Lawyer Roger Cox says there has never been such a lawsuit: a large international corporation is to be judicially compelled to radically trim its business towards climate protection and to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by almost half by the end of the decade.

The lawsuit before a Dutch district court in The Hague is directed against Europe's largest oil company, Shell.

But it could set a precedent for other large companies as well.

The plaintiffs are the environmental protection association Friends of the Earth and other non-governmental organizations.

The lawyer Cox represents them in court.

The verdict is due to be pronounced on May 26th.

Marcus Theurer

Editor in the economy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

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    If Shell loses this process, the consequences for the company would be huge.

    The plaintiffs are demanding that the oil company reduce its entire carbon footprint by 45 percent - and with it all emissions that arise when the oil and gas produced by Shell is burned anywhere in the world.

    At first glance, the result of such a judgment seems pretty crazy: the court would in fact require one of the largest companies in the world to shrink by half within a few years.

    Shell is only likely to grow in the future with climate-neutral energy.

    So far, however, the group has generated its sales almost exclusively with fossil fuels.

    Courts protect the climate

    On the other hand: Is such an outcome of this model trial really unthinkable? In Germany, too, the courts are intervening in the climate problem: the Federal Constitutional Court has just passed its first climate protection judgment and instructed the federal government to formulate its CO2 reduction targets for the period after 2030 more specifically. Other European governments have already decided to ban the sale of vehicles with internal combustion engines in a few years. And the fact that the marketing of fossil fuels has to decrease as quickly as possible on a global basis is fairly undisputed. Why not by court order?

    Plaintiffs attorney Cox wants to achieve just that.

    “There are many companies that are half the size of Shell today and yet very profitable,” he says, unmoved.

    He knows that the consequences of defeat for Shell would extend well beyond this one corporation.

    "Such a signal would suddenly change the assessment of the risk profile of oil companies," says Cox.

    Then auditors who audit the balance sheets of companies and fund managers who hold their shares would be forced to see them differently and much more critically in order not to make themselves legally vulnerable.

    RWE is also on trial

    So the case highlights the role of big business in the fight against climate change. There are currently around 40 climate protection lawsuits against energy companies in the world. Often the companies should be taken into recourse for climate damage. In 2018, for example, Rhode Island became the first American state to sue a group of large oil companies for damages. The accusation: the companies knowingly contributed to climate change and did not warn about the dangers of fossil fuels.

    In Germany, the Hamm Higher Regional Court is dealing with the lawsuit brought by a Peruvian smallholder against the RWE Group. With its coal-fired power plants, the latter contributed to the melting of the glaciers in Peru, which threatened the farmer's home village. The French oil company Total, on the other hand, is faced with a similar lawsuit in its home country as Shell in the Netherlands: Total should also change its business model so that it complies with climate protection.

    "Without the involvement of multinational corporations, the international climate protection goals cannot be achieved," says Donald Pols, managing director of the Dutch department of Friends of the Earth. The British think tank Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) calculated a few years ago that since the late 1980s the 25 leading energy companies and their products have been responsible for half of all industrial greenhouse gas emissions in the world. For Donald Pols it follows: You have to start with precisely these corporations and force them to change.