Klimat 2.2 – Saúl vs RWE: A climate lawsuit – Line Skov

Amalthea bokkafe

–Saúl vs RWE: a climate lawsuit–

This talk of the series will be on the theme Climate justice in peruvian Andes and german courtrooms.
In November 2017 the Higher Regional Court in Hamm, Germany, accepted the legal grounds for a potentially groundbreaking climate lawsuit. A Peruvian farmer from the deglaciating Andes had taken the single biggest emitter of CO2 in Europe, the brown coal company RWE (the very same which is the target for Ende Gelände), to court in an attempt to hold it liable for its share of producing climate change. If this lawsuit is won, it can set a precedent for future lawsuits, allowing everyone affected by climate change to sue major fossil fuel industries. Climate litigation can become a major tool for climate justice.

The talk will be held by Line Skov who wrote her master thesis in Human Ecology based on the case and fieldwork in Peru and Germany.

Line met the Peruvian farmer in Germany, and followed him to his climate change threatened town in the Andes. Here she investigated perceptions of the severe impacts of climate change in this area, and who people blame for these changes. She found that an inward-turning blame on the individual or the local community creates guilt which conceals the actual responsibility of major industries. This discourse is found both in the Peruvian Andes and the German court rooms. But with an increasing amount of initiatives like the climate lawsuit, this discourse might change for good.

https://archive.org/download/aghedvigklimat/Line%20Skov%20-%20Saul%20vs%20RWE.mp3