Fossil Fuel Litigation: international progress on legal and factual questions

Abstract: Fossil fuel companies around the world are producing ever more fossil fuels and investing billions into new extraction projects, locking in future fossil fuel production volumes grossly inconsistent with achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement. New fossil fuel production projects have long faced litigation on planning, environmental and administrative law grounds. Increasingly, novel legal theories are being employed in strategic suits against fossil fuel companies - the recent decision of the Court of Appeal of the Hague in Shell v Milieudefensie being an important example. In this seminar, Dr Fergus Green will provide an overview of the landscape of fossil fuel litigation, explore key legal and factual questions that commonly arise in such litigation, and discuss recent developments in the UK, Europe and under international law.

Speaker: Dr Fergus Green is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy, University College London. He works on questions at the intersection of political economy, political theory, public policy and law concerning the drivers of and responses to climate change, including projects on fossil fuel governance, just transitions, and popular decarbonisation. He has published in a wide range of academic journals, including Science, the American Political Science Review, Global Environmental Politics, the Journal of Political Philosophy, Nature Climate Change, and the Melbourne Journal of International Law. He is a three-time chapter co-author of UNEP’s fossil fuel Production Gap Report and co-created the Redline database to support litigation against fossil fuel projects. He has also been a consultant to the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission, and an expert advisor to Milieudefensie (Friends of the Earth Netherlands) in the appeal stage of its landmark corporate climate case against Shell. Before entering academia, Fergus worked as a lawyer in Australia specialising in climate change, energy, environmental and water law, and subsequently as a Policy Analyst & Research Advisor to Professor Nicholas Stern at the LSE’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

Details: This is a hybrid event, held online and at La Trobe Law School (Bundoora campus, Kingston Braybrook Moot Court, Social Sciences Building, level 2).