The campaigning group is targeting Esso, a subsidiary of ExxonMobil, for its key role in lobbying for the US to abandon the Kyoto Protocol, which is the only international agreement to address global warming.
Esso has taken the legal moves in France, where it has filed a suit demanding 拢51,678 a day in compensation for as long as the campaign continues, and the website of the campaign taken down. A hearing date has been set for July 1 in Paris.
The move is an admission by the oil giant that the grassroots campaign is having some effect. ExxonMobil says the campaign is illegal and is damaging the reputation of its brand.
ExxonMobil claims its logo has been manipulated exchanging the two letters s for two dollar signs, which it says resemble Germany's hated Nazi SS.
Stop E$$o says it has targeted Esso because the company has run a 10-year campaign of dirty tricks against international action to combat climate change.
Stephan Tindale, Greenpeace UK director, said: "Instead of using bully-boy antics to gag free speech, we suggest Esso instead halts its campaign to subvert international action on climate change. We simply replaced two letters in Esso's logo with the internationally recognised symbol for the US dollar. We find it ironic that the richest corporation in the world can't recognise the dollar sign and confuses it with a Nazi symbol. In the meantime, we're delighted Esso has finally admitted that our campaign is having an effect."
The campaign argues that ExxonMobil gave $1.3bn (拢866m) to the Republicans in the 2000 US election and as soon as George Bush became president, he pulled the US out of the Kyoto Protocol.
In a statement, ExxonMobil said: "The reader of the [website] pages can only feel, independently from any argument expressed on this site, a repulsion, which turns away customers from the Esso brand."
The French Stop E$$o campaign was launched in May. 北京赛车pk10s are also running in the US, Canada and Germany. The campaign in the UK is a coalition of Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and People & Planet.
The papers filed by Esso show that it is seeking to have the French version of the Stop E$$o website taken down. While Esso refuses to discuss the content of the site, it says the use of the campaign logo on the site is enough to justify its removal.
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