Greenpeace climate justice activists approaching Shell platform en route to major oilfield (Photo: Chris J Ratcliffe / Greenpeace)
“It has become clear: Eni is trying to silence anyone who dares to speak up and denounce the company’s contribution to the fueling of the climate crisis,” says Chiara Campione of Greenpeace Italy.
Greenpeace Italy revealed Wednesday that the Italian multinational energy company Eni is threatening a libel suit against it over reports the organization published about oil and gas companies.
Greenpeace said the potential lawsuit is related to a report on temperature-related premature deaths that may be caused by emissions from oil and gas companies like Eni and a report on the concept of “climate homicide.”
“We face yet another act of intimidation by Eni; it seems that threatening defamation lawsuits is the new sport which the company has decided to pursue most enthusiastically. But we won’t be silenced,” said Chiara Campione of Greenpeace Italy. “This new potential defamation lawsuit follows a similar case initiated by Eni against Greenpeace Italia only a few months ago.”
OOOPS ENI DID IT AGAIN! It seems that threatening defamation lawsuits is the new sport which the company has decided to pursue most enthusiastically. https://t.co/zZjhRdCa0f
Eni was given an opportunity to respond to the findings of the Greenpeace reports, but the group said Eni offered “no substantive rebuttal” and threatened legal action. The organization claimed other oil and gas companies mentioned in these reports have not threatened legal action.
Greenpeace Italy and the climate advocacy group ReCommon are currently suing Eni over its alleged contributions to the climate crisis. The first hearing for that case occurred last month.
“It has become clear: Eni is trying to silence anyone who dares to speak up and denounce the company’s contribution to the fueling of the climate crisis,” Campione said.
The multinational oil giant Shell sued Greenpeace in November for alleged damages related to Greenpeace activists boarding one of the company’s oil platforms. Shell is trying to get as much as $8.6 million in damages, which Greenpeace says would greatly threaten its ability to campaign.
The French multinational oil and gas company TotalEnergies is also suing Greenpeace France over a report that claimed it underestimated its 2019 greenhouse gas emissions.
Greenpeace said Wednesday that these companies are trying to “stop Greenpeace and other organizations from denouncing the damage the fossil fuel industry is causing to people and the planet.”
Most of Europe’s natural ecosystems have been lost over the centuries. However, a sizeable amount of natural old forest still exists, especially in the north. These “old-growth” forests are exceptionally valuable as they tend to host more species, store more carbon, and are more resilient to environmental change.
Many of these forests are found in Sweden, part of the belt of boreal forests that circle the world through Canada, Scandinavia and Russia. But after researching these last relics of natural forest we have found they are being cleared rapidly – at a rate faster even than the Amazon rainforest.
There is no direct monitoring of these forests, no thorough environmental impact assessments and most of the public don’t seem to be aware this is even happening. Other evidence suggests something similar is happening right across the world’s boreal forests.
It can be tricky to know exactly how much old-growth forest there is, since the distinction might not always be clear. However, there is a clear difference between forests that have been “clear-cut” (entirely chopped down) sometime in the past and those that never have.
Clear-cutting started appearing in Sweden in the early 1900s and has been the dominant type of forestry in the country since the 1950s. The uncut forests that predate this time have therefore most likely not been clear-cut and since they are old they can be classified as old-growth forests.
Clear-cutting is still the main form of logging in Sweden. Lasse Johansson / shutterstock
In our study, we looked specifically at forests in unprotected areas where the trees predated 1880 on average. That’s long before the large-scale adoption of clear-cutting in Sweden and means those forests have likely never been clear-cut.
These unprotected old-growth forests constitute around 8% of the productive forest land in Sweden, that is, the area that is generally favourable for forestry (omitting forests close to the Scandinavian mountain range tree line). This amounts to about 1.8 million hectares of old-growth forest, more than the total wooded area in many European countries.
This area of unprotected old-growth forest, with the remaining protected old-growth and primary forests, constitutes a large share of the last known ecosystems of “high naturalness” in the EU.
What is happening to these old-growth forests?
Between 2003 and 2019, 20% of all the clear-cut forest in Sweden was old-growth. This means a sizeable share of forest products, such as timber, paper and bioenergy, comes from old trees. The losses to unprotected old-growth forests amount to 1.4% per year, which means they will be lost completely by the 2070s if the trend continues.
To put this in perspective, Sweden’s old-growth forests have been cleared six to seven times faster than the Brazilian Amazon forest between 2008 and 2023. (Of course, given the size of the Amazon, the total amount of cleared forest is much larger there).
While our study, shockingly enough, appears to be the only of its kind across the boreal region, there is some research showing that old-growth forests are also harvested in Canada. Additional anecdotal evidence further suggests the unchecked loss of old-growth forests to forestry operations in otherborealregions .
What’s next?
The European Commission has drafted guidelines for all countries to map and protect all remaining old-growth and primary forests. This would be a good start.
But ultimately, we’ll need a coordinated system to map and monitor the entire boreal forest simply to learn the rate at which it is being lost. This would also help us understand the implications for carbon storage, for other plants and animals that live in these forests, and the humans that use them.
Unfortunately, this is a large and difficult task. Yet this might be one of our last chances to protect and recover large areas of natural forests. Logging old-growth forests now will delay their recovery for centuries.
Anders Ahlström, Associate Professor, Department of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science, Lund University and Pep Canadell, Chief Research Scientist, CSIRO Environment; Executive Director, Global Carbon Project, CSIRO
Politics has failed to address the climate crisis in any meaningful way. Our contemporary politics which I regard as a plutocracy as opposed to a democracy – meaning that it serves a small elite of incredibly rich and powerful people – cannot address the climate crisis because it is serving the climate-destroying plutocrats. Since the system won’t change, we have to change the system. There’s no ifs or buts about this – climate records are getting broken month by month and in the summer it will be back to breaking climate records day by day. Our politics have absolutely failed to address this so we have to change our politics. It’s not a big deal – politicians need to start serving the electorate instead of the rich and powerful.
A car gets submerged in flood waters in a pub car park in Sonning on Thames, Berkshire, UK. Photograph: Geoffrey Swaine/REX/Shutterstock
Government has no credible plan for effects of extreme weather, says Committee on Climate Change
The UK’s plans for adapting to the effects of the climate crisis “fall far short” of what is required, the government’s statutory adviser has said.
The Climate Change Committee (CCC) has examined the national adaptation programme published by ministers last July, intended to set out how people, buildings and vital national infrastructure such as water, transport, energy and telecommunications networks could be protected from the increasing severity of storms, floods, heatwaves and droughts that are afflicting the UK as a result of global heating.
In a damning verdict delivered on Wednesday, the committee found that the government had no credible plan for making the UK resilient to the increasing effects of extreme weather.
Julia King, chair of the adaptation subcommittee of the CCC, said: “The evidence of the damage from climate change has never been clearer, but the UK’s current approach to adaptation is not working.”
Lee Anderson MP has defected to Reform UK. Credit: Official House of Commons portrait
The Ashfield MP, who left the Conservatives today for Reform, shares his new party’s trenchant opposition to net zero.
The UK’s main climate science denial party has gained its first member of parliament with the defection of suspended Conservative MP Lee Anderson.
Anderson announced today that he was joining Reform UK, a right-wing, anti-green and anti-immigration party which is currently polling at 12 percent.
Reform campaigns to “scrap all of net zero” and last year received £135,000 from donors who deny climate science or have business links to fossil fuels.
Anderson has repeatedly attacked the government’s net zero policies, arguing in February 2024 that a net zero UK “wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference to the earth’s atmosphere”.
He is also a vocal backer of new oil, gas and coal extraction in the UK. He has suggested that coal, the most polluting fossil fuel, is environmentally sustainable because “coal 100 million years ago was trees and plants”.
In 2022 he supported the decision to open a new coal mine in Cumbria, which he described as “part of the net zero journey”.
Since June 2023 Anderson has worked as a presenter on right-wing broadcaster GB News alongside Reform’s leader Richard Tice and its honourary president Nigel Farage.
While Anderson has contradicted the scientific consensus on net zero and fossil fuels, Reform’s leadership has gone further, explicitly rejecting the climate science on global warming.
Tice has said “CO2 isn’t poison, it’s plant food”, while the party’s London mayoral candidate Howard Cox has said “man is not responsible for global warming”.
Reform’s manifesto falsely claims that “scientists disagree as to how much” humans have had an impact on global warming. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s foremost climate science body, has stated that it is “unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land”.
When approached for comment, a Reform UK spokesperson told DeSmog: “You know what our policies are towards net zero and the climate agenda” adding that it should come as no surprise when Reform is “supported by others that agree with us”.
Lee Anderson and the Conservative Party had not responded at time of publication.
Anderson was suspended from the Conservative Party last month after saying “Islamists” had “got control” of London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who is a Muslim, adding that the Mayor had “given our capital city away to his mates”.
The MP had resigned as the Conservative Party’s deputy chair in January to protest the government’s bill on deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda, which he considered too weak.
Anderson and Climate Denial
Anderson has repeatedly attacked net zero policies, arguing last month that if the UK “became net zero tomorrow” it wouldn’t affect global warming due to higher volumes of emissions produced by other countries.
In September 2022, Anderson signed an open letter written by the Net Zero Scrutiny Group (NZSG) of backbench MPs that was published in The Telegraph. It called on the UK government to green-light fracking for shale gas, and argued that gas projects should be “fast-tracked” in light of the energy crisis.
At last month’s launch of Popular Conservatives – a new Tory faction run by Mark Littlewood, the former director of the BP-funded Institute of Economic Affairs think tank – Anderson said net zero “never comes up on the doorstep” aside from “the odd weirdo”.
Last July, Anderson called the climate activist group Just Stop Oil “the biggest menace in our society” in a post on X (formerly Twitter) where he celebrated the approval of hundreds more oil and gas licences in the North Sea.
GB News and Fossil Fuels
In June 2023, Anderson joined right-wing outlet GB News as a presenter, a role which pays him £100,000 per year – around £20,000 more than his MPs’ salary.
A DeSmog investigation last year found one in three GB News presenters broadcast climate science denial, while half attacked net zero policies.
GB News is co-owned by British millionaire Paul Marshall, who in October DeSmog revealed has £1.8 billion invested in fossil fuel interests through his hedge fund Marshall Wace in the year to June 2023.
The channel’s other biggest shareholder, the United Arab Emirates-based investment firm Legatum Group, runs the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a conservative project fronted by Canadian climate denier Jordan Peterson.
ARC’s advisors include some of the world’s most prominent climate crisis deniers, including Danish writer Bjorn Lomborg, US activist Michael Shellenberger, and former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who is also a GWPF trustee.
GB News is the subject of several ongoing probes by broadcast regulator Ofcom, and earlier this month reported losses of £42 million in the year to May 2023, and £76 million since its launch in 2021.
