A gas project of Chevron and Total is responsible for major funding of the military junta in Myanmar, allowing Burmese generals to accumulate billions of dollars in Singapore banks, and human rights abuses have been linked to the Yadana Pipeline, says human rights group EarthRights.
EarthRights claims that both Total and Chevron have tried to dismiss the abuses, which include forced labor and killings, by Myanmar troops along the Yadana Pipeline. The group also maintains that the $4.8 billion in revenue from the project has allowed the ruling military junta to continue to exist.
Judge Juan Nunez has recused himself in the case which focuses around claims that Chevron has been environmentally irresponsible in Ecuador’s Amazonian rainforest. He is the fifth judge to leave the case.
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by filmmaker Joe Berlinger, director of Crude. For more information visit the Crude film website.
During the summer of 2005, a charismatic American environmental lawyer named Steven Donziger knocked on my Manhattan office door. He was running a $27 billion class-action lawsuit on behalf of 30,000 Ecuadorean inhabitants of the Amazon rainforest and was looking for a filmmaker to tell his clients’ story.
Since I am not known as an environmental filmmaker — my last film, “Metallica: Some Kind of Monster,” was a warts-and-all portrait of a heavy metal band in crisis — I was a little surprised that Donziger had sought me out to me to make his pitch.
The story the lawyer told me was indeed shocking: From the mid-1960s until the early 1990s, Texaco (now Chevron) dumped 18 billion gallons of oil and toxic waste into the Amazon rainforest of Ecuador, creating a 1,700-square-mile “cancer death zone” the size of Rhode Island. The plaintiffs he represented alleged that birth defects, leukemia, miscarriages and other ailments were plaguing the people of the region, and the Amazon itself — one of the few places on Earth to survive the last ice age — was gasping for breath under the strain of oil exploitation.
Chevron Corp. has filed an appeal in California State Court of Appeals in hopes of overturning a lower courts ruling halting the planned expansion of its Richmond, California facility on the grounds it does not meet the standards for greenhouse gas mititgation and reporting as laid out in new provisions of the California Environmental Quality Act.
San Ramon, CA - Much will be said at the Chevron Corporation’s shareholder conference this week; the agenda is full. However, there will be little said about Chevron’s involvement in controversial projects concerning tar sand. Despite the requests of shareholders owning $31.4 billion dollars, Chevron will remain quiet, keeping the Alberta tar sand projects off the agenda.
Tar sand, a source of non-conventional oil, consists of bitumen, a sticky, tar-like form of petroleum which is so thick and heavy that it must be heated or diluted before it will flow. Harvesting tar sand requires huge amounts of energy and water.
In addition to heavy water use, extraction of Alberta’s Athabasca oil sands also involves clear-cutting of the Boreal Forest, formation of toxic “tailings” lakes, habitat destruction of iconic species such as the woodland caribou, and up to five times higher greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil extraction. All of these factors lead Canada’s Environmental Defence to label tar sand development “the most destructive project on Earth.”
A documentary or any feature film, like a good dessert, needs good texture. Some docs offer light delicate flavors, while others serve up crisp tawdry offerings but Crude, the latest feature documentary from director Joe Berlinger (Brother’s Keeper, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster) brings a feel so viscous its some wonder that the film and the emotions within it don’t just ooze into the theater.
And why wouldn’t the film be viscous with center of the film swirling around a legal case about the black gold being pumped out of the jungles of Ecuador. Some have called the case the “Amazon Chernobyl” but whatever the name, Berlinger delves head first into this the David versus Goliath story that circles around one of the longest and most controversial legal (not to mention environmental and human rights) cases ever.
Today seven activists are facing a crowd of some of the world’s biggest proponents of coal-based energy at the World Coal-to-Liquids Conference 2009 in Washington, DC.
The group, acting as Rising Tide DC, interrupted the planned panel discussion to interject some ideas of their own about the environmental detestation caused by coal technologies. The panel, which began at 4:30 pm, includes representatives of Chevron, the World Coal Institute, the World Petroleum Council, and Consol Energy.
In the end, the military killed two protesters. Accounts of the incident vary drastically: Chevron says the protesters were violent, armed, and had taken workers hostage, while the protesters and their lawyers claim they had been entirely peaceful and engaged in civil disobedience.
The League of Conservation Voters has launched a new campaign to counter Chevron’s newest greenwashed advertising blitz. In their new ads, Chevron asks, “Will You Join Us?” and gives examples of the things people can do on a personal level to stop global warming.
They don’t mention what they as a company have the power to do. Instead, they ask people to do things like take their golf clubs out of their trunk, replace light bulbs with CFLs, and “consider” buying a hybrid.
A gas project of Chevron and Total is responsible for major funding of the military junta in Myanmar, allowing Burmese generals to accumulate billions of dollars in Singapore banks, and human rights abuses have been linked to the Yadana Pipeline, says human rights group EarthRights.
