DUTCH climate activists launched legal action today to force oil giant Shell to commit to reining in its carbon emissions.

Lawyer Roger Cox told a panel of three judges at the Hague district court that Royal Dutch Shell’s corporate policy is “at odds” with global climate goals. 

Milieudefensie, the Dutch arm of Friends of the Earth, is seeking a court order to make Shell commit to reducing emissions by 45 per cent by 2030.

Mr Cox said Shell is responsible through its business and fossil-fuel sales for 1.2 per cent of the world’s industrial greenhouse gas emissions.

Shell’s lawyer Dennis Horeman said the company is already working on energy-transition models and that a victory for the environmentalists could open the floodgates to “countless” similar cases. Shell says it plans to be a “net-zero energy-emissions business by 2050 or sooner.”

He argued that a judgement against Shell would give judges an inappropriate “central role in an active and delicate political process.”

The Climate Action Tracker Group suggested this week that the Paris Agreement climate goals, limiting warming to 2.1°C by the end of the century, could now be within reach based on ambitious Chinese emissions-reduction plans and the election of Joe Biden in the US, who, unlike President Donald Trump, does not deny human-driven climate change.

Last month the Carbon Tracker think tank predicted that the “aggressive China-led shift to electric vehicles” would “slash oil demand growth by 70 per cent by 2030.”