Climate change in court: German farmer sues Volkswagen over high emissions
A German farmer is suing Volkswagen over the damage climate change is doing to his family business.
Ulf Allhoff-Cramer’s case will be heard in the western town of Detmold and is backed by environmental NGO Greenpeace.
Why are Volkswagen being take to court?
Allhoff-Cramer claims that the automaker is partly responsible for the impact of global heating on the farming industry and wants Volkswagen to stop making combustion engines by 2030.
"Farmers are already being hit harder and faster by climate change than expected," says Allhoff-Cramer.
Greenpeace has already backed several legal cases in Germany aimed at holding companies and the government accountable for climate change.
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Such cases have met with mixed success: some have been dismissed, while one made it to Germany's top court, which last year ordered the government to step up its efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
A similar demand to AllhoffCramer’s on Volkswagen - the world's second-biggest car manufacturer based on sales - was rejected by manufacturers last year.
Is Volkswagen a high carbon emitter?
The automobile industry is a high emitting sector, with a typical family sized car creating 24 tonnes of
CO2 during its life cycle.
Volkswagen themselves claim that they have reduced the emissions of their EU fleet by one fifth compared with 2019. However, the company has been embroiled in scandals related to such claims before.
In 2015 the US Environmental Protection Agency caught Volkswagen using software that ensured diesel cars passed emissions tests and then turned off pollution controls during normal driving.
The company apologised and paid tens of billions of dollars in fines, recall costs and compensation to car owners.
How is Volkswagen responding to the court case?
Volkswagen said in a statement that it aims to reduce its emissions "as quickly as the business allows" but has set itself a 2050 deadline to cut carbon dioxide emissions to net-zero.
"Volkswagen stands for climate protection and rapid decarbonisation of the transport sector, but cannot meet this challenge alone," the company said, adding that the transformation also depends on government regulation, technological development and buyer behaviour.
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Germany has set itself the tar-get of being carbon neutral by 2045, with a 60 per cent cut compared to 1990 levels due before
2030.
Volkswagen said lawmakers should decide on climate change measures.
"Disputes in civil courts through lawsuits against individual companies singled out for this purpose, on the other hand, are not the place or the means to do justice to this responsible task," VW said.
"We will defend this position and ask for the lawsuit to be dismissed."
and could be slapped with a penalty of up to € 50,000 if their pet injures or kills a crested lark.
Should I keep my cat indoors?
If you live in Walldorf the decision is no longer in your hands. But for those elsewhere the answer may not be so clear-cut.
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“Suddenly preventing cats that are used to going outside from doing so, means immense restrictions and stress for the animals,” Deutscher Tierschutzbund, Germany’s largest animal welfare organisation, said in a statement to Euronews Green.
"The negative influence of cats on the population of songbirds is in any case controversial and, to our knowledge, has not yet been proven for the crested lark in Walldorf."
The organisation supports measures to protect the crested lark but believes no animal can be treated as second class.
It would be better to fight the actual causes than to blame cats for this. Daniela Schneider Campaigner for Four Paws Germany
“Defining domestic cats as 'cul-prits' for the endangerment of certain bird species also means letting them take the blame for the fact that humans have destroyed habitats and food supplies for wild species over a long period of time, thus threatening their existence,” the statement concludes.
This sentiment is echoed by Daniela Schneider, a campaigner for Four Paws Germany.
“The influence of intensified agriculture, monocultures, insect mortality, and increasing land development is probably greater than that of some cats hunting birds,” she tells Euronews Green.
“These causes are caused by humans. It would be better to fight the actual causes than to blame cats for this.”
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Are cats a danger to wildlife?
The debate over whether cats should be free to roam can be a controversial one. The European Pet Food Industry found that 26 per cent of all households in Europe own at least one cat. This inevitably leads to a quarter of the population having strong feelings on the matter.
A study in 2013 estimated that free-ranging domestic cats in the US alone kill around 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals annually. However, the authors acknowledged that unowned cats cause the majority of this mortality.
The most recent figures from the Mammal Society say that cats in the UK catch up to 100 million animals over spring and summer, including 27 million birds. The most frequently caught species of bird according to them are house sparrows, blue tits, blackbirds and starlings.
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Despite these statistics, the UK’s largest conservation charity, RSPB, says that there is no clear scientific evidence that this is causing bird populations to decline.
“Many millions of birds die nat-urally every year, mainly through starvation, disease or other forms of predation,'' they state on their website.
“It is likely that most of the birds killed by cats would have died anyway from other causes before the next breeding season, so cats are unlikely to have a major impact on populations.”
In Walldorf, regional newspa-per Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung reported on Wednesday that the head of the local animal protection association plans to take legal steps to challenge the "disproportionate" order.
Cat owners affected by the new decree can exercise their right to object to it until mid June.