Nord Stream, a crime against the environment: the harmful consequences will be very extensive

If, as appears highly probable, damage to the pipeline Nord Stream resulting in the leakage of huge masses of methane is due to an intentional action, it comes to illicit fact which could constitute a real crime against the environment. It is certain, in fact, as the CNR researchers confirm, that even if there is no direct danger for man and even if the cloud seems to have disappeared, “the introduction of these masses of methane it can significantly alter the climate with effects on global circulation like carbon dioxide. Indeed it is even more harmful. The effect of one gram of methane is 25 times higher than that caused by CO2…; certainly the massive mass of methane will contribute to increase, for example, the incidence of extreme weather events such as those we are witnessing in this period “.

So much so that methane is in second place, after CO2, in the list of the main persons responsible for climate changes, with atmospheric pollution and depletion of the ozone layer; and the European Union, for this very reason, has developed a specific strategy for its limitation since 2020. Indeed, it is issuing a directive that requires all Member States to punish as a crime, with severe prison sentences, the illegal release or release of substances which, such as methanereduce the layer of ozone, causing increasingly serious and frequent climate disasters. Obligation in part anticipated by our country which since 2015 has punished as a crime (imprisonment and fine) “anyone who illegally causes a significant and measurable impairment or deterioration … of an ecosystem, of biodiversity, including agriculture, flora or fauna “; adding that, in the most serious cases, a environmental disaster.

In other words, as the Supreme Court explains, what you want to punish with this crime is “a modification of the original consistency of the environmental matrix or ecosystem characterized, in the case of” compromise “, in a condition of risk or danger that could defining itself as a “functional imbalance”, because it affects normal natural processes related to the specificity of the environmental matrix or ecosystem and, in that of “deterioration”, as “structural imbalance”, characterized by a decay of state or quality of the latter “(Cass. 46170/2016). That is precisely what caused those who sabotaged the pipeline, with one criminal action perpetrated in the Baltic Sea but with harmful consequences which, unfortunately, will certainly be much more widespread.