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Comment by treeman79 | Hacker News Reader

Curious as to response. Ignoring that a higher court doesn’t just overturn this.

Blacklisting Netherlands seems in the realm of possibility. As in, no oil or oil based products being allowed into country.

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"Blacklisting" the Netherlands from receiving any oil or oil products? A member state of the European Union with Borders to Germany and Belgium and with access to the North Sea? Who should do this "blacklisting", Royal Dutch Shell, headquartered in The Hague, NL? And who is supposed to enforce it? Even if there was a case for such a thing, which there isn't, no member state of the EU ever would dream of doing any such thing, since that would violate the Four Freedoms doctrine of the EU, and also because the neighbors get a sizable part of their oil and oil products through Rotterdam.

Shell has always countered the argument that they should to more to reduce CO2 emissions by making the government responsible for forcing them. They say they even asked the government to intervene, as it's unrealistic to expect a company to do so of it's own accord. Of course, they don't mean that, but it is an integral part of their greenwashing campaigns.

The proper response would be to rejoice that they finally got what they wanted and lobby for the same judgement for their competitors, then get on with it and finally reduce their emissions.

> The proper response would be to rejoice that they finally got what they wanted and lobby for the same judgement for their competitors, then get on with it and finally reduce their emissions.

Because they didn't get what they want.

Imagine you make widgets and you pay your employees $5/hr. You want to pay your employees $10/hr but you can't because your widgets would then be too expensive, you'd be driven out of business and your employees would have to get jobs elsewhere for $5/hr. But if a the government enforced a $10/hr minimum wage then you can pay your employees $10/hr, you don't go out of business, and your employees can keep their jobs.

It's a collective action problem and the government is uniquely good at solving them while businesses are uniquely bad.

(Royal Dutch) Shell is based in the Netherlands. I doubt they'd "blacklist" themselves.

The Netherlands is part of the European Union, whose members can trade freely between each other. Trying to cut off oil from the Netherlands would also require cutting it off to France, Germany, Spain, etc.

Who would enforce such a silly action in any case? Presumably the government and army of the Netherlands wouldn't want to cut itself off; in which case, what would prevent anyone with lorries, boats or planes from bringing in "oil or oil based products" (at a hefty markup)?

It would be weird if Royal Dutch Shell blacklisted the Netherlands. They might very well do a Unilever [1] and re-register as a UK only business.

But since this is also based on EU law they'd basically have to leave all their business in the EU. Which would probably reduce their carbon footprint by the requested amount. ;-)

Also BP, Exxon, Mobile and other petro companies: Better watch out since the chance of lawsuits like this agains them is pretty big.

An in an other also: EU is struggling [2] to reach reductions in CO2 emissions. This can help a little.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jun/11/unilever-pi...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-07/eu-says-c...

This idea that megacorps are above the law and can scoff at democracy is perverse, dangerous, and rampant on this site.

It would be very disruptive given that Shell is headquartered in The Hague, and NL has small but not insignificant oil reserves of its own on both land and sea.

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