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Andrey Rudakov | Bloomberg | Getty Images
An employee holds a control panel while the barrels are filled with lubricating oil for shipment to the factory of Royal Dutch Shell Plc in Torzhok, Russia on March 21 2014.
Green groups and human rights said Friday that they have launched a lawsuit against Royal Dutch Shell in the Netherlands to force the energy company to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels.
The groups, including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth Netherlands, have convened a court at its Shell headquarters in The Hague, asking it to stop extracting oil and gas and reduce its gas emissions to greenhouse effect to zero by 2050.
"Shell spends billions of dollars each year on oil and gas exploration, and currently plans to invest just 5% of its budget in renewable energy and 95% in fossil fuel exploitation," said the groups.
They stated that Shell's projects were "incompatible with the goal of limiting the rise in global temperature to a 1.5 ° C warming" as part of the goals set in the Paris Agreement for fight against climate change.
Shell said on Friday that the case should not be sued because it supports the goals of the 2015 Pact and has promised to halve its contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions from here 2050.
"We also believe that action against climate change is needed now," the company said in a statement.
"We have invested billions of dollars in various low-carbon CO2 technologies, such as biofuels, hydrogen and wind energy, and we want to continue to expand these activities."
Activists say this commitment does not go far enough for climate goals to be achieved on a global scale.
"With their current strategy, they will keep the world dependent on fossil fuels for the next 40 years," said Greenpeace activist Eefje de Kroon.
The groups said more than 17,000 Dutch citizens had registered to support their case against Shell.
The company has about six weeks to respond to the court summons, after which a judge will decide to continue the proceedings.
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