Subject to appeal, yes, but the ruling is binding as of yesterday. The WSJ article is misleading, by not mentioning this essential aspect of the ruling.

The shell case builds on a landmark ruling [1] which has gone through Courts of Appeal and the Supreme Court. In my opinion, the odds of this ruling being revoked is highly unlikely, since the argumentation of the ruling follows [1] hence there is jurisprudence in place.

[1] https://leidenlawblog.nl/articles/the-urgenda-decision-the-l...

The attorney, Roger Cox, thought out the legal framework for these landmark rulings, see his book Revolution Justified (2011) [1], for a summary see [2].

Note many followed in Roger's wake, take for instance yet another recent landmark ruling by the the German constitutional court declared the current climate protection measures insufficient [3]

The organization that took on Shell is Milieudefensie [4] ( hey, why not pay tribute and chip in )

[1] https://www.revolutionjustified.org/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4M-8bYFJsiA

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/06/germany-to-bri...

[4] https://milieudefensie.nl/actie/lidworden

> subject to appeal, yes, but the ruling is binding as of yesterday

This is how appeals work. They are binding until a higher court stays or overturns the original decision.

> the odds of this ruling being revoked is highly unlikely, since the argumentation of the ruling follows...hence there is jurisprudence in place

This is how appeals work. Rulings create jurisprudence. A ruling is a pre-requisite to an appeal.

The appeal may be solid or flimsy. But nothing said here points either way. That said, two courts pointing one way may make it harder for the ECHR (which I believe is the next step, though I may be mistaken in this) to overturn.

The Shell decision didn't seem to have a noticable effect on the stock price which I guess means it's already factored in, or investors don't believe it will have much effect in the near term.

I guess it depends on what your counterfactual is?

The decision was expected, but would still have made a difference? As in, if the decision had gone the other way, things would have turned out differently?

The thing with the Shell decision is that even if the decision stands, all Shell has to do is put their emission producing refineries into a different company, they can wash their hands off it then. CO2 emissions? We only sell petrol which we buy from this other company.

Or other paperwork trickery, either way, they'll get away with things. Of course, by 2030 the market will have shifted towards electric vehicles by a lot already.

Paperwork trickery will be harder, as they can't be subsidiaries. So it has to be a real sale to a real external company. This takes time and money and basically means getting out of the refinery business. This doesn't change anything for the shell rotterdam facilities as they still need to co-operate.

Basically, in the worst case is just a number of months delay for all petro investments. While all the green stuff can go ahead. Already a real impact, even if it is not so big in that case as expected.

yeah they can't do the thing that the miners do and put all the pollution in a subsidiary that then goes bankrupt.

Well, they can, but then all the refineries are in a bankrupt subsidiary and the objective is achieved anyway ;)

It looks like the decision includes scope 3 emissions, so in your example the refining would be included, as well as the emissions from burning the petrol

The decision already applies to all of the 1100 holdings Shell has. The mother company is held responsible for all activities of the subsidiaries