interviews
Water and the American West
by Richard Frank
October 25, 2021
This interview with Richard Frank, professor of environmental practice at the UC Davis School of Law and Director of the California Environmental Law and Policy Center, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Can you tell me a little bit about the story of water and how it's tied to the West, and to California in particular?
Richard | A friend of mine who's a Court of Appeals Justice here in California wrote an opinion on a water law dispute and started it with the quote, "the history of California is written on its waters." And I think that the point is true of the entire American West.
Water policy and legal issues are inextricably tied to the development of the Western United States; water is the limiting factor in so many ways to settlement, to economic development, to prosperity, and to the environment and environmental preservation.
Can you talk about the difference between groundwater and surface water– and the policies that regulate each?
There are really two types of water when it comes to human consumption. There's surface water: that is the water that is transmitted by lakes, rivers, and streams. Then there is groundwater, and a substantial amount of water that Americans and the American West rely on is groundwater. That is water that is stored in groundwater aquifers, which are naturally occurring groundwater basins. Both groundwater and surface water are critical to the American West and its economy and its culture.
Traditionally a couple of things are important to note, first of all, water is finite. Second, water gets allocated in the Western United States generally at the state level. There's a limited federal role. Primarily, policy decisions about who gets how much water for what purpose are made state by state.
I think allocation is really interesting in that it's more state-level than federal. How was water and the allocation of water in California designed? Is it a public-private combination? What goes on in terms of the infrastructure of water?
Another very good question. The answer is it depends. Most of our water infrastructure is public in nature.
Again, in the American West, the regulation of water rights is generally done at the state level, but the federal government, historically, has a major water footprint in the American West because it has been federal dollars and federal design and management that really controlled much of the major water infrastructure in the American West — you know, Hoover Dam, and the complex system of dams and reservoirs on the Colorado River in California, with the Central Valley Project that was built and managed by the federal government with Shasta Dam on the upper Sacramento River as the centerpiece of that project. But we also have a California State Water Project, the key facility being the Oroville Dam and reservoir on the Southern River that is managed by state water managers. If we were starting over, that kind of parallel system would make no particular engineering or operational sense.
But, we are captive to our history.
And then you have these massive systems of aqueducts and canals that move water from one place to another throughout the American West. They are particularly responsible for moving water from surface water storage facilities to population centers. In the last 50 to 75 years, these population centers have really expanded dramatically, so you need massive infrastructure to deliver water from those storage facilities, the dams, and reservoirs, which generally are located in remote areas to the population centers. So it takes a lot of time and energy to transport the water, from where it is captured and stored to where it is needed for human use.
California has faced continuous drought – what measures is the state taking now to manage water?
Just to frame the issue a little bit — we have, as I mentioned, a growing population in the American Southwest at a time when the amount of available water is shrinking due to drought and due to the impacts of climate change. We have growing human demand for residential and commercial purposes and at the same time, we have a shrinking water supply. That is a huge looming crisis.
And it is beginning to play out in real-time. You see that playing out in real-time. For example, several different states and Mexico rely on Colorado River flows based on an allocation system that was created in the 1920s, which is overly optimistic about the amount of available water. From the 1920s until now, that water supply has decreased, and decreased, and decreased. Now you have interstate agreements, and in the case of Mexico, international agreements that allocate the finite Colorado river water supplies based on faulty, now obsolete, information. It is a real problem.
What measures do you take now, knowing this information?
If you look at the US Drought Monitor, it is obvious the problem is not limited to the Colorado River. We are in a mega-drought, so cutbacks are being imposed by federal and state water agencies to encourage agricultural, urban, and commercial water users to cut their water use and, and stretch finite supplies as much as possible through conservation efforts.
In California, we have the State Water Resources Control Board, the state water regulator in California, and they have issued curtailment orders. Meaning, they have told water rights holders, many of whom have had those water rights for over a hundred years, that, for the first time, the water that they feel they are entitled to, is not available. Local water districts are also issuing water conservation mandates; the San Francisco water department is doing that, in Los Angeles, the metropolitan water district, is urging urban users to curtail their efforts.
And then agriculture. Agricultural users — farmers and ranchers — have had to get water rights in many cases through the federal government, as the federal government is the operator of these water projects. They have contracts with water users, individual farmers, ranchers, or districts, and they are now issuing curtailment orders. They're saying, we know you contracted for X amount of water for this calendar year, but we are telling you because of the drought shortages we don't have that water to supply. Our reservoirs are low at Lake Shasta or at the Oroville Dam.
When you drive from San Francisco to LA on the five, you see a lot of signage from the agricultural farming community about water. There's apparently some frustration about this. What are the other options for them?
About 80% of all human consumed water goes to agriculture. That is by far the biggest component of water use, as opposed to 20% used for urban and commercial, and industrial purposes.
Over the years, ranchers and farmers, and agricultural water districts assumed that the water would always be there — as we all do.
And the farmers and ranchers have, in hindsight, exacerbated the problem by bringing more and more land into production. You see on those drives between San Francisco and Los Angeles, particularly in the San Joaquin Valley, all these orchards are being planted. Orchards are more lucrative crops than row crops — cotton, alfalfa, and rice. But, if you are growing a row crop, you can leave the land fallow in times of drought.
We don't have to plant. If the water stopped there, or if it's too expensive to get, it may make economic sense, but if you have an orchard or a vineyard it's a high value, those are high value crops, you don't have that operational flexibility and they need to be irrigated in wet years and in dry years. Now, you see these orchards, which were only planted a few years ago, are now being uprooted because the farmers realized that they don't have the water necessary to keep those vineyards and orchards alive. For ranchers, the same thing is true with their herds. They don’t have enough water for their livestock.
The water shortage has never been drier than it is right now. Farmers and ranchers are being deprived of water that they traditionally believed was theirs and they're very understandably, very unhappy about it. They see it as a threat to their livelihood and to the livelihood of the folks who work for them. Their anger and frustration are to be expected, but it's nobody's fault.
To say, as some farmers do, that it is mismanagement by state and federal government officials, I think is overly simplistic and misplaced in the face of a mega-drought. Everybody's going to have to sacrifice. Everybody's going to have to be more efficient in how they use water. All sectors are going to need to be more efficient with the water that does exist.
Looking at this percentage breakdown of water use – is it actually important for individual users to change their water habits?
Well, every little bit helps. When you're talking about homeowners, about 70% of urban water use is for outdoor irrigation. So we're talking parks and cemeteries and golf courses and folks' yards. You know, that used to be considered part of that American dream and the California dream — you would have a big lawn in front of your house and behind your house. Truth be told, that has never made much sense in an arid environment. That's where the water savings in urban areas is critical in the way it really involves aesthetics rather than critical human needs, like water for drinking and bathing and sanitation purposes. There is a growing movement away from big lawns, and away from the type of landscaping that you see in the Eastern US — there is no drought in the Eastern United States. As Hurricane Ida and other recent storms have shown, the problem is too much water, or rather than too little in most of the Eastern United States. So it really is a tale of two countries.
We just need to recognize that the American West is an arid region. It has always been an arid region, we can't make the desert bloom with water that doesn't exist. We need to be more efficient in how we allocate those water supplies. And it seems to me in an urban area, the best way to conserve and most effective way is to reduce urban landscaping, which is the major component of urban water use.
You also write about water markets and making them better – for those who don’t know, what is the water market?
Water markets, that is, the voluntary transfer of water between water users, is more robust in some other Western states. Again Arizona and New Mexico come to mind. California somewhat surprisingly is behind the curve. We are in the dark ages compared to other states. Water markets are kind of anecdotal. There is not much of a statewide system. It is done at the local level, through individual transactions without much oversight and without much transparency. And I have concerns about all of those things.
I believe conceptually watermarks are a way to stretch scarce, finite water resources to make water use more efficient. I can, for example, allow farmers or ranchers to sell water to urban uses or commercial usage or factories in times of drought.
Farmers sometimes can make more money by farming water, than they can by farming crops.
There are efficiencies to be gained here.
The problem in my view is really one of transparency. The water markets are not publicly regulated, and some of the people who are engaging in water transactions like it that way, frankly, they want to operate under the radar.
In my opinion, water markets need to be overseen by a public entity rather than private or nonprofit entities. We need oversight and transparency, so that folks like you and myself can follow the markets to see who's selling water to whom, for what purpose, and make sure that those water transfers serve the public interests and not just the private interests.
There have been a number of stories in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Salt Lake City Tribune about efforts in some parts to privatize water transfer. Hedge fund managers are buying and selling water, as a means of profiting. And it strikes me that when you're talking about an essential public resource — and in California, it is embedded in the law that public water is an inherently public resource, that water is owned by the public and it can be used for private purposes, but it is an inherently public resource — the idea of commoditizing water through the private, opaque markets is very troublesome to me. I think it represents a very dangerous trend and one that needs to be corrected and avoided.
Why is California so behind?
There's no good reason for it. It's largely inexplicable that since the state was created on September 9th, 1860, we've been fighting over water. In the 19th century, it was miners versus farmers ranchers. In the 20th century, with the growth of urban communities, the evolution of California into one of the most populous states with 40 million Californians, it has been a struggle between urban and agricultural uses of water.
In the second half of the 20th century, there was a recognition that some component of water had to be left in streams to protect ecosystems, landscape, and wildlife, including the threatened and endangered wildlife. That suggestion has made agricultural users in California angry. You will see those signs that allude to the idea that food and farming are more important than environmental values. I don't happen to believe that's true. I believe both are critically important to our society. But the advocates for the environment have a proverbial seat at the water table. So that's another demand for water allocation that exists.
Do you maintain optimism?
Yes. I think it's human nature to look on the bright side. I try to do that through research scholarships and teaching. There are models for how we can do this better in the United States. Israel and Saudi Arabia and Singapore are far more efficient with their water policies and efforts. Australia went through a severe megadrought. They came out of it a few years ago, but they used that opportunity to dramatically reform their water allocation systems. That's an additional model. I think most people would agree in hindsight that their previous system was antiquated, and not able to meet the challenges of climate change and the growing water shortage in some parts of the world.
Here in the United States, we can learn from those efforts. There are also some ways to expand the water supply. Desalination for one. Again, Singapore and Saudi Arabia have led the world in terms of removing the salt content from ocean water and increasing water supply that way. In Carlsbad, California, north of San Diego, we have the biggest desalination plant in the United States right now, and that is currently satisfying a significant component of the San Diego metropolitan areas’ water needs. It's more expensive than other water supplies, but the technology is getting more refined, so the cost of desalinated water is coming down at a time when other water supplies, due to shortages and the workings of the free market are going up.
At some point, they're going to meet or get closer. Unlike some of my environmental colleagues, I think desalination is an important part of the equation.
In a proposal that came up in the recall election, one of the candidates was talking about how we just need to build a canal from the Mississippi River to California to take care of all our problems. That ignores political problems associated with that effort, as well as the massive infrastructure costs that would be required to build and maintain a major aqueduct for 2000 miles from the Mississippi to California. That's just not going to happen. Some of those pie in the sky thoughts of how we expand the water supply, I think, are unrealistic.
interviews
Discourses of Delay
by Ben Franta
September 9, 2021
This interview with Benjamin Franta, a PhD student at Stanford, was conducted and condensed by franknews. Benjamin Franta has worked as a consultant on several of the legal cases mentioned in the following conversation.
Benjamin | I study the history of fossil fuel politics, fossil fuel companies, and climate change. In particular, I study what fossil fuel companies knew about climate change, when they knew it, and what they told the public about climate change. I also just finished a law degree at Stanford law school, and I am very interested in how this historical research can be used to inform climate lawsuits in the United States and around the world.
Really, I got into this area by chance. Before this, I got a Ph.D. in applied physics, which I did because I wanted to do something about climate change. I assumed that climate change was a scientific problem that required a technological solution. I assumed that inventing a better solar cell, for example, was the way to solve the problem.
It wasn't until the end of my Ph.D. in applied physics, that I changed my mind about what the real impediment to solving climate change was. I began to see the political dimensions of the problem — the obstructionism of the fossil fuel industry. I began to think that if I really wanted to make an impact and contribute in a meaningful way, in a measurable way, then I needed to think more broadly and do work that was politically impactful. I decided to do another Ph.D., in part, because I didn't know what other route I could take if I wanted to study the fossil fuel industry and its activities.
This was in 2016 or so. Around that time, the first legal investigations into the fossil fuel industry’s deception were beginning. I thought focusing the power of the law on the industry itself was really interesting. I mean, ten years ago, the focus on the industry was was relatively rare. Back in 2012, I was involved with the fossil fuel divestment movement at Harvard. The movement was just starting, and the focus on the fossil fuel industry itself, the producer, rather than the consumers, was fairly novel.
The focus on the industry was very powerful, and the replicability of the tactic of divestment was also very powerful. That was part of my political awakening, and when I saw a similar legal angle being opened up, I thought, this is a very new and very powerful front.
So, I went to Stanford, and I began to study history. My advisor is a scholar of the tobacco industry and frequently testifies in tobacco trials, even today. He also understood the importance of legal action to expose the deceptions of a big powerful industry, hold it accountable, and, ultimately, change society. So it all came together, and now here we are.
frank | Here we are. You take an interesting journey that, I think, that broadly traces a lot of peoples' growing understanding of the problem. How did the fossil fuel industry create a cognitive dissonance between the necessity to act and our belief in our own ability to act on it? What are the broad contours of that history?
Sure. By the 1960s, the industry was on notice about the ultimate eventuality of global warming from its products. By the early 1980s, the industry had a quite sophisticated understanding of how much global warming would occur over time and what many of the impacts would be.
This issue has never really been one of a lack of information, a lack of understanding, or a lack of knowledge around what ultimately needs to be done to solve the problem, and that surprised me. We have long known that we need to replace fossil fuels with other sources of energy. That was never really the bottleneck. Rather, the bottleneck is the various strategies to delay action that industry implemented. A lot of people have studied these strategies, which journalists and researchers call “discourses of delay.” This is a framework for thinking about the tactics that have induced delay and helped perpetuate the status quo.
What are the tactics?
One is blaming the consumer. Framing this as a problem as the fault of the consumer for not making better consumer choices, is a great way to lock in the problem. Better consumer choices are good, but it is not sufficient. The focus on the consumer makes the industry invisible — suddenly the industry doesn’t have agency in this matter.
KXAS-TV (Television station : Fort Worth, Tex.). [News Clip: Carpools], video, June 23, 1977, 10:00 p.m.; Fort Worth, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1284185/m1/?q=carpool: accessed September 3, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.
This includes things like the “carbon footprint” as a paradigm, efforts to encourage carpooling, and efforts to encourage changing light bulbs. Oil companies put out advertising campaigns, starting at least in the 2000s, that framed environmental problems in this way. They marketed climate change as basically being the fault of consumers. The genius part of that is it, it appeals to our better nature. It appeals to people who want to help, who want to fight climate change, and offers them an inadequate set of actions.
Another big strategy is to frame climate change as too expensive to solve. I have a new paper coming that examines how the oil industry hired often the same group of economic consultants, from the early 1990s until today, who essentially told the public that it's too expensive to avoid climate change and that climate change itself won't be that bad. I believe there has been a manipulation of economics by the industry over the past few decades.
The latest iteration of these strategies is positioning the industry as the solution to the problem. This emerged around the late 1990s and the early 2000s. In the late 1980s, climate emerged as this big political issue; there were going to be international treaties and domestic legislation to move away from fossil fuels. The industry litigated the science first, saying the science was uncertain and that it would be too expensive to move off of fossil fuels.
Then, in the late 1990s, there was a very noticeable flip in the rhetoric. The fossil fuel industry moved away from saying that climate science was unreliable, and moved towards saying, “of course climate change is real, and we’re the solution to the problem.” Instead of risking being pushed away from the table by challenging the science, industry wanted to ensure they had a seat at the table, effectively making it so that little could be done about climate change unless it had the approval of the fossil fuel industry. The industry promoted things like carbon capture and sequestration, and we see the lingering effects of that today.
I like the frame of “predatory delay,” which is a phrase that Alex Steffen coined. The delay itself is the damage. All the incumbent has to do is slow down the change enough, and that is a victory. The industry does not have to prove climate science wrong, it just needs to slow down action. This is what we're fighting against. The battle now is one of speed. We have to replace fossil fuels, as quickly as possible. That is the goal. I think that we are finally looking in the right direction, we are finally looking at industry. We have the documents, we have mounting evidence, and I think that will help to disrupt their delay operations.
What do you think is the proper way to think about personal efforts and calling for structural change? I feel like there might be a strain of personal fatalism that plays also into these delay strategies.
I think the way to harmonize individual action with structural change is to put one's individual action towards something that can affect that change. Of course, structural change happens through the coordinated individual action of many, many people. And of course, there is nothing wrong with changing your light bulbs. Of course, being wasteful is bad. There is not a contradiction there. But, ultimately, the real question is, do your efforts have the capacity and the potential to scale up and become powerful enough to overcome a very powerful incumbent industry with ideological allies?
This might be a question without a clear answer, but one of the things that continues to be confusing to me is, what are these corporations thinking? How do they reckon with their choices.
Of course, it's kind of hard to know what they’re thinking. I mean, there's a banality of evil. On some level, people are just doing their jobs and their job is to help the company. There's a selection effect as well. Where if you feel ambivalent about what you're doing in your work you might not stay at the company for a long time, so for the people at the top of these corporations, the company is their world.
In the tobacco case, my advisor often talks about how the tobacco executives truly believed that tobacco did not cause cancer because they had convinced themselves of a definition of causation where that could be true — basically, an if and only if causation. If a lot of people who don't smoke have cancer and not everybody who smokes gets cancer, maybe we don't know if smoking causes cancer. That itself also kind of appeals to this quest for infinite knowledge. There is some uncertainty as to what really causes cancer fundamentally on a biochemical level, that is still a research question. So you can always appeal to the quest for knowledge, and essentially say that we don't have enough information to act yet, in order to promote uncertainty, and therefore delay.
I also think the oil and gas industry in particular has an internal culture of believing it's the savior and the enabler of modern civilization. You can see in certain responses from the industry that they believe there is no modern world without them. Like, so what if we cause a little global warming, we gave you the entire world.
The cost of modernity.
Yeah. So there's that too. There's probably a whole array of psychological realities and monetary incentives that will lead to this. That is why there's a broader conversation that sometimes creates fractures in the climate movement about how much do you challenge the structures of modern capitalism versus how much do you focus on particular corporations?
I think both approaches are valid. I think it's clear that the modern form of the corporation probably needs to be reformed for the sake of our future. This is not the first time that big industries have created massive catastrophes and crises for people. Look at the opioid crisis and that massive cover-up. This lying and deception and rationalization becomes completely normalized in these corporations. The opioid crisis was enabled by the highest-paid consultants in the world, those at McKinsey, for instance. These are not outliers.
I also think it is true that what we do in the next 10 years in regards to climate change is going to affect the earth for thousands of years. We have to move really quickly. We should try to harmonize these goals so that they allow us to address the problem of the fossil fuel industry within the decade in a conclusive way. If we can accomplish that, that in itself will be an example and evidence of the fact that we need to do something about the bigger and broader problem of how global capitalism is structured.
KXAS-TV (Television station : Fort Worth, Tex.). [News Clip: Daisy Chains], video, June 15, 1979, 10:00 p.m.; Fort Worth, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1083929/m1/?q=oil%20and%20gas%20industry: accessed September 3, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.
Moving to built environments – how do you think propaganda and the cognitive dissonance efforts that have come down from the corporations have gone on to affect the infrastructure of the world we are living in now? Should adaptation be prioritized on par with mitigation?
That's a good, and a big, question. I mean, clearly, the industry has influenced our built environment. Look at the dependence on cars in the United States, particularly in certain parts of the United States, like California. These are big infrastructural decisions that have had effects for many decades — which is part of industry strategy.
Pipelines and distribution infrastructure lock in the need for natural gas, for example, because once you put it in there, it is costly not to use it.
In terms of adaptation, I mean, I don't have a super good answer to this. One way to think about this is the fact that a lot of places are not going to be protected. How do we value these property assets? How do we think about how expensive it is to protect these assets and whether it is even possible to do so? How much of the real estate market in the United States is massively misvalued because of climate change? What the right thing to do to correct that is an open question.
Horrifying.
Right. Is it unethical to correct that misvaluation because a lot of people will lose their wealth? And I'm not talking about only wealthy people, I'm talking about the middle class and poor people too. Or is it more unethical to pretend like nothing is wrong, so that when a market correction finally does happen, it may be even more devastating and disruptive? I don't know.
I think lawsuits are going to inform this question, certainly in the United States. A lot of the plaintiffs for the lawsuits are municipal entities or states who want to build a seawall, for example, and they want the fossil fuel industry to pay for part of it. Just by bringing the suit, you have to actually figure out the concrete numbers of the damage due to climate change.
Rather than the neoclassical economic paradigm, which has spoken in terms like, “climate change costs 0.5% of GDP or 1% of GDP,” we are going to have conversations more like, “we need this seawall, we need it now, and it is going to cost us $500 million.”
Have there been cases like this hypothetical that have attempted to make fossil fuel companies pay for the cost of adaptation?
Yes, there's a whole group of cases in the United States, and the collection is expanding all the time. I think it is above 20 now.
Has there been any resolution in any of those cases?
Not for most. A few of them early on were dismissed for legal reasons, but more recently they have been more successful. They have overcome many of the industry's motions to dismiss, and the next phase might be what is called the discovery phase. This is before the trial, where you ask the other side to give you particular documents and information. I think that that will be big.
Those cases have been working their way through the court system for the past four to five years. And they've mostly been wrangling over jurisdiction. That sounds technical and boring because it is just determining where the cases should be heard. But, in large part, that determines the fate of the cases. In certain jurisdictions, it's easier to get the case dismissed.
Which jurisdictions are easier than others? Is this a matter of specific states?
It is largely a battle over state court or federal court. The plaintiffs have better chances in the state courts because if the cases are in federal court, then they're more likely to be dismissed. That is partly because the Environmental Protection Agency technically, although not effectively, regulates CO2. Therefore, there is a federal body that is technically dealing with climate change. That makes it easier to dismiss the cases from a federal court — so that federal bodies don't step on each other's toes. Of course, this reasoning for dismissal doesn’t quite make sense, because these climate cases don’t seek to regulate CO2. Instead, they’re trying to get compensation for damages caused by corporate malfeasance, which is a classic function of the court system. I think more judges are recognizing that over time.
For the last few years, the plaintiffs have been successful in keeping the lawsuits in state courts where they are more likely to survive and go to discovery and potential trial. We obviously don’t know what will happen with these cases. But, it is a massive controversy with a huge amount of damages and a huge amount of evidence of corporate malfeasance.
I think it's only a matter of time before these cases succeed in some form, either by a judgment or a big settlement of some kind. I am enthusiastic about the prospects of these suits to make change. Their truth-telling capacity is also huge. You get this information out into the public through discovery. I think this is all hugely, hugely important.
And who are the plaintiffs?
The plaintiffs in the US are often cities or counties or states.
Got it.
And that was a very important, legal, strategic insight. For a long time individuals brought climate cases, but it was hard to show that you were impacted by climate change more than anybody else. The court would ask, “Well, why should you bring this case? You're just a random individual.” If you have a city bringing a case, you can say, “Actually climate change is causing this specific amount of damage to us.”
Does a case like PG&E being held responsible for fires fit into the framework? Is there a world where PG&E starts shifting the blame on fossil fuel companies?
That's more speculative, but it's possible. You could have corporations versus corporations. You can think about the insurance industry, or, like you said, PG&E. PG&E might be able to turn around and place part of the blame on the fossil fuel industry for these fires.
What happens if these cases continue to go in favor of the plaintiffs? What happens to the fossil fuel companies? Is this the way they are stripped of power?
I think the short answer is yes.
The damages in a single case might only be hundreds of millions of dollars. Of course is not a lot of money compared to how much the fossil fuel companies invest in their own operations every year — they might invest $10 or $20 billion per year per company. But, the fact that it's shown that the companies are liable for this is powerful. And this is just one piece, this is just the U.S. There are other legal contexts and efforts occurring around the world as well.
The US has a legal context where suits are often about money, and money damages are often the remedy. But in other countries around the world, the legal context is different and there have been some major successes. For example, there was recently a case against Royal Dutch Shell in the Netherlands, where The Hague District Court ruled that Royal Dutch Shell, based on Dutch law about the duty of care that Royal Dutch Shell owes Dutch citizens, and further based on international human rights principles, has to do everything it can to align its business with the Paris Agreement. That means that Royal Dutch Shell has to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from its products by about half over the next decade. Essentially, that would require a transformation of the company. It can no longer be a fossil fuel company as it is today. That is incredible. You have a court ordering a big multinational corporation to stop doing business as it's doing it now. Assuming this judgment stands, the court is going to watch the company, potentially for decades, to ensure it complies. There is a huge scope for change through litigation, and there are numerous legal systems that can force these companies to change.
US National Archives. Secretary Ken Salazar meeting with oil and natural gas industry representatives concerning energy resource development in the Permian Basin.