Big Oil Causes Big Mess in Ecuador

January 2, 2009 by Katie Bezrouch
Filed under: Ecopolitics 
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The Ecuadorian rain forests are suffering, and so are its inhabitants. Texaco (currently owned by Chevron Corporation) began prospecting for oil in Ecuador in 1964. They found what they were looking for, and built the invasive petroleum extraction infrastructure that still oppresses the local indigenous people and the Amazon.

Chevron insists that their involvement ends there. They refuse to take any responsibility for ominous environmental disaster that plagues the region that Texaco once profited from, and instead point their finger at PetroEcuador, a state-owned Ecuadorian oil company.

Ecuadorian citizens seem to disagree with the American company. A class action law suit was filed against Chevron in 1993 on behalf of 30,000 Amazon residents for polluting their environment.

Since then, Chevron pushed to have the case heard in Ecuador, where it has been re-filed. The trial is still going on right now, while judicial inspections are being performed. The vast sea of opposing information available on this subject can be dizzying, but when I took into account the origin of the intellectual material it helped cure my vertigo.

According to Judith Kimerling (2007 recipient of the Parker Gentry Award for Conservation Biology), “…from 1972 until it left Ecuador in 1992, Texaco intentionally dumped more than 19 billion gallons of toxic wastewater into the region and was responsible for 16.8 million gallons of crude oil spilling from the main pipeline into the forest.” This pollution has caused massive amounts of eco-degradation and human health problems. There has been increased cancer rates in oil producing villages and higher miscarriage rates. The International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health attributes this to living in the proximity of a contaminated water source, and it just so happens that the streams in the region contain more than 280 times more oil chemicals than European communities would allow.

But Chevron has a different perspective. Their analysis of Ecuador data reveals no increased cancer levels in the oil region. They fabricated this information by funding a study of their own called “Cancer Mortality and Oil Production in the Amazon Region of Ecuador, 1990-2005,” key word being “funding”. The study was conducted by three scientists at a consulting firm called Exponent. When I went to the their website and found that the veteran member of the Exponent Board of Directors (Samuel H. Armacost) is also a board member of the Chevron Corporation, I couldn’t help myself from laughing out loud.

Anyone with a critical eye should be able to see right through Chevron’s junk science. An independent court-appointed expert found that 100% of Chevron’s former well sites are contaminated with illegal levels of Total Petroleum Hydrocarbons. Most all of the samples contain well known carcinogens, or, cancer causing agents.

I wonder if Chevron is beginning to regret moving the case to Ecuador. They probably assumed switching the location would help to keep Chevron out of the US media spotlight. Maybe they thought they would be able to bully their way out of assuming liability more easily in a smaller, less wealthy country. All in all, it doesn’t seem to be working out so well for them. Chevron keeps trying to flaunt its power and threaten Ecuadorians by pushing US administration to cancel special trade preferences for Ecuador if the country’s government doesn’t drop the case. But the US government has continued all trade agreements….and soon Mr. Obama will step into office…and well, things aren’t looking great for Chevron these days.

Big oil has to pay for the damage it’s done. Hopefully, Chevron-Texaco still has some money left over from selling the 1.3 billion barrels of oil they extracted from the ancestral lands of Ecuador.

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