Australia’s Santos has won a court case that was brought against it five years ago by environmentalists, alleging that the company misled its shareholders about its net-zero intentions.
A federal judge in Sydney dismissed the case this week, with details about the motives for her decision to be published next week.
The litigation story began in 2021, when a shareholder advocacy dubbed the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility alleged that Santos had made misleading claims about its plans to reduce its Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions to a net zero by 2040.
The Environmental Defenders Office, acting on behalf of ACCR, argued that Santos’ claims that natural gas is “clean fuel” and that it has a credible pathway to net zero emissions by 2040 “constitute misleading or deceptive conduct” under the Corporations Act 2001 and the Australian Consumer Law, EDO said at the time.
The court case was also “a landmark, world-first test case in relation to the viability of carbon capture and storage, and the environmental impacts of blue hydrogen, increasingly touted as a key element in gas companies’ pathways toward net zero emissions,” EDO added.
Five years on, and the case has failed to become a landmark despite the efforts of the plaintiffs’ team, who focused on the language Santos used, pointing to its plans to use natural gas to reduce its carbon footprint as presumably incompatible with an actual energy transition.
Greenwashing lawsuits have multiplied over the last five years, as various environmentalist groups seek ways to pressure companies—and local governments—into making emission reduction a bigger priority than it already is for many. Last October, French TotalEnergies got hit with a court ruling that it had misled the public about its green credentials after environmentalists sued. Several years earlier, Shell was ordered by a court to reduce its emissions by 45% from 90s levels by 2030, in another case targeting the energy industry on emissions.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
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