Dutch environmental groups take Shell to court over climate change

DutchNews, April 5, 2019

Part of the massive Pernis refinery. Photo: Shell Media Library

Environmental activists take Shell to court on Friday to try to stop the Anglo Dutch oil giant drilling for gas and oil, and to ensure it meets climate change targets. 

Some 17,000 people and six organisations have signed up to Milieudefensie’s call for co-defendants in the case, which the green group hopes will lead to a judge ‘forcing Shell to stop being a major cause of climate change.’ 

The 2015 Paris agreement on climate change included a commitment to leave oil, gas and coal in the grounds as much as possible, the lobby group says. ‘These three fuels are major causes of global warning and this is why we have to stop our dependence on them as soon as possible. 

‘Shell maintains that it is living up to these agreements but in practice this is far from the truth,’ Milieudefensie said. ‘Shell continues drilling for oil and gas non stop and spends billions of euros every year on oil and gas exploration.’ 

US oil group 

Earlier this week Shell said it is leaving a major US oil lobby group because it disagrees with the group’s policies on climate change. 

After reviewing its 19 industry memberships, Shell said it would not renew its membership of the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers lobby next year because of ‘material misalignment’. 

Chief executive Ben van Beurden said in the review that it is important to ensure ‘the industry associations we belong to do not undermine our support for the Paris Agreement.’ The US withdrew from the Paris deal in 2017.

Related Article:

Campaign group Follow This withdraws Shell AGM climate motion

Minister looks into early closure of coal-fired power stations

DutchNews, November 1, 2018

Coal fired power stations could close earlier. Photo: Depositphotos.com 

Economic affairs minister Eric Wiebes may consider closing one or more coal fired power stations earlier than planned to comply with CO2 reduction goals, broadcaster NOS reported on Thursday. 

During a debate on Dutch plans to combat climate change late on Wednesday night, the minister admitted for the first time that the Netherlands is unlikely to reach the official target of cutting emissions by 25% compared to 1990 in two years time. 

Experts say the government’s present climate policy will not lower CO2 emissions by more than 23%. That means some 4 million tonnes of CO2 emissions remain unaccounted for. 

The early closure of, for example, the coal-fired power station in Amsterdam, which is planned for 2024, would be good for some 3 million tonnes. 

The closure would form part of a package of additional measures which the minister said would be put in place next year, depending on the results of a new report on emission levels by Netherlands environmental assessment agency PBL due in January. 

Five plants 

The Netherlands currently has five coal-fired power stations, of which the three biggest and most polluting are in Rotterdam and the Eemshaven. The cabinet will shortly come up with a proposal for the closure of all five by 2030.

Last month, appeal court judges ordered the Dutch state to step up efforts to cut CO2 emissions in a case brought by campaign group Urgenda. 

The state appealed against a decision three years ago that required it to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25% of 1990 levels by 2020. It was the first time a court had ruled that a national government was legally bound to follow through on promises made in international climate agreements.

Canada relaunches pipeline talks with indigenous tribes

Yahoo – AFP, October 3, 2018

Harriet Prince (R) of the Canada's Anishinaabe tribe demonstrates in March 2018 with
 environmental activists opposed to the Trans Mountain pipeline project in Burnaby,
British Columbia, Canada (AFP Photo/Jason Redmond)

Ottawa (AFP) - Canada's resources minister said Wednesday Ottawa was relaunching consultations with indigenous groups on the Trans Mountain pipeline to the Pacific after a court ruled the tribes get a say in the multi-billion dollar project.

"We believe that we can and must move forward with engaging in a meaningful and focused consultation with indigenous groups on the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project," Natural Resources Minister Amarjeet Sohi told a press conference.

And so the government, he said, will "reinitiate (those) consultations with indigenous groups impacted by the project."

The minister added that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberal government -- which has made reconciliation with Canada's indigenous peoples a priority -- would seek to "dialogue and listen carefully to the concerns of indigenous peoples and offer accommodation if accommodation is possible."

Sohi also said the government will not appeal the court ruling affirming the constitutional rights of indigenous peoples to be consulted on commercial projects on their traditional lands.

Trudeau, speaking to reporters outside parliament, said an appeal was off the table because it "would take another few years before we could begin construction."

"We feel the blueprint the court laid out for (Trans Mountain) will allow us to get things done quicker and get our resources to new markets other than the United States in a more rapid fashion," he said.

The 1,150-kilometer (715-mile) pipeline was to move 890,000 barrels of oil a day from landlocked Alberta province to the Pacific coast for export, replacing a smaller crumbling conduit built in 1953.

The Trudeau administration approved the project in 2016 after an environmental review, saying it was in the "national interest" as it would help ease Canada's reliance on the US market and get a better price for its crude oil.

But the planned pipeline has faced stiff opposition from environmentalists and indigenous tribes worried that increased shipping from a marine terminal at the end of the route in Vancouver would impede the recovery of killer whale populations in the area.

Ottawa stepped in to buy the project for Can$4.5 billion (US$3.5 billion), effectively nationalising it in a bid to bring a swift end to legal challenges and illegal protests at construction sites.

But the Federal Court of Appeal ruled that the government must take a second look at the project, taking greater care to consult with indigenous tribes and consider marine traffic impacts.

Last month, Sohi sent the file back to the National Energy Board for reassessment, taking into account the impact of increased tanker traffic on endangered killer whales along the coast.

Once that review and indigenous consultations are concluded Trudeau's cabinet would have to decide again whether to greenlight the project.

Chinese farmer turned eco-warrior takes on big business

Yahoo – AFP, Yanan WANG, November 12, 2017

Farmer Wang Enlin (2nd L) sits in his house with fellow environmental activists who
 have taken on a subsidiary of China's largest chemical firm, accusing it of polluting and
destroying farmland (AFP Photo/Nicolas ASFOURI)

Yushutun (China) (AFP) - Wang Enlin, an elderly farmer who left school when he was 10 years old and taught himself law armed with a single textbook and dictionary, makes for an unlikely eco-warrior.

Yet the 64-year-old is determined to reap justice as he readies for a fresh battle in his war with a subsidiary of China's largest chemical firm, which he accuses of polluting and destroying his farmland.

"In China, behind every case of pollution is a case of corruption," he said of his mission to bring Qihua Chemical Group (also known as Heilongjiang Haohua Chemical) to account.

Wang and others villagers from northeast Heilongjiang province have sued Qihua accusing it of contaminating their soil, rendering it untenable for crops, in a case that has stretched on for more than 16 years.

This February, Wang and his self-styled "Senior Citizen Environmental Protection Team" earned a rare victory when a local court ordered Qihua to clear up their chemical waste site -- adjacent to the farmers' land -- and pay a total of 820,000 yuan ($120,000) to compensate for lost harvests in 55 affected rural households.

But that ruling was overturned on appeal, and Wang is now gearing up to fight back on another day in court.

"We will absolutely win. The law is on our side," Wang told AFP.

His case is testing the possibilities of a national environmental protection law revised in 2015.

The legislation was widely touted as a way to open the courts to public interest environmental damage lawsuits, but has been criticised for poor implementation.

Farmer Wang Enlin (2nd L) sits in his house with fellow environmental activists who 

have taken on a subsidiary of China's largest chemical firm, accusing it of polluting 

and destroying farmland (AFP Photo/Nicolas ASFOURI)

Change your fate

Qihua is a subsidiary of the state-owned ChemChina, the country's largest chemical enterprise. It specialises in crude oil processing and petroleum products.

Wang's battle began in 2001, when a village committee leased 28.5 hectares (70 acres) to Qihua for use as a chemical waste dumping ground without the villagers' consent.

The villagers claim that the company failed to take proper pollution control measures.

Wang says he felt compelled to teach himself law after realising he lacked the knowledge or resources to take on the might of an industrial giant.

China had just emerged from its Great Famine when Wang left school: "It didn't matter at the time whether you got an education," he said. "It wouldn't change your fate."

He was well into middle age when he found a textbook on environmental law at a local bookstore. It took him years to understand as he painstakingly looked up unfamiliar terms in a dog-eared dictionary.

After petitioning the local authorities to no avail, he received aid in 2007 from the Centre for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims, which helped the villagers put together a lawsuit using evidence he had compiled.

A 2013 sampling of mercury levels conducted on the site by the Green Beagle Institute, a Beijing-based non-profit, found the land was "not suitable for agricultural use".

The Ministry of Environmental Protection included Qihua in a 2014 list of "major" environmental cases.

But it was still another year before Wang's case was accepted into China's justice system.

Prominent environmentalist Ma Jun told AFP that while the litigation process has been streamlined since 2015, pollution lawsuits can still take years to be heard partly because "local governments give some degree of protection to polluting companies".

Today Wang prepares his own legal paperwork and hosts daily gatherings at his home for villagers hoping to learn about their rights.

Wang, who suffers from lung problems and requires medicine to help him breathe, accuses Qihua of "pretending to be deaf and mute" on the issue.

He says he is frequently visited by police officers who urge him to drop the case and stop talking to the media.

Qihua's lawyers declined to comment on the case.

'Corrupt officials'

In September, the Qiqihar Intermediate People's Court accepted Wang's request to appeal the ruling that overturned his initial victory.

"We're just farmers, without any resources or power," said Wang Baoqin (no relation), a member of Wang Enlin's senior citizens' environmental group.

"Against the government, we can't win. Against those corrupt officials, we definitely can't win. So we decided to take the side road and fight the company."

According to Rachel Stern, the author of "Environmental Litigation in China: A Study in Political Ambivalence," the number of new legal cases related to natural resources has increased tenfold over the past decade.

The Supreme People's Court heard 133,000 such cases last year.

Some complainants have found success: in 2015, a petrol giant was ordered to pay 1.68 million yuan ($265,000) to 21 fishermen whose livelihoods suffered from oil spills.

Qihua's plant did not appear to be in operation when AFP reporters visited in late August. The land was dry and marked by patches of overgrown grass, no longer the site of a massive wastewater pond.

But no crops will grow in the spot again, Wang Baoqin predicted.

"We may not even see justice in our lifetimes," she said. "We're doing this for the generations to come."

A Chinese farmer who taught himself law takes on the big business that polluted his and his neighbors' lands https://t.co/BtWvQJBrI7 pic.twitter.com/wGlDbb8Njo

— AFP news agency (@AFP) November 12, 2017

Nobel laureate wants global environment court

Yahoo – AFP, October 24, 2017

Yemeni Nobel Peace Prize laureate Tawakkol Karman calls for a global tribunal to
prosecute executives of multinational corporations who damage the environment (AFP
Photo/Orlando SIERRA)

Tegucigalpa (AFP) - Nobel Peace Prize laureate Tawakkul Karman proposed in Honduras on Tuesday the creation of a global tribunal to prosecute executives of multinational firms who damage the earth.

Karman, of Yemen, made the suggestion in the Central American country that Amnesty International last year described -- along with its neighbor Guatemala -- as the most dangerous in the world for environmentalists.

"A world court should be created that could punish all these multinational corporations" that damage the environment and contribute to climate change, Karman said through a translator.

She spoke at a press conference with Shirin Ebadi of Iran, a fellow Nobel laureate who won the peace prize in 2003.

As part of the Nobel Women's Initiative, they aimed "to gather a first-hand account of the ongoing violence against women land defenders" in Honduras and in Guatemala, where they travelled later Tuesday, the group's website says.

The murder of Berta Caceres, 45, gunned down last year, highlighted the threat to Honduran activists and sparked international outrage.

Caceres opposed plans by the company Desarrollos Energeticos to build a hydroelectric dam across a river on which indigenous communities depended.

Rachel Vincent, advocacy and media director for the Nobel Women's Initiative, said Honduras has the world's highest rate of murders for human rights and land defenders.

Since 2009, 123 activists have been killed, she said.

In comments to AFP, Karman said a special international court is needed "to fight against corruption and money laundering and against all those involved in destroying the environment and exploiting the climate in a damaging way."

She said such a tribunal could be similar to The Hague-based International Criminal Court which investigates and tries people charged with genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Karman said the court she proposes would handle cases in which human rights and environmental activists or anti-corruption fighters are "found dead."

She also said the investigation of Caceres's murder must be deepened "to discover all those who benefited from this crime."

Eight people were arrested, among them an employee of Desarrollos Energeticos.

The Nobel laureates met Austra Berta Flores, the mother of Caceres, on Saturday.

In Guatemala, they are to join two other Nobel Peace Prize winners, Guatemala's Rigoberta Menchu and Jody Williams of the United States.

Dutch state has two weeks to publish clean air plan, court rules

DutchNews, September 7, 2017

Traffic is a major source of inner city pollution. Photo: Depositphotos.com

The Dutch state has been given two weeks to come up with a plan to drastically improve air quality in the Netherlands by judges in The Hague. 

In addition, ministers must publish a list of all the places in the Netherlands where pollution limits are being broken or may be broken in the future, the court said. 

The court was responding to a fast-track case brought by environmental organisation Milieudefensie which claims tens of thousands of people die prematurely in the Netherlands every year because of air pollution. 

Although the government does have a plan to reduce air pollution, it is still too vague and short on concrete measures, the court said. In addition, the plan will not lead to change immediately and the deadline for meeting official pollution limits has already been moved several times,’ the court said in its ruling. 

Milieudefensie spokeswoman Anne Knol said the ruling is a ‘breakthrough’ for healthy air. ‘Air pollution in the Netherlands really needs to be tackled so that fewer people are made ill or die from the consequences. It is also good news for the million lung patients in the Netherlands.’ 

Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague are all in the top 12 of most polluted European cities and last year air quality deteriorated further, the organisation claims. 

Similar cases have also been brought before the courts in Germany and Britain. In the Netherlands in 2015, a citizens initiative known as Urgenda won its case to force the government to take more steps to reduce greenhouse gases. 

Junior economic affairs minister Sharon Dijksma said in a reaction that the government will do more to tackle air pollution. ‘Clean air is crucial,’ she told news agency ANP. ‘That is why we are going to speed up our approach and make our plans more concrete, together with the regions where there are problems.’

Related Articles:

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Electric cars catch on in Dutch company lease fleets

20TH KRYON SUMMER LIGHT CONFERENCE, US (7), June 2-4, 2017 (Kryon Channelling by Lee Carroll) (Text version "The State of the Earth")

"... This is controversial. The planet can't just "change the water". It does it instead with a "reboot of life in the ocean" using the water cycle. Watch for evidence of this as it occurs, and then remember this channel. This weather cycle is to refresh the life in the ocean so that everyone on the planet will have needed food from the ocean. Gaia does this by itself, has done it before, and it does it for a reason - so it will not stagnate.

Dear ones, indeed, you have put compromising things into the air and the water, but it has not caused this cycle. We have said for a very long time, stop killing the environment! The reason? It's going to kill you, not Gaia. Gaia is spectacularly resilient and will survive anything you do. However, it is you who may not survive if you continue polluting. All this is starting to change with your awareness, and you're starting to see this and move with it. But Humans are not causing the current weather shift. This will be known eventually.

What is happening has happened before, and it's almost like a reboot for the oceans and it carries a lot of dichotomous events. You're going to see reports of a dying ocean, but at the same time you're going to see unusual reports of too many fish and other sea life in places that were supposed to have a decline. You're going to see the life cycle of the ocean itself start to change and reboot.  ..."

Green group takes Dutch state to court over air pollution

DutchNews, August 21, 2017

Photo: Depositphotos.com

Environmental organisation Milieudefensie is taking the Dutch government to court this week, demanding it takes immediate action to ensure air quality meets official directives.

The case will be heard by judges in The Hague on Wednesday. Milieudefensie claims that the government has been damaging citizens’ health for years. ‘Every day we breathe in unhealthy air and that means tens of thousands of people get ill and thousands die as a consequence,’ a spokesman told the Parool. 

The paper said a recent health board report revealed the air quality in Amsterdam has not improved in recent years and concentrations of nitrogen dioxide have worsened.

Related Article:

20TH KRYON SUMMER LIGHT CONFERENCE, US (7), June 2-4, 2017 (Kryon Channelling by Lee Carroll) (Text version "The State of the Earth")

"... This is controversial. The planet can't just "change the water". It does it instead with a "reboot of life in the ocean" using the water cycle. Watch for evidence of this as it occurs, and then remember this channel. This weather cycle is to refresh the life in the ocean so that everyone on the planet will have needed food from the ocean. Gaia does this by itself, has done it before, and it does it for a reason - so it will not stagnate.

Dear ones, indeed, you have put compromising things into the air and the water, but it has not caused this cycle. We have said for a very long time, stop killing the environment! The reason? It's going to kill you, not Gaia. Gaia is spectacularly resilient and will survive anything you do. However, it is you who may not survive if you continue polluting. All this is starting to change with your awareness, and you're starting to see this and move with it. But Humans are not causing the current weather shift. This will be known eventually.

What is happening has happened before, and it's almost like a reboot for the oceans and it carries a lot of dichotomous events. You're going to see reports of a dying ocean, but at the same time you're going to see unusual reports of too many fish and other sea life in places that were supposed to have a decline. You're going to see the life cycle of the ocean itself start to change and reboot.  ..."