Corporations Demand Billions In Taxpayer Money For The Inconvenience Of Not Being Allowed To Boil The Planet

A coalition of Dutch civil society groups has filed a complaint asking the European Commission to help dismantle an obscure but highly effective web of Dutch investment treaties. These legal instruments gracefully allow corporations, fossil fuel companies prominent among them, to sue national governments whenever environmental policies threaten their projected profit margins.

When a country inevitably decides to close a highly polluting gas field to protect the basic health of its citizens, the affected company simply demands billions in taxpayer compensation for the hypothetical money it had planned to make. The Netherlands proudly champions its climate leadership in glossy brochures, yet its treaties have been used in at least 140 known cases, more than those of any other country except the United States.

These treaties ensure that the free transfer of capital is always treated with far more reverence than the continued habitability of the physical environment. The system functions flawlessly, protecting the sacred right of investors to remain completely insulated from the financial consequences of their own ecological obsolescence.