Energy, Mining & Utilities

Empresa de Energía del Pacífico (EPSA) dumped over 30 years of accumulated sediment from the Anchicayá dam in western Colombia in July 2001, polluting the river, killing fish, destroying farmlands and mangroves. The Afro-Caribbean community downstream sued EPSA and finally won Col$203,962 million (US$52 million) in compensation in February 2024, after 20 years of court battles.  Read More

Glencore was given a permit to build a dredging waste dump site to serve the McArthur River Mine lead and zinc extraction operation in Australia’s Northern Territories. The regional government was sued by members of the Yanyuwa and Yanyuwa-Mara community (who hold Aboriginal title to the site) for failing to consult them. The High Court of Australia ruled in the community’s favor in February 2024. Read More

Climate activist Mike Smith, a Māori elder in Aotearoa (New Zealand), sued seven of the biggest greenhouse gas emitters in the country to publicly admit that they caused a public nuisance and dramatically scale back emissions to reach net zero by 2050. In February 2024, New Zealand’s Supreme Court ruled that his lawsuit should b Read More

After the Netherlands implemented a sweeping ban on the use of coal in electricity generation by 2030, energy giant RWE took the country to arbitration court to demand €1.4 billion in compensation for the impact on its massive new coal plant in Eemshaven. RWE decided to drop the litigation in October 2023 when it was dealt a series of legal defeats in Read More

Nigeria has defeated an attempt to extract over US$11 billion in compensation for a canceled natural gas processing plant in Calabar, Cross River state, Nigeria, by Process & Industrial Developments (P&ID), a shell company based in the the tax haven of British Virgin Islands. Read More

Cobre Panamá, the largest open pit copper mine in Central America, is operated by Toronto-based First Quantum Minerals. After some 250,000 people in Panama took to the streets to protest against corruption and environmental damage at the mine, Panama’s supreme court declared that First Quantum’s contract to operate the mine unconstitutional, causing it to be shut down. Read More

Private sector projects to solve the climate crisis have soared in the last decade: green energy options from British Gas and NextEra; Tesla electric cars; panels from JinkoSolar in China; and Siemens wind turbines in the North Sea. Yet how many truly mark a departure from business-as-usual by industry? Read More

Oxford University holds regular career fairs for students to meet privately with prospective employers. The university also claims to be committed to net zero and to be sustainable. Read More

Navigator CO2 Ventures proposed to build a 2,000 kilometre pipeline to transport carbon dioxide from ethanol plants to be stored underground in southern Illinois. Environmentalists, farmers and landowners joined forces to oppose the Heartland Greenway pipeline which was canceled after it was denied a construction permit by the South Dakota Public Utilities Commission. Read More

ExxonMobil wants to restart oil drilling off the coast of Santa Barbara, California. It plans to transport the crude oil to inland refineries in Santa Maria and Pentland by truck. Environmentalists fought the proposal citing the history of oil spills from trucks and pipelines in the region. Local government officials and courts recently ruled in their favor. Read More