Greenpeace Germany’s officials and environmental activist Ms. Clara Mayer have filed a lawsuit against Europe’s largest carmaker, Volkswagen in a German court, accusing the company of failing to do its part in the fight against climate change.
Before initiating the lawsuit, the claimants gave Volkswagen eight weeks to consider their demands, which included ceasing the manufacture of internal combustion engine cars by 2030 and decreasing carbon emissions by at least 65 percent from 2018 levels.
The company had said that it did not view suing individual firms as an adequate solution for tackling a society-wide issue.
“Volkswagen already committed clearly to the Paris Climate Agreement in 2018 and has the most ambitious electrification strategy, investing $41 billion in electromobility by 2025,” a spokesperson said in September when Greenpeace made its demands.
In late September, the heads of the German environmental organization Deutsche Umwelthilfe launched a similar lawsuit against BMW and Daimler, after both companies rejected requests to stop producing fossil-fuel-based automobiles by 2030 and reduce CO2 emissions before then.
Volkswagen has set two factors that will impact positively on lowering emissions, the growing proportion of electric vehicles in the Group’s vehicle mix and the fact that it will leverage green electricity in the future fed into the grid for running them.
In 2018, the Group became the first carmaker to commit itself to the Paris Climate Agreement and now pools all environmental measures under its ‘goTOzero’ mission statement. In the course of implementing these, the Group’s previously announced interim target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from passenger cars and light commercial vehicles across their entire life cycle by 30 percent of 2015 levels by 2025 still applies.
The lawsuits are based on two previous climate-related cases: a German ruling in May 2020 that the country is failing to protect future generations from the effects of climate change, and a Dutch ruling the same month ordering Shell to reduce its emissions, marking the first time a private company has been held responsible for its impact on the environment.
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