GreyShuck

More than 30 public figures including Emma Thompson, Imelda Staunton and Greta Thunberg have written to Shell criticising its “callous and vindictive” lawsuit against Greenpeace after activists occupied a moving oil platform last year.

In one of the biggest legal threats in the environmental charity’s 50-year history, Shell is suing it for $1m (£790,000) in damages, with costs that could run into the millions.

The move follows a protest in January last year in which four Greenpeace activists boarded a platform north of the Canary Islands that was being transported to the Shetland Islands, holding signs stating: “Stop drilling – start paying.”

Monday’s letter , signed by dozens of prominent musicians, activists, and lawyers as well as more than 100,000 members of the public, calls on Shell to respect the right to protest.

The ad opens on a bucolic mountainscape, a lush, ascending piano run playing in the background. Gauzy clips from nostalgic midcentury auto ads fill the screen. “See the USA in your Chevrolet,” 1950s diva Dinah Shore sings.

But this isn’t your average car advertisement. Soon, the title track from Singin’ in the Rain begins to play, and scenes of cars burning amid wildfires and filling with water in floods start rolling. The once rollicking music becomes somber.

This commercial is the latest production from Oscar-winning director Adam McKay’s climate-focused production company Yellow Dot Studios. Launched last year, the non-profit studio produces short-form videos aiming to push back on climate disinformation.

Several hundred protesters briefly broke into a plant owned by chemicals group Arkema near Lyon in southeastern France on Saturday to protest against alleged pollution from the site and eight people were arrested, local authorities said on Saturday.

Five climate change activists have been convicted of smashing a glass revolving door at JP Morgan’s European headquarters after a judge said their beliefs did not “afford them a defence”.

Stephanie Aylett, 29, Pamela Bellinger, 66, Amy Pritchard, 38, Adelheid Russenberger, 32 and Rosemary Webster, 66, used hammers and chisels to cause “many thousands of pounds” of damage during the Extinction Rebellion protest.

Courts around the world are handling an increasing number of climate and environmental cases due to the urgent need to combat worsening warming and ecosystem destruction.

As of December 2022, 2,180 climate-related cases had been filed in 65 jurisdictions, including international courts and tribunals, according to the UN’s 2023 global climate litigation report. People and organisations – including communities, cities, environmental groups and young people concerned about their future – are bringing lawsuits against their governments.

Citizens want governments to take more effective climate action that protects their right to live in a clean, healthy and safe environment. Some lawsuits are successful, others fall by the wayside.

Flagship cases illustrate certain tactics which maximise the chance of a win. There are many community actions against governments currently being brought before the European Court of Human Rights. The outcomes are highly anticipated and three key aspects could inform how climate justice is approached from a legal perspective in the future.

The 1963 Civil Rights victory in Birmingham, Alabama paved the way for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In their latest article, published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, UMass Amherst Associate Professor of History Kevin Young and Yale University environmental social scientist Laura Thomas-Walters ask: What are the lessons from that monumental victory for today's climate movement?

"We wanted to think more deeply about the concept of disruption with an eye toward being useful to the climate movement," Young says. "Lessons from 1963 are often misunderstood."

UK ministers are facing court for a second time over plans to meet legally binding climate targets, after environmental groups branded revised measures “a complete pipe dream”.

The government has already been forced to change its climate action plan after a legal challenge by environmentalists, but the same groups are taking it back to court over updated plans they say are “riddled with holes and relian[t] on risky techno-fixes”.

“We believe the government’s revised climate action plan is a complete pipe dream,” said Katie de Kauwe, a lawyer for Friends of the Earth. “It lacks critical information on the very real risks that its policies will fail to deliver the cuts needed to meet legally binding carbon reduction targets and relies too heavily on unproven technologies.

A controversial new study claims we may breach the 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) climate change increase threshold by the late 2020s — almost two decades earlier than current projections.

The study, published Feb. 5 in the journal Nature Climate Change, claims global surface temperatures had increased by 1.7 C (3 F) above pre-industrial averages by the year 2020.

However, other scientists have questioned the findings, saying that there are major flaws in the work.

Britain has handed major oil companies the right to drill for fossil fuels in 24 new licence areas across the North Sea as part of the government’s mission to extend the life of the ageing oil and gas basin.

The North Sea regulator said 17 oil companies, including Shell and BP, were granted licences in the Central North Sea, Northern North Sea and West of Shetland areas to “provide benefits to the local and wider economy”.

The latest licences, which follow an initial tranche of 27 licences offered in October last year, could begin producing oil and gas before the end of the decade, according to the North Sea Transition Authority.

The move has angered MPs and environmental campaigners who called the move “grossly irresponsible” and accused the government of overstating the economic benefits of the North Sea and sacrificing Britain’s climate leadership for “a pipe dream”.

The fossil fuel industry funded some of the world’s most foundational climate science as early as 1954, newly unearthed documents have shown, including the early research of Charles Keeling, famous for the so-called ‘Keeling curve’ that has charted the upward march of the Earth’s carbon dioxide levels.

A coalition of oil and car manufacturing interests provided $13,814 (about $158,000 in today’s money) in December 1954 to fund Keeling’s earliest work in measuring CO2 levels across the western US, the documents reveal.

Keeling would go on to establish the continuous measurement of global CO2 at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. This ‘Keeling curve’ has tracked the steady increase of the atmospheric carbon that drives the climate crisis and has been hailed as one of the most important scientific works of modern times.

The UK must act urgently to meet its international climate commitments, the independent climate watchdog has warned, after sending “mixed messages” to other countries at the Cop28 UN climate summit in December.

While carbon reduction from electricity generation has shown progress, the rate at which all other sources of emissions are being cut must quadruple to meet the UK’s target under the Paris agreement of 68% reductions in emissions by 2030, according to the Climate Change Committee.

Piers Forster, the interim chair of the committee, said: “We must rapidly replace fossil fuels with low-carbon alternatives to get back on track to meet our 2030 goal. The UK could set a powerful example of tackling climate change and reducing our insecurity to climate impacts.”

In 1916, a trainee doctor befriended a wounded young soldier in a hospital in Nantes. André Breton was working in the neurological ward and reading Freud. Jacques Vaché was a war interpreter, moving across the front between the Allied positions and disrupting where he could; he once collected cast-off uniforms from different armies, including enemy forces, and sewed them together to make his own “neutral” costume. He sent Breton letters describing his “comatose apathy” and indifference to the conflict, though, he wrote, “I object to dying in wartime”.

Weeks after the Armistice, Vaché killed himself in a hotel room. Breton hailed him “the deserter from within” and one of the key inspirations for “The Surrealist Manifesto”, published in Paris in 1924.

This slim volume turned out to be the most influential artistic pronouncement of the century. Breton argued that rational realpolitik had created the catastrophe of the first world war. Championing the irrational, the subconscious, dream states — “pure psychic automatism” — he called for a revolution of the mind: “thought dictated in the absence of all control exercised by reason.”

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