single individual who can count on escaping the ravages of COVID-19 and because an “all hand on deck:” approach is required now, it can be preparation for a new world vision and aspiration for a full and healthy life for all, now and in the future.

 

Who can look in the mirror and say “No thanks to this shared mandate, shared threat and also shared opportunity?”