Sharp Rise in Number of Climate Lawsuits Against Companies, Report Says (theguardian.com) 44
The number of climate lawsuits filed against companies around the world is rising swiftly, a report has found, and a majority of cases that have concluded have been successful. From a report: About 230 climate-aligned lawsuits have been filed against corporations and trade associations since 2015, two-thirds of which have been initiated since 2020, according to the analysis published on Thursday by the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. One of the most rapidly growing forms of litigation is over "climate-washing" -- when companies are accused of misrepresenting their progress towards environmental targets -- and the analysis found that 47 such cases were filed against companies and governments in 2023.
As climate communications are increasingly scrutinised, there has been arise in climate-washing litigation, often with positive outcomes for those bringing the cases. Of the 140 climate-washing cases reviewed between 2016 and 2023, 77 have officially concluded, 54 of which ended with a ruling in favour of the claimant. More than 30 cases in 2023 concerned the "polluter pays" principle, whereby companies are held accountable for climate damage caused by high greenhouse gas emissions. The authors also highlighted six "turning off the taps" cases, which challenge the flow of finance to areas which hinder climate goals.
As climate communications are increasingly scrutinised, there has been arise in climate-washing litigation, often with positive outcomes for those bringing the cases. Of the 140 climate-washing cases reviewed between 2016 and 2023, 77 have officially concluded, 54 of which ended with a ruling in favour of the claimant. More than 30 cases in 2023 concerned the "polluter pays" principle, whereby companies are held accountable for climate damage caused by high greenhouse gas emissions. The authors also highlighted six "turning off the taps" cases, which challenge the flow of finance to areas which hinder climate goals.
Capitalism is all about trust (Score:3)
Alternately, they should hire better lawyers, not of the variety that tobacco companies hired in the 50s.
WEF shenanigans (Score:2)
How credible is the WEF anyway? Their gender equality index report lists for dozens of categories only two scenarios
1. Equality - When women and men are the same in one category and when women are doing better than men
2. Inequality - When women are doing worse than men in one category
So no, the WEF is not credible. Their 2024 equality report lists USA as equal for life expectancy even though men live 6 year shorter than women.
https://www.weforum.org/public... [weforum.org]
The WEF equality report is widely reported and
Re: (Score:2)
Truth in advertising matters. These companies should have listened to their lawyers.
Would those be the lawyers that told the companies to sidestep the issue by not making any promises in the first place on reducing CO2 emissions?
If I'm understanding the fine article correctly the lawsuits are over a corporation promising to lower CO2 emissions and that corporation not meeting that goal they set for themselves. Okay then, if announcing an effort to lower CO2 leads to lawsuits later if anything goes wrong then corporations will just learn to not make any promises to lower CO2 emissions. Of
Re: (Score:3)
An Erasmus public health group published a cynical study that the shorter life expectancy of smokers reduced the burden on Medicare because it reduced the number of old people. He didn't bother weighing that against the value of the smokers' lives to their family and themselves. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/... [nejm.org]
Your concern is that these lawsuits are inefficient use of environmentalist dollar
No assets, incorporate outside of your market (Score:2)
Companies will just limit liability by having nothing to take in a lawsuit
1. Incorporate outside of any country where they sell millions of dollars of product
2.. Not own anything in the country, lease it from some other company
Alternately, the company would just stop selling product to countries that have these laws favoring climate lawsuits.
FWIW: Consider that no insurance company would give liability insurance to a food, chemical, drug company in a high lawsuit risk country.
The legal reckoning hasn't even started. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm sure that these same people will soon discover that these companies also don't give a damn about black lives, take no pride in their alphabet customers, and will lie through their teeth to get whatever gullible group of idiots that love lip service to do business with them based on hollow words.
This has always been true, perhaps a new generation is just noticing
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
"Zen Fascists will control you...100% natural, you will jog for the master race, and always wear the happy face."
Re: The legal reckoning hasn't even started. (Score:2)
Imagine that (Score:3, Insightful)
You shit in the pool and then are asked to clean it up.
Re: (Score:2)
Lawyers.
Re: (Score:2)
I was going to make the same comment on how lawyers were going to get the money from these lawsuits but then I realized that while the lawyers will get some of the money most of all the money just gets lost, no better than just going out burning money and breaking things.
Maybe there's some exceptions here but my estimation is these lawsuits are just a waste of valuable resources. We have a bunch of activists that believed some corporation did something wrong, raised some money, took the corporations to cou
Re: (Score:2)
George Soros?
companies are people (Score:2)
Now they get to go to court to defend their screwups.
Turning off the taps (Score:2)
What about turning off the taps of foreign investment in countries that turn around and sue you?
Wait (Score:2)
You mean it was always about grabbing American money? I'm shocked!
That's nothing... (Score:2)
most of them funded by the same groups (Score:1)
island not gone (Score:1)
Re: island not gone (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
just as i read that this one atoll in the pacific still hasn't disappeared after 20 years of prediction this entire climate change caused by human is a scheme, it's not true at all climate is warming up because the earth is passing through a very magnetically active area of our galaxy, which interacts with the iron core
Cite, bro. Cite. Not because I wanna attack the premise. Because I find the premise itself interesting on the surface, even if it's complete bunk. I like investigating the more out-there theories, because even wing-nuts sometimes have something to offer the conversation. And? Considering I've never even heard a whisper of this particular theory in the past, I'd be very curious where you discovered this gem. Provided I don't need to schedule an appointment with your proctologist to find your source.
Re: (Score:2)
I think he is talking about the galactic current sheet, which interacts with the sun (and presumably also with the earth's core, but I'm less familiar with that aspect). I could be wrong, and he might be talking about something completely different.
Be warned that this gets very complicated very fast.
Basically, the sun has a magnetic field and an outward flow of charged particles. That flow tends to form into a sheet that roughly corresponds with the heliospheric equator, but wavy because of the spinning m
Re: (Score:2)
I think he is talking about the galactic current sheet, which interacts with the sun (and presumably also with the earth's core, but I'm less familiar with that aspect). I could be wrong, and he might be talking about something completely different.
Be warned that this gets very complicated very fast.
Basically, the sun has a magnetic field and an outward flow of charged particles. That flow tends to form into a sheet that roughly corresponds with the heliospheric equator, but wavy because of the spinning magnetic fields. The galaxy has the same thing, but on a much, much bigger scale.
The theory is that the local wavefront of the galactic sheet announced its own arrival in the 1860s with the Carrington event. To understand that, think of the sun's surface as a chimney that must be kept clear, and the galactic particle flow as clogging the chimney, causing a buildup of pressure that blows off occasionally. Other nearby stars show evidence of recent eruptions, and we are starting to think that there is a spectrum (figuratively speaking) of solar output that ranges from "normal" to "solar flare" to "nova", with the line between the larger flares and the smaller novas being pretty fuzzy.
The galactic current sheet also interacts with the sun to modulate not just flares and novas, and not just what the climate guys think of as the sun's output (TSI), but also the other 99% of what the sun does that they ignore, like cosmic rays. (Some people define cosmic rays to be of non-solar origin, but that's just word games.) Cosmic rays play a huge role in cloud dynamics.
There is also - something - going on inside the earth. The planet's magnetic field is fading fast and the magnetic poles are moving away from the inertial poles. And the rotation speed of the earth's core is shifting relatively quickly, sometimes super-rotating (spinning faster than the surface) and sometimes supra-rotating (slower than the surface). And there are credible arguments that the recent changes in ocean temperatures are not thermodynamically plausible based on an external heating model (aka solar doesn't dump enough joules to do what we are seeing).
Citations are hard to do because this is big and messy, and pulls things in from all over. New papers are published almost daily that either support, or at least conform to, some aspects of this theory - and in credible journals too. But for the big picture synthesis, you have to go outside of the mainstream. I think that the biggest name is suspicious0bservers.org [suspicious0bservers.org], but he makes his living selling a mix of doomsday literature and more conventional science. His daily youtube show is about 50% observations of solar phenomena, using NASA/NOAA data.
Thanks for the write-up, man. It's been several decades since I looked into it, but I used to be fascinated by the idea of the rotating/shifting poles theory. Where Earth's magnetosphere essentially goes batshit for a few weeks/months/years, and we end up with the poles either flipping or moving somewhere wildly different than they are before the shift. I don't know if that's been debunked in recent decades, but I wonder if we aren't seeing the beginning of that from within?
Re: (Score:2)
Good time to be a lawyer (Score:2)
Regardless of which side. Although being a corporate lawyer probably pays better.
Europe in an energy crisis. (Score:2)
Just saw this video posted to Peter Zeihan's youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
A summary of that video is that Europe has to build nuclear power plants, see their lights go out, or seek out fossil fuels from nations that are not exactly stable politically and economically right now. The example used was Italy, they are faced with dusting off the books on how to manage a domestic nuclear power industry after they abandoned the technology, seeing the country go dark (or at least dim since th
Re: (Score:2)
Most of this isn't true, unfortunately. Italy, like the rest of the Europe, is struggling to adapt to the Russia situation. Nuclear is a solution? Well, maybe if it were quick to build which it isn't. Meantime, there is plenty of scope to add lots of solar power to Italy; in parts of the country the use of agrivoltaics may be one of the ways to keep the vines growing in the face of climate change exacerbated water shortages.
On top of that Italy is big, long and has a lot of shallow water and currently have
Re: (Score:2)
Nuclear is a solution? Well, maybe if it were quick to build which it isn't.
I'm getting really fed up with this bullshit argument as I've been hearing this bullshit for my entire adult life. Had people just shut the fuck up about how long nuclear power plants take to get built and start building them then we would not have this energy problem we have now.
You think the people in Italy don't know that nuclear power plants take time to build? I'm sure they know that but they are considering nuclear power regardless. Why? Because they had subject matter experts look at their abilit
Re: (Score:2)
True, true, if we had taken notice of the clear evidence that climate change was a real problem, we wouldn't be where we are now.
What is also true is the increases in energy production capacity from solar and then wind are far outstripping nuclear or indeed any other source. That Italy is considering building new plants -- which I can't find much evidence of -- that would be because they have none and it is worth considering all the options. Especially for a right wing government because, bizarrely, electri
Re: (Score:2)
What leads you to believe that the technology for a floating nuclear power plant doesn't exist?
While there's been few floating nuclear power plants built so far they have been built before, Russia has one currently in operation. Floating fossil fuel power plants have been built in considerable quantities over the years, so that's nothing new. Putting a nuclear reactor on a ship for power is nothing new. Thinking up something that combines these different ship features should be trivial. I mentioned floa
Re: (Score:2)
We have floating nuclear power. We do not have large scale floating nuclear power with full connection to the onshore grid. Maybe the technology developed for floating wind turbines will work, but multiple 20MW lines to seabed is not the same thing as a single 200MW line. Personally, I can't see the big benefit. If you can put a nuclear reactor onto a ship, then you could also take it off again and put it onto dry land where it would be cheaper to run, maintain and secure; I mean, why use a sea borne enviro
the wost offenders (Score:2)