Climate, Politics, & Tea

Continuing on my oil theme from last week, I was very pleased to read today about the settlement in an ongoing lawsuit against Shell. The case centered around Shell’s operations in Nigeria – where Shell enlisted the support of the brutal military dictatorship to suppress the local Ogoni people who were protesting the pollution and destruction of their land caused by Shell’s operations (including gas flaring, oil spills, and deforestation). Shell was charged with complicity in the torture and murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa and other leading community activists in the mid-1990s. A powerful video giving some background on the case is here:

In today’s settlement, Shell has agreed to provide $15.5 million, which will be used to compensate victims’ families, establish a trust fund to benefit the Ogoni people, and cover a portion of plaintiffs’ legal fees and costs. (It is worth noting the gross inequalities involved here – $15.5 million is a huge sum for the plaintiffs and 0.06% of Shell’s 2007 annual profit, yet Shell still spent 13 years fighting the Ogoni in court). This settlement does not provide justice for the Ogoni people, since Shell has not committed to ending its ongoing destructive practices in the Ogoni region. Nevertheless, it is a remarkable victory for indigenous people against one of the most powerful multinational corporations in the world.

Update (June 9): more background on the lawsuit and an interview with Ken Saro-Wiwa’s son and one of the lawyers in this article.

I took a break from my usual routine this past week to go to a protest of Chevron at their annual shareholder’s meeting at their international headquarters in San Ramon, CA. The protesters were there to support shareholders from local communities around the world who are suffering serious health, human rights, and environmental abuses as a result of Chevron’s operations. They were there to make various demands on Chevron’s management (like pulling out of their operation in Manila, where they are still operating even though the Filipino supreme court has more than once ordered them to leave) and to present a report detailing their grievances: www.truecostofchevron.com. I don’t think the management agreed to any of their demands at the meeting, but the negative press that came out of the protest was still very worthwhile.

Unlike other protests I’ve been to, I actually learned something from the speeches, most of them detailing Chevron’s activities in other parts of the world, including Burma, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, the Philippines, and Ecuador. In the Ecuadorian Amazon, for example, Texaco drilled for oil in the Amazon from 1964-1990 – leaving at least 916 unlined, open toxic waste pits behind when it left the country. Texaco also dumped more than 18 billion gallons of toxic pollutants into the local rivers – a practice that was both illegal in the United States and in contravention of the company’s contractual obligations in Ecuador. After Chevron acquired Texaco in 2001, it has steadfastly refused to clean up this mess. Local communities filed a class action lawsuit in 1993, and last year a court-appointed independent expert recommended that Chevron be held liable for damages of $27 billion. The final verdict should come out this fall.

A couple of things struck me as we were protesting:
1. Whoever came up with the theme for the protest did a brilliant job. As most people have seen, Chevron has been running a rather obnoxious greenwashing campaign featuring ads with a photo of a person saying things like, “I will change my lightbulbs to fluorescents. Will you join me?” or, “I will drive less. Will you join me?” The latter is my personal favorite since it so obviously shows the hypocrisy of the whole ad campaign – I’m sure if everyone who read that ad stopped driving, Chevron would not be too happy. The protestors threw Chevron’s ad campaign right back at them with a big poster of Chevron’s CEO saying “I will pretend to care about the environment” and other posters of the faces of people victimized by Chevron’s policies saying things like, “I will give my baby polluted water.” I heard that Chevron is now pulling its ads, at least in the San Francisco area.

2. More importantly, I was really struck by the contrast between activism in the United States and elsewhere in the world. Before the protest, some of us were concerned about the remote chance that we might get arrested (I say “remote” because this protest has happened every year for the past several years and nobody has been arrested, to my knowledge). At the protest, we were reminded of people non-violently protesting Chevron in Nigeria who were murdered for their actions. It was a good reminder of how lucky we are in the United States – and also of how little excuse we have for not standing up against injustice when it is so easy to do so here.