Environment

In a unanimous ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit against Shell in Nigeria for human rights abuses in the Ogoni region. The ruling effectively blocks other lawsuits against foreign multinationals for human rights abuse that have occurred overseas from being brought in U.S. courts. Read More

For over a month, villagers in the eastern Indian state of Odisha have been conducting a sit-in to demand the withdrawal of armed police officers at the site of a proposed $12 billion steel complex to be built by Pohang Iron and Steel Company (POSCO) of South Korea. Read More

Does Monsanto own all future generations of genetically modified seeds that it sells? The Missouri-based agribusiness giant wants farmers to pay a royalty to plant any seed that descended from a patented original. The legal decision has ramifications for other patented "inventions" that reproduce themselves like strands of DNA. Read More

Addax Bioenergy, a Swiss energy company, is jeopardizing the livelihoods of thousands of subsistence farmers in order to export ethanol made from sugarcane grown in Sierra Leone, according to the Sierra Leone Network on the Right to Food and Brot Für Alle, an NGO based in Switzerland. Read More

BP, the UK oil company, went on trial this week for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. The company could be fined up to $30 billion over the $25 billion it has promised if the court finds that it was "grossly negligent." Read More

A climate change activist locked himself to a projector screen at an oil and gas conference in Texas today interrupting a TransCanada executive who was making a presentation on a pipeline from Alberta to the U.S. Instead 300 astonished attendees heard an impassioned presentation about TransCanada's poor safety record. Read More

U.S. oil giant Chevron's latest move in an epic legal battle waged against indigenous Ecuadorian villagers involves serving legal papers on journalists, a New York state government official, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, a host of environmental groups, and even its own shareholders. Read More

Range Resources, a Texas company, bullied the federal government into dropping a scientific report on environmental contamination caused by fracking, a new investigation has just revealed. This comes on the heels of two major pro-fracking academic reports that had to be withdrawn in 2012. Read More

Hedge fund billionaire George Soros is making a killing buying and selling farmland in South America after converting them to biofuel production. While this has caused the land prices to increase dramatically, the ecological impact is questionable. Read More

Miguel Facussé, the owner of Dinant Corporation in the Honduras, has come under scrutiny for the human rights abuses against farmers in the Bajo Aguán valley, where his company is cashing in on a boom in palm oil demand, fueled by loans from major donors like the World Bank. Read More