Amazon Watch and Rainforest Action Network just announced a major victory for the Amazon rainforest. An Ecuadorean judge today found Chevron guilty of one of the largest environmental crimes in history and ordered the company to pay a whopping $8 billion to clean up its damage in the Amazon.
Chevron immediately issued a statement condemning the judgement as "ilegitimate and unenforceable" and announced plans to appeal. This ruling clearly has Chevron riled up, as the statement suggests the ruling is "the product of fraud" and included this ominous line: "Chevron intends to see that the perpetrators of this fraud are held accountable for their misconduct."
Chevron apparently fails to see the irony of the phrase "held accountable for their misconduct" since today was a major slapdown of the company's destruction of the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador.
As the L.A. Times notes in its piece about the verdict,
Head over to The Understory blog of the Rainforest Action Network for more details.
AmazonWatch and Rainforest Action Network have released the following statement in response to the verdict:
“As of today, Chevron’s guilt for extensive oil contamination in the Amazon rainforest is official. It is time Chevron takes responsibility for these environmental and public health damages, which they have fought for the past 18 years.
“Today’s ruling in Ecuador against Chevron proves overwhelmingly that the oil giant is responsible for billions gallons of highly toxic waste sludge deliberately dumped into local streams and rivers, which thousands depend on for drinking, bathing, and fishing.
“Chevron has spent the last 18 years waging unprecedented public relations and lobbying campaigns to avoid cleaning up the environmental and public health catastrophe it left in the Amazon rainforest. Today’s guilty verdict sends a loud and clear message: It is time Chevron clean up its disastrous mess in Ecuador.
“Today’s case is historic and unprecedented. It is the first time Indigenous people have sued a multinational corporation in the country where the crime was committed and won.
“Today’s historic ruling against Chevron is a testament to the strength of the Ecuadorian people who have spent 18 years bringing Chevron to justice while suffering the effects of the company’s extensive oil contamination.”
Democracy is utterly dependent upon an electorate that is accurately informed. In promoting climate change denial (and often denying their responsibility for doing so) industry has done more than endanger the environment. It has undermined democracy.
There is a vast difference between putting forth a point of view, honestly held, and intentionally sowing the seeds of confusion. Free speech does not include the right to deceive. Deception is not a point of view. And the right to disagree does not include a right to intentionally subvert the public awareness.
So just in case anyone wasn’t sure, a major study of almost 12,000 scientific papers on global warming between 1991 and 2011 finds less than one per cent disagree that humans are the main cause.
Published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, the study led by John Cook, the Australia-based founder of Skeptical Science, confirms the debate about the causes of global warming had all but vanished in the scientific literature by the early 1990s. ...
read more
Comments
I think Chevron deserved the
I think Chevron deserved the punishment they recieved for dumping their oil in the rainforests of Ecuador. Although Ecuador agreed to Chevron's terms and conditions of dumping oil in their land, Chevron still had the audacity to even ask permission of spilling oil in the Ecuadorian's land when they knew it would cause cancer and harm the people of the land. And the Ecuadorians only agreed to Chevron for the oil spilling because Chevron promised them 2 checks in return to help clean up the oil once they were done with their experiment.