A detailed 36-page “Letter Before Claim” was sent to BP on Dec. 19, outlining allegations against BP p.l.c. and the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Pipeline Company (BTC Co). The claimants accuse BP of breaching international human rights commitments by supplying Israel with oil that supports its military activities.

The claim notes BP’s essential role in oil transportation to Israel via the BTC Pipeline, majority-owned and operated by the company. Since the escalation of conflict in October 2023, over 45,000 deaths have been reported in Gaza, alongside severe destruction of civilian infrastructure and disruption of essential services.

The claimants argue that BP’s actions contravene international law principles, including, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the prohibition on complicity in war crimes under customary international law, and BP’s own Human Rights Policy.

Further reinforcing the claim, International Court of Justice (ICJ) rulings in 2024 acknowledged a “real and imminent risk” of genocide in Gaza.

The lead claimants have suffered grave personal losses due to the conflict. These include:

– A British citizen of Palestinian origin who lost 16 family members to air-strikes, with surviving relatives experiencing severe humanitarian distress in Gaza.
– Another claimant who has faced family fatalities and displacements, compounded by inadequate access to medical care and essentials.

Other participants in the case report enduring serious physical and psychological trauma.

Tayab Ali, head of international law at Bindmans LLP, emphasized the necessity for corporate accountability, stating: “This legal action marks a new phase in accountability for those complicit in alleged war crimes. The evidence suggests BP’s failures to adhere to its human rights policies have significantly contributed to the humanitarian disaster in Gaza.”

From JURIST, Dec. 25. Used with permission.

See our last reports on genocide accusations against Israel, and the ICJ case.

Photo: Fossil Free London via MEMO

The Ninth Circuit panel also upheld a ruling by another federal judge which allowed California courts to take up climate cases brought by the counties of San Mateo, Marin and Santa Cruz and the cities of Richmond, Santa Cruz and Imperial Beach.

The Ninth Circuit decision follows similar rulings by federal courts remanding climate lawsuits to state courts in Maryland, Rhode Island and Colorado. The US Supreme Court last fall rejected appeals of those decisions. (San Francisco Chronicle, Legal Newsline, Grist)

In a piece optimistically (in our view) entitled “Has Demand For Oil Already Peaked?,” OilPrice.com comments: “[D]emand destruction on the order of nearly 30 million barrels per day (mb/d) may have been brief, but we are a long way from a 100-mb/d oil market.” Quoted is BP’s CEO Bernard Looney, who admitted the pandemic could entrench societal changes with the potential to permanently erode consumption. “It’s not going to make oil more in demand. It’s gotten more likely [oil will] be less in demand,” Looney said in an interview with the Financial Times. “I don’t think we know how this is going to play out. I certainly don’t know. Could it be peak oil? Possibly. Possibly. I would not write that off.”

Note that Looney is using the term “peak oil” in precisely the opposite way that it was being used just a few years ago. Then, it referred to the notion that the planet’s reserves will inevitably be exhausted before demand for oil is diminished. Now it suddenly seems to mean the notion that demand for oil will be exhausted, mandating that remaining reserves be left in the ground. This rather vindicates what we have been saying for years: Oil prices are driven by politics, not geology.

This is why this grim moment for humanity holds utopian as well as apocalyptic potentialities. But there are twin related challenges here: First, to assure that the adaptations that are now eroding oil demand are indeed made permanent; and secondly, to assure that the inevitable pain for this transition be borne by the ruling class—not the common people, whether of Iraq or consumer countries such as the United States…

Photo via Iraqi News Agency

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) said that the ANWR "contains an estimated 10.4 billion barrels of oil." She added: "We know we that can produce it safely. We know that we are going to need this oil in the years ahead. The reality is is that world oil demand is rising, it is not falling. We need to bring more supply online, and we need to open up our most prospective areas. So, again, when we have a small area that has enormous potential, why, why would we continue to deny that opportunity?"

Countered Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA): "Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is nothing more than a Big Oil polar payout… We will keep fighting, because the Arctic Refuge should forever be the home of caribou, not crude; bears, not barrels of oil; sandpipers, not pipelines. We will never stop fighting."

Under the legislation, the Interior Department is directed to hold at least two auctions for drilling rights leases in the next 10 years, with a limit of 2,000 acres of development. But any lease sale or drilling is likely still years away, especially with oil prices still depressed. Federal law still mandates an extensive review process, including a detailed environmental impact statement (EIS) under the National Environmental Policy Act. (The Hill, Newsweek)

"Doing an adequate NEPA review that would need to precede any leasing decision would take a considerable amount of time," said David Hayes, an Interior Department deputy secretary under presidents Obama and Clinton and an opponent of ANWR drilling who currently heads New York University's State Energy & Environmental Impact Center. He told Axios that could take two years. "That's typical for a major EIS on a very sensitive and complex [question]. It is very hard to do in less than two years. If they try and cut corners on their NEPA analysis, there will be very strong challenges…"

And as a Barclays analysis adds: "At any point along this at-least-four-year path to the first lease sale and the subsequent 2-6 year period to the first drilled well, political winds in Congress or a new Secretary of the Interior could stop the process."

Then there is also opposition to opening the ANWR from Native Alaskans, who still depend on the caribou herds that are in turn dependent on the National Wildlife Refuge for their calving grounds. "We just want to continue to have our food security," Bernadette Demientieff, director of the Gwich'in Steering Committee, told a small rally for protection of the ANWR on the National Mall in Washington DC Dec. 6. "To have healthy land. To have healthy animals to hunt." (KTOO, Juneau) The Gwich'in Steering Committee has already brought litigation to stop seismic exploration within the ANWR.

Some Native Alaskan communities are looking to oil exploitation as a ticket out of poverty. The 12 Alaska Native Corporations established in 1971 by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act are already arguing among themselves as to which has rights to drilling in the ANWR—as noted by the Anchorage Daily News and eagerly seized upon by Fox News. Specifically, the Arctic Slope Regional Corp, the only Native corporation that now has recognized rights to future oil revenues from the ANWR, has issued a letter demanding that the other corporations stop lobbying Congress to require ASRC to share.

ASRC signed a lease agreement with Chevron and BP in 1984 stipulating that if the federal government allows drilling in the ANWR, they could develop an adjacent 92,000-acre area owned by Native groups. "They go to DC as if they're representing the native people of the North Slope, and the people who interview them bill them as that," Robert Thompson, a resident of the Native village of Kaktovik, told Inside Climate News. "But they're representing the interests of a for-profit corporation that's in joint venture with Chevron and BP." 

And Murkowski's estimate for how much oil is under the ANWR is actually high-balled. The US Geological Survey estimates the area could contain 4.3 billion to 11.8 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil. This higher figure, which would put the ANWR in the same range as the heavily exploited Prudhoe Bay, is given only a 5% probability. 

The area that now covers the ANWR was first given federal protection by order of the Interior Secretary in 1960, bringing 8.9 million acres into what was then called the Arctic National Wildlife Range. In 1980, President Carter signed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act , creating the ANWR and enlarging the protected area to over 19 million acres. This was a pay-off to environmentalists after the bitter struggle over the opening of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, linking Prudhoe Bay to Valdez.

But only 8 million acres of the  ANWR was actually designated as Federal Wilderness, meaning it is permanently off-limits to development. Section 1002 of the legislation specifically set aside 1.5 million acres on the coastal plain with the greatest hydrocarbon potential. The law authorized seismic studies in the "1002 area," but left its ultimate fate for future Congresses to decide. (Oil & Gas 360, NatGeo)

The National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, across Prudhoe Bay from the ANWR, was opened to exploitation by Obama in 2011, and the Trump administration has been dramatically stepping up lease sales there, with nearly half of its 23 million acres now up for bid. (Bloomberg)

Photo: FWS

San Francisco claims that the city will experience temperature increases of 8.6°F, increase current "100-year flood" events to occur 92 times per year, and increase sea levels up to 66 inches by 2100. Upgrades to the sea wall are estimated to cost $500 million short-term, and $5 billion long term. It is also estimated that the city will have to spend $350 million to upgrade their sewer and storm water infrastructure.

From Jurist, Sept. 22. Used with permission.

Note: The city of Oakland filed a similar suit the same day. (The Hill) A similar suit filed by the Native Alaskan village of Kivalina, which actually faces relocation due to rising sea levels, was dismissed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2012. 

In 2016, US President Obama withdrew all of the northern Atlantic Ocean and most of the Arctic Ocean under federal jurisdiction from oil exploration and production through the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act. In January, the Washington Supreme Court issued a ruling against plans for a major oil terminal on the West Coast.

From Jurist, April 29. Used with permission.

Note: Trump's new order overturns Barack Obama's declaration of Arctic and Atlantic offshore waters "indefinitely off limits" under powers granted the executive by the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act. There will presumably be a court battle over whether Trump now has the authority to remove these waters from protection. The January ruling by the Washington Supreme Court against the terminal project at Grays Harbor came in a case brought by the Quinault Indian Nation and four environmental groups. Numerous other such terminal projects remain pending, in both the US and Canada.

From Jurist, Nov. 30. Used with permission.

The Baku-Supsa pipeline augments and partially parallels the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline, which passes through Georgia to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Both were closed during the 2008 war.

Map: Perry-Castañeda Library

The April 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill has had far-reaching and catastrophic environmental and economic effects. In March the US government appealed a federal court ruling that reduced the potential liability BP faces under the Clean Water Act in relation to the spill. In February, District Court Judge Carl Barbier of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana rejected a motion by BP to reduce the civil fine payable under the Clean Water Act. BP's appeal sought to reduce the fine per barrel from the $4,300 proposed by the US government to $3,000 per barrel. In December the US Supreme Court declined to review a settlement with BP resulting from the 2010 disaster. In August a federal district court in Louisiana ruled that BP was grossly negligent and bears a majority of the blame for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Form Jurist, July 3. Used with permission.

Note: Before this week's ruling, BP was already liable for $4.5 billion in penalties announced after a November 2012 settlement of a federal criminal case.