Big Oil feels the heat in European courts

A new lawsuit against Italian oil giant Eni shows how fossil fuel companies could be held accountable under laws outside the U.S.

Emily Sanders is the Center for Climate Integrity’s editorial lead. Catch up with her on Twitter here.

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Graphic design by Tess Abbot

Here at ExxonKnews, we often focus on the climate cases brought against oil and gas majors in the United States. But we’ve spilled less digital ink on those efforts elsewhere.

This week, we’re surveying the evolving landscape of climate cases filed against Big Oil companies under different European laws — how they can be held accountable in various jurisdictions, and what they tell us about where the movement is headed.

In Italy, oil giant Eni is facing a new lawsuit for decades of “lobbying and greenwashing” that led to climate catastrophe.

Two environmental groups and twelve Italian citizens hailing from Italy’s most climate-wrecked regions sued Eni last month for its historic and present-day climate deception, which the lawsuit argues led to violations of human rights under Italian and European law. The case, filed in the Civil Court of Rome, is the country’s first-ever climate lawsuit against a private entity.

The suit argues that Eni downplayed the impact of fossil fuels on the planet while expanding their production and use. In putting the climate under threat, the plaintiffs say Eni infringed on the fundamental rights to life, health, and private and family life that are protected in the Italian Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights. 

The plaintiffs are asking the court to force Eni to reduce emissions across its operations 45% by 2030, as well as to establish the company’s liability for “material, economic, and moral damages as well as damages to their health and property, as a result of the consequences of climate change,” according to a Greenpeace media briefing. 

The complaint cites documents discovered by the plaintiff organizations, ReCommon and Greenpeace Italy, including industry-funded reports from 1970 and 1978 documenting the “catastrophic” and “serious” consequences that unrestricted carbon emissions would have on the atmosphere. The company “knew about the impact on the climate associated with the exploitation of fossil fuels, but they decided to go ahead with their business as usual,” said Felice Moramarco, a communications strategist at Greenpeace Italy.

Eni is one of the largest polluters in the world, with operations in exploration, drilling, and petrochemical production spanning more than 60 countries. Today, the plaintiffs argue, the oil giant is using subtle forms of greenwashing to appear committed to addressing the climate crisis while making record profits through its growing business in fossil fuels, like claiming it can use carbon capture and storage to reach its net-zero targets in compliance with the Paris Agreement. 

Aside from Eni itself, the lawsuit also targets two government entities — the Ministry of Economy and Finance, and the development bank Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, who together own a 30% share in the company — for their complicity in Eni’s climate destruction. The plaintiffs are asking the court to order the entities to “adopt their own policies that guide their participation in the company by setting and monitoring ENI’s climate objectives in line with the Paris Agreement and human rights.” 

Antonio Tricarico, Program Director at ReCommon, said Eni is akin to a “parallel state” in Italy, where its deep and historic ties to government and unrivaled cultural, academic, and media sponsorships have allowed it to shape the country’s perceptions of fossil fuels — and, up until now, escape accountability there. 

“Since the invasion of Ukraine and the war and still ongoing energy crisis, the company has been very clever in repositioning itself as the rescuer of the Italian people for diversifying gas,” Tricarico said. As Desmog reported last month, Eni ran advertising campaigns promoting gas as a “clean” fuel (despite that methane poses even more of a short-term hazard to the climate than CO2).

“It’s a narrative battle — how to legitimize these operations,” Tricarico said. The lawsuit, according to Tricarico, is “a watershed in terms of campaigning on Eni, which is clearly the main blockage of the energy transition in Italy.” 

The Eni lawsuit is part of a rising tide of legal action against Big Oil in Europe.

The case against Eni “demonstrates that none of the oil majors are immune to this litigation, even in their home country,” said Carol Muffett, president of the Center for International Environmental Law. “Just as we have extensive historic documentation of what the oil companies knew and when they knew it in the U.S., those records are there to be found for other companies in other contexts as well.”

Here are some of the other lawsuits oil majors face in Europe: 

Milieudefensie et al. v. Royal Dutch Shell plc.

The lawsuit against Eni was modeled in large part after a 2019 suit brought against Shell in the Hague District Court of the Netherlands by environmental groups and more than 17,000 individual co-plaintiffs. As in Eni’s case, they argue that Shell’s historic climate deception and drastically inadequate plan to reduce carbon emissions have endangered human rights protected under Dutch and European law. They also ask the court to force Shell to reduce its emissions in accordance with the goals of the Paris Agreement.

In May 2021, a Dutch court ruled that Shell must reduce its emissions 45% by 2030, including from the use of its products (Scope 3 emissions). Shell appealed that decision last year, claiming that “Shell alone cannot directly influence the energy choices made by its customers.” (Funny — they sure tried to, with the decades of deception about their products and all).

Notre Affaire à Tous and Others v. Total

In France, oil giant Total is facing a similar lawsuit under a French “duty of vigilance” law passed in 2017, which requires corporations to identify and address risks its activities would pose to human rights and the environment. In 2021, Total lost its battle to move the case to commercial court.

Greenpeace France and Others v. TotalEnergies SE and TotalEnergies Electricité et Gaz France

A second lawsuit was filed against Total in 2022 by environmental groups seeking to hold the company accountable for running advertisements that intentionally misrepresented its role in the energy transition. The lawsuit argues that Total violated the European Unfair Consumer Practices Directive (UCPD), which protects consumers from false and misleading marketing — much like oil giants have been subjected to consumer protection lawsuits for climate fraud in the United States. 

BP greenwashing complaint

In the United Kingdom, a 2019 complaint against BP forced the polluter to withdraw its ‘Keep Advancing’ and ‘Possibilities Everywhere’ ad campaigns, which ClientEarth lawyers argued misled consumers about the climate consequences of gas and the company’s commitment to “low carbon energy.” Filed with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in the UK, the first of its kind complaint called for the ads to be banned unless they included tobacco-style health warnings about the climate impacts of greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels.

Big Oil could face litigation “in virtually every jurisdiction in the world.”

While laws will vary in each jurisdiction, the fundamental principles underlying cases against the fossil fuel industry are universal. “One of the unique things about the decisions that we’ve seen in the climate litigation context is that the judges aren’t limiting themselves to legal analysis drawn from their own countries,” Muffett said. “We’re seeing that jurists are applying analysis and decisions that are drawn from countries around the world. This is helping the law move much faster in this context than might otherwise be expected.”

You could say it all began with one Peruvian farmer and a precariously melting glacier. In 2015, Luciano Lliuya sued German multinational energy giant RWE in German court to make the company help pay for the cost of preventing a massive deluge of the city of Huaraz in Peru, where rising temperatures have made an impending disaster out of a glacier called Nevado Palcaraju. The case has cleared the company’s motions to dismiss and moved forward to an evidence-collecting phase by a panel of German judges, who are expected to make a ruling this year. 

While the amount of damages requested in Lliuya’s case is relatively small, the principle, Muffett said, is enormous.

“When you compare where we were even a few years ago, what we’ve established in one country after another is that courts now accept that the harms arising from climate change are justiciable, and that claims against identifiable defendants can be filed and prosecuted,” said Muffett. “The ability of people around the world to demonstrate that they have been or are being harmed by climate change, and that the operations and the business plans of the major investor owned oil companies are at the root of that harm, continues to grow. That is a fundamental revolution in the law in a very short span of time.

“The future for these companies is a future in which they face litigation in virtually every jurisdiction in the world where people might be affected by climate change.”

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ICYMI 

A staggering majority of shareholders rejected more than a dozen proposals for climate action at Exxon and Chevron’s annual general meetings this week. Across the Atlantic, activists swarmed the shareholder meetings of European oil giants Shell, BP, and TotalEnergies in protest of the companies’ ongoing climate destruction. Meanwhile, members of the U.S. Congress and the European Parliament are both calling for the oil executive presiding over the next U.N. Climate Change Conference to be removed from his seat, since he is an oil executive, and this is a climate change conference. 

In other words, the companies most responsible for climate change aren’t doing a great job of convincing anyone that they’re part of the solution — and people everywhere are stepping up actions to instead hold them accountable.