Dangerous Actions

Although fossil fuel corporations care little enough about keeping the world fit for human habitation provided the profits keep flooding in, they are occasionally capable of concern for the safety of others provided the profits keep flooding in. Shell plc is so worried about the safety of climate protesters that it is suing Greenpeace for between 2.1 and 8.6 million dollars. The benefactors of the Niger delta have been traumatised by Greenpeace activists' occupation of an oil platform in January and an attempted lawsuit against eleven Shell directors which aimed to hold them, of all things, personally responsible for the strategies of their own company. The lawsuit was rejected on the obvious grounds that Shell was too big to obey the law; although a less British legal system did order the company to cut its emissions by forty-five per cent over the decade, in accordance with the Paris agreement. Shell appealed that ruling on the grounds that agreements to limit climate change are the concern of governments rather than of anyone involved in accelerating climate change. Few Greenpeace protesters could ever aspire to so idiosyncratic a sense of responsibility.