Australian Energy Major Wins Greenwashing Court Case

Australia’s Santos has won a tribunal lawsuit that was brought against it 5 years agone by environmentalists, alleging that the institution misled its shareholders astir its net-zero intentions.

A national justice successful Sydney dismissed the lawsuit this week, with details astir the motives for her determination to beryllium published adjacent week.

The litigation communicative began successful 2021, erstwhile a shareholder advocacy dubbed the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility alleged that Santos had made misleading claims astir its plans to trim its Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions to a nett zero by 2040.

The Environmental Defenders Office, acting connected behalf of ACCR, argued that Santos’ claims that earthy state is “clean fuel” and that it has a credible pathway to nett zero emissions by 2040 “constitute misleading oregon deceptive conduct” nether the Corporations Act 2001 and the Australian Consumer Law, EDO said astatine the time.

The tribunal lawsuit was besides “a landmark, world-first trial lawsuit successful narration to the viability of c seizure and storage, and the biology impacts of bluish hydrogen, progressively touted arsenic a cardinal constituent successful state companies’ pathways toward nett zero emissions,” EDO added.

Five years on, and the lawsuit has failed to go a landmark contempt the efforts of the plaintiffs’ team, who focused connected the connection Santos used, pointing to its plans to usage earthy state to trim its c footprint arsenic presumably incompatible with an existent vigor transition.

Greenwashing lawsuits person multiplied implicit the past 5 years, arsenic assorted environmentalist groups question ways to unit companies—and section governments—into making emanation simplification a bigger precedence than it already is for many. Last October, French TotalEnergies got deed with a tribunal ruling that it had misled the nationalist astir its greenish credentials aft environmentalists sued. Several years earlier, Shell was ordered by a tribunal to trim its emissions by 45% from 90s levels by 2030, successful different lawsuit targeting the vigor manufacture connected emissions.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

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