Video on Chevron’s Appalling Behavior in Ecuador
Every few months, I try to remind myself to write something on Chevron and its overtly criminal behavior in Ecuador. Those who are keeping track here will recall that, for a period of 26 years, Chevron (then Texaco) deliberately dumped tens of billions of gallons of toxic byproducts of their oil extraction processes directly into Ecuadorian rivers and streams, simply because they thought they would never get caught. Well, they did — and recently an appellate court upheld an $18 judgement against Chevron, making it appear that perhaps the good guys have won here, and that some level of justice may be done, where the victims (the local people suffering skyrocketing rates of cancer, birth defects, etc.) will be compensated for their losses.
No such luck. Instead of remediating his company’s contamination, Chevron CEO John Watson has invested hundreds of millions of dollars on 39 different U.S. law firms in an increasingly futile attempt to evade responsibility for the consequences of this quite deliberate man-made catastrophe.
Linked above is a 15-minute long video that summarizes exactly what happened here — perhaps the single most despicable act in the history of corporate criminality.
Watch the movie Crude…..available on Netflix. It is a documentary on the injustice of the people of Ecuador and the environment caused by corporate greed. Very sad but real and something everyone needs to see.
Scott: Yes, I saw it, and it was great. In fact, I wrote this at the time: http://2greenenergy.com/crude-%E2%80%93-the-movie/1022/.
I really don’t need to view the movie.
Years ago, I learned how corporations behave in countries that either have inadequate environmental laws or governments that are too weak to enforce them. Ecuador is not the only country with that problem; the delta area of Nigeria is another good example.
I’ve been studying the behavior of companies during the Gilded Age, i.e., the period between the Civil War and about 1900. I’m also reading the biographies of the captains of industry during that period. During that period, American companies behaved just as badly here in the U.S. as companies are now behaving in poorer countries. However, in that era, the technology did not exist to prevent much of the pollution that occurred and if laws had then existed that were as effective as the laws we have now, probably the industrial revolution could not have occurred and we’d still be living much like our ancestors in the early 1800s.
History shows how important it is to have legislation to protect the environment. But, the legislation has to be drafted very carefully, else it may create as many problems as it solves.