Now Chevron’s annual report reports that 2008 was the company’s most profitable year in history. Just ahead of Chevron’s shareholder meeting, a new report released today tells shareholders more about the hidden and underreported costs of these profits. The alternative annual report is called “The True Cost of Chevron.” It brings together stories from communities across the world—Angola, Burma, Canada, Chad, Cameroon, Ecuador, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, the Philippines and the United States—all directly affected by and in struggle against Chevron’s operations.
We turn now to another oil giant that’s operating in the Niger Delta, as well as around the world: Chevron. Well, ten days into the Nigerian military’s offensive on the oil-rich delta, militants blew up a major Chevron pipeline on Sunday. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, known as MEND, claimed responsibility for the attack.
Chevron said it’s been forced to shut down about 100,000 barrels a day since the attack. In an email message, MEND said it would continues its, quote, “cat and mouse tactics until oil exports cease completely.”
For Chevron, this is just more bad news ahead of the shareholders’ meeting on Wednesday. The attack comes in the midst of a fierce court battle in Ecuador over the polluting of the Amazon that could cost Chevron as much as $27 billion.
The most important thing, first to say about the report is that it is a collaborative—unique collaborative effort of local communities all across the United States and the world telling their story of the direct impacts of Chevron’s operations on their communities, on their livelihoods, on their health, and an attempt to unite those struggles against Chevron into one movement and put it all together in one report to let Chevron’s shareholders know that while the case in Ecuador that is about to cost—it looks like Chevron is going to lose that case, a $27 billion liability, has received a significant amount of attention for good reason. It’s not an isolated case, and it’s not an isolated incident of harm caused by the company and communities organizing to ensure that Chevron is held to account.
So, what we uncovered in the report is essentially a consistent theme across Chevron’s operations in the United States and globally of a severe lack of adherence to environmental laws and environmental standards, public health laws, public health standards, particularly abroad, rampant human rights abuses, and aligning itself with some of the most brutal governments and supporting those brutal governments and regimes and their militaries in the world, including using those brutal militaries to protect its operations; also, that Chevron, very much counter to its public relations efforts, is very, very much not refashioning itself as a clean-energy company, but rather is moving even more aggressively now into some of the most environmentally destructive modes of production that we’ve come up with: tar sand production in Alberta, shale production in the Midwest, offshore drilling. Chevron also has a coal company. It also has a chemical company. It’s also engaging in even more environmentally destructive modes of production, while making, at best, token investments in green alternative energy.
And then, what our report attempts to do is, again, to demonstrate that there is a cost associated with this—these methods of production. And those costs are communities organizing, organizing against those actions, and holding the company to account, financially to account, in the case of lawsuits, in the case of organized boycotts, in the case of demanding that the company spend its money not on its image but on actually cleaning up its act and its practices.
William J Haynes is particularly important. He was the chief counsel, the chief civilian counsel at the Pentagon under the Bush administration, now hired in 2008 to become chief counsel for Chevron. Haynes is currently being investigated both by the US Senate and a Spanish court that may launch criminal charges against him for his involvement in the so-called torture memos, that Haynes personally wrote or oversaw the decision to use harsh techniques on prisoners in Guantanamo and in Iraq.
There was a letter, actually, when Haynes was being considered by the Bush administration for a judgeship, from twenty US military leaders against that appointment, saying that in those memos Haynes actually advocated the use of dogs to intimidate suspects, that the appointment of Haynes as the chief counsel at Chevron, given that Chevron is facing these mass human rights abuse challenges in Burma, in Nigeria, the environmental degradation and human rights consequences of that, in Ecuador, also public health challenges in the Philippines and in Kazakhstan, is quite daunting and quite disturbing for those who are involved in those cases to see, you know, what type of justices that Chevron is bringing to the fore. And there has been many, many calls to demand that Haynes be fired from Chevron and not be given that position while he’s under investigation for those memos.
Another interesting former Chevron board member, who was on Chevron’s board prior to his appointment into the Obama administration, is General James Jones, who not only is now the head of the NSC, but while he was on Chevron’s board had also spent two years as the head of the Chamber of Commerce 21st Century Energy program. And that was the Chamber of Commerce, essentially the largest business lobby group in the country’s efforts to directly challenge legislation to address climate change and to aggressively advocate the agenda of the oil industry for lifting the moratoriums on offshore drilling, for increased shale development, and other domestic—domestic efforts for the oil industry, but also to try and link more directly US foreign policy with our energy policy. And he’s now, as I said, the head of the Obama administration’s National Security Council. Those are just two key—key examples.
J Steven Griles was this number two at the Interior Department under the Bush administration. His tenure at Interior was described by the inspector general who investigated him as, quote, “an ethical quagmire.” He was probably the best example of an individual who was, while in office in the Bush administration, doing everything he could on behalf of his former oil industry clients. Griles became very much embroiled within the Jack Abramoff scandal, is now imprisoned for his role in that scandal.
And he was—in at least two instances worked for Chevron: one, lobbying on behalf of Chevron’s merger with Texaco, and in another, as a witness within a very significant case of Chevron and other companies being charged with, and then settling those charges, of essentially not paying up on the dues that they owed to states and the federal government for offshore drilling.
Now, all these offshore drilling crimes, that one included and many others that we describe within the report, are very important for the public to understand. As Chevron and the oil industry right now tries to lobby to say how clean and safe and good for the economy offshore drilling could be, we have that instance of them not paying their dues. The other instance we have is in Alaska, where there’s a current lawsuit against Chevron for dumping mass amounts of toxins and other pollutants into Alaska’s Cook Inlet as part of its ongoing offshore drilling operations there, again, another lawsuit challenging Chevron’s operations and potentially its bottom line.
There’s two examples to focus on here. One is the extremity of the case, which is, for the thirty years that Texaco operated in Ecuador, its blatant and chosen disregard for environmental laws and environmental standards that created what’s called a Chernobyl in the Amazon of a massive oil dumping oil spill that continues to pollute, cause mass health problems, cancer, miscarriages, and has destroyed essentially the Amazonian jungle in Ecuador. And Texaco, which was then purchased by Chevron’s unwillingness to come clean and clean up its mess and pay for the damages and the health effects and the livelihood effects of the community, that judgment has now, as we’ve said, come up to potentially a $27 billion judgment.
But this is also the story of a long-term successful organizing by the Ecuadorians, supported by Americans, supported by a global movement, to ensure that this case, which was initially launched in 1993 in the United States, then moved to Ecuador, would continue to receive support and attention and be heard and continue to be fought, because as we see all around the world, the case in Ecuador is not isolated and that each of these communities is following a similar model, organizing, sustaining that organizing in the local community, needing support here, needing a voice here, to see that they, too, can carry their case all the way through against this enormous financial behemoth which is Chevron. And now it does look like, even though Chevron has consistently misled its own shareholders on this point, that the Ecuadorian judge is going to rule as early as this fall against Chevron and require a $27 billion cleanup.
Discussion:
Antonia Juhasz, lead author and editor of the True Cost of Chevron report. She’s also the author of Tyranny of Oil: The World’s Most Powerful Industry and What We Must Do to Stop It.
and Ammy Goodman
– from democracynow