My Speech In Stockholm On a Legal Framework to Hold Major Polluters Accountable

"The legal battle of this generation is upon us. We must act now or we will lose our vital ecosystems forever."

Hi everybody! Thanks again for the support on Substack which is a platform that is critical to building our campaign even stronger. I am sharing my full 9-minute keynote speech in Stockholm marking the 50th Anniversary of the first United Nations Global Conference on the Environment. I spoke on a panel with Tarja Halonen, the former President of Finland a major leader on climate; and Jo Jo Mehta, the supremely talented organizer of the international Stop Ecocide campaign. (Here is the Stop Ecocide website.)

Jo Jo and her team are trying to convince the international community to accept “Ecocide” as the world’s next atrocity crime alongside crimes like “Genocide” and “Crimes against Humanity”. It was a profound honor to be invited — and shows again how far our campaign has come as people worldwide are interested in my commentary on a variety of climate, human rights, and legal issues. More than 200,000 people have watched the panel on YouTube and more than 4 million worldwide attended at least part of the conference online.

I truly believe had “Ecocide” been considered a crime in the 1960s when Texaco (now Chevron) began to ravage Ecuador’s rainforest, it is possible company executives would not have engineered a system of oil extraction that by design dumped billions of gallons of cancer-causing oil waste onto Indigenous ancestral lands in the Amazon. Why? Because they would have known they might face personal criminal liability and possible prison time for doing so. For this reason, I believe the biggest and most important legal battle of our generation — and for humanity — is to ensure “Ecocide” becomes the law and begins to work its deterrent impact on worst tendencies of the fossil fuel industry.

And how ironic is it that while fossil fuel companies get to destroy the planet with impunity, it is apparently illegal to try to do something about it. Hence, my 993 days in detention on misdemeanor charges filed by a Chevron-linked judge that were rejected by the regular federal prosecutor.

Finally, I want to thank my friends at the environmental organization “We Don’t Have Time” in Sweden for inviting me to speak at their global summit for each of the last three years. If you can, please check out their website and join their international network. Finally, please share this Substack with your friends as we are trying to build support.