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Most outrageous greenwash competition
An ad [pdf] promoting palm oil as a sustainable source of food oil and biofuel was rejected because it violated truth in advertising laws. The ad was created for the Malaysian palm oil industry and refused by the UK's Advertising Standards Agency. It's the first I've ever heard of a greenwashing attempt being called an outright lie and thus rejected.
This ad (partially pictured) is pretty bad. Do you know of one that's worse?
The rejection may stem from the advertisement's claims not just that palm production requires less land than other crops but also that that plantations help pull indigenous groups out of poverty. In reality, they are more likely to ensure continued poverty through rigged purchasing agreements or outright land grabs.
The Penan tribe of the Malaysian part of the isle of Borneo put out a this statement via the indigenous rights group Survival International:
How come the advert claimed that palm oil helps alleviate poverty, when from the very beginning oil palm plantations have destroyed our source of livelihood and made us much poorer? A lot of people are hungry every day because our forest has been destroyed.
The expansion of palm oil accounts, in large part, for Malaysia's neighbor Indonesia's position as the third largest greenhouse gas polluter in the world as a result of rampant deforestation.
Do you know of ads that have been banned—or should be? Submit a link in the comments with links or information disproving the ad's claims. I'll write a post about the best (worst) ones.
| November 02 2009 at 12:38 PM
Brazilian tribe dwindles to five people
Here is a NYT article, in its entirety. On the one hand, it says so much, and, on the other, surely there must be more to say about an entire culture of people.
The Akuntsu tribe has been whittled down to five people after the group's oldest member, Ururu, died, a native rights organization, Survival International, said Monday. There were seven members of the Amazon basin tribe when it was first contacted by Brazil's Indian affairs department in 1995. Survival International said the tribe had been a victim of ranchers and gunmen who wiped out most of the group when they took its land in the 1960s and '70s.
| October 20 2009 at 06:16 PM
More questions about Chevron videotapes
A New York Times article published on Friday raises more questions about Chevron's relationship to the two men that produced the videotapes that, according to the company, reveal a scheme to bribe the judge then presiding over its Amazon lawsuit. (The judge has since recused himself while also proclaiming his innocence.)
A press release put out by plaintiffs' groups further notes that Bloomberg News has reported that Diego Borja, one of the men who allegedly made the tapes, worked for Chevron as a field technician during the civil trial, just months before the videos were made, and also has an office in a small building where Chevron's local Ecuadorian legal team also maintains its offices.
The Times also finds no evidence to support the company's claim that an Ecuadorian man in the tapes is the power broker for the country's ruling party that he claims to be.
Because the men who made the tapes had no apparent motive to do so other than compensation from Chevron (why record yourself successfully bribing someone unless you have reason to want to ruin that person?), suspicion continues to mount that the tapes are essentially fakes and/or that they show Chevron's own attempts to bribe people involved with the decision. Plaintiffs groups are calling for a DOJ investigation into Chevron's actions, given that bribery abroad is a U.S. crime.
I see an investigation as a good chance for the federal government to show foreign nations that it doesn't condone corporate meddling—of whatever kind—into sovereign justice systems. Even if the tapes are nothing but a bad frame job, other countries deserve a little more respect.
For a review of Crude, a current documentary about the case, click here, and for an interview with director Joe Berlinger, click here.
| October 13 2009 at 03:48 PM
Chevron CEO forced out?
Dave O'Reilly, the CEO of San Ramon-based Chevron Corp., announced a surprise retirement earlier today, a move that seems related to growing publicity about Chevron's likely liability for environmental destruction of the Ecuadorian Amazon wrought by Texaco, which Chevron purchased under O'Reilly's watch in 2001. (A documentary about the case, Crude, opened in San Francisco this week.)
Chevron's refinery in Richmond, CA.
If Chevron is found liable for the full $27 billion estimate in a pending lawsuit, it would lose 20 percent of its market value.
"O'Reilly is either trying get out of Chevron before the Ecuador judgment comes down and further embarrasses him, or he was hounded to retire so Chevron could try to bury an obvious corporate governance problem given its failure to properly vet Texaco," said Chris Lehane, a lawyer and political consultant working for the Amazonian communities suing Chevron.
Local environmental group Amazon Watch, which is supporting the plaintiffs in the suit, issued an open letter to Chevron shareholders earlier this year, alleging that O'Reilly had not properly evaluated Texaco's Amazon problem before purchasing the company.
"There is no evidence that Chevron's management ... independently vetted Texaco's representations at the time about the nature of the lawsuit or the limitations of its [release] which no court of law in either the U.S. or Ecuador has ever accepted as valid in reference to the civil lawsuit," said the letter, signed by Atossa Soltani, the executive director of Amazon Watch. (Chevron has claimed that a release issued by the Ecuadorian government protects it from any lawsuits, while the backers of the lawsuit claim that the release only applied to government-brought suits.)
An investigation opened by New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo lends credence to plaintiffs' allegations: It seeks to determine whether Chevron misled shareholders about its financial liability in the Ecuador case. In the company's SEC disclosures, it claims the lawsuit is "frivolous" and refuses to estimate a potential loss.
Chevron's press release credits O'Really with leading "two of the industry's most significant and successful transactions — the 2001 merger with Texaco and the acquisition of Unocal in 2005." Current vice-chair John Watson will succeed O'Reilly.
| September 30 2009 at 12:12 PM
Crude talk with Joe Berlinger
Tonight marks the San Francisco premiere of esteemed documentarian Joe Berlinger's latest film:
Crude, a portrait of the Amazon lawsuit against Chevron. (Read TGL's review here, and a primer on the lawsuit here.)Trudie Styler, Sting's wife, has personally invited all of the 6,000 Chevron employees in the Bay Area to attend, free of charge, in hopes of generating some productive conversation. Chevron has repeatedly declined invitations to for private screenings and has publicly criticized the film apparently sight unseen.
Berlinger was gracious enough to talk to me yesterday about the emotionally intense, legally complex film.
How did you get interested in the situation in Ecuador?
Stephen Donzinger, the American attorney who's the consulting attorney in the case, came to my office. He was looking to get a filmmaker interested in the story. And as he was talking, all of my red flags started going off as to why this wasn't something I wanted to get involved in. There's a certain style of political, human rights advocacy film-making where a singular point of view is banged over your head repeatedly and anything that's dissenting or ambiguous is not allowed in the film. That is the antithesis of my style. My style is, allow everyone to have their say and the larger emotional truth kind of rises to the top.
The other red flag that went off was that he was talking about this convoluted 13-year history, and I'm a cinema verite filmmaker who likes to film things in the present tense. I did not yet know about Pablo Fajardo or the judicial inspections which in the film play so beautifully. I felt like I had missed the story.
I mean, here we have a situation where it's a Spanish language film with subtitles in a country where, you know, I had to check myself on a map where Ecuador was. I figured my audience would be equally not interested in this story, even though [Donzinger] was compelling. But, I said, "If you understand that I have tons of doubts and you want to take the time to show me around the region, sure, why not—I've never been to the rainforest."
I think Stephen was just convinced that if I saw the pollution, I'd have a change of heart. And he was 100 percent correct. I was imagining this lush paradise—I later learned that the Ecuadorian Amazon is one of the few places on Earth that weathered the last ice age and therefore it's a laboratory of plant and animal species that have yet to even be counted. If you just walk around this region, the environment has been completely assaulted. And they're not just drilling for oil anywhere; they're drilling for oil in paradise, being really sloppy about it, and they're doing it where people live who've lived in harmony with nature for millennia. It was just heartbreaking.
All of my hesitations, my aesthetic criteria, my financial considerations starting getting chipped away at, but by the time I got back to New York, I just felt like, how can I turn my back on what I saw? But I didn't think it was going to become a film. I still thought it would be incredibly difficult to tell this story and to sell it to people.
Do you still feel that way, having made the film, or do you feel like you managed to meet your own aesthetic standards?
I do. I started the project with doubts; I thought I'd start documenting it, and see where it went—maybe I'd just hand off footage to somebody else. I said, even if I lose money on this, I have a debt as a human being to go cover this. Once I made that decision, strangely enough, all the things I was worried about started to come together.
I met Pablo Fajardo: What a fucking great character! I mean, if it was a scripted movie, it would be improbable: An impoverished oil-field worker witnesses the devastation around him; decides to do something; pulls himself up by his bootstraps, gets educated, gets a law degree and finds himself at the center of the largest environmental lawsuit in the world against the fifth-largest company in the world. He just drips with authenticity and purpose and heroism and I was just completely blown away by the guy.
So I'm thinking: I got one good thing going for me. But then on the third trip, I went on my first inspection. And I show up and there are lawyers in jungle gear and a crush of media, and they start pontificating. And I'm like, woah, this is the present-tense thread that I thought would elude me. This was like 4 or 5 months into a commitment that I thought this could actually be a film.
Now I feel like it's a film that fits in with my body of work.
Did you expect to have a verdict before you finished the film?
No. I think this is to the consternation of Stephen and the other plaintiffs attorneys, but one of the themes that emerged from this film was that this thing was going to go on forever. The film doesn't really take a position in the lawsuit. That's why I'm not afraid to have Chevron's say, because to me, there are larger issues at play, which is what the film is about.
The first thing the film is about is that the legal structures we have to resolve these crises are inadequate: We're in year 17 of a struggle that's probably going to go on for another 10 or 15 years. By the time this is resolved, three generations of people will have died and suffered, and that's too long. We open the movie with that sad song of the Cofan woman and at the end of the movie you see the Cofan people going downriver to God knows what existence—because they still have to live with this. They have to go back to that shithole that was once paradise.
We all are somewhat aware that there was an indigenous population that once roamed this land that we removed. That's why I wanted to make this film: It emotionally hit me what I intellectually knew, which is that for the last 700 years white people have treated indigenous people shamefully, and multinational behavior in the extractive industries is just the late 20th century/early 21st century continuation of this shameful trend. That's what the film is about: I can't tell you if Chevron has wrapped itself up in enough legal technicalities to prevail in the lawsuit from a purely legal, technical standpoint, but clearly the moral responsibility lay at their door. There's a moral bankruptcy to all of their arguments because this shouldn't have happened in the first place.
One of the questions I was going to ask you was whether you think the film takes a stand on the lawsuit, but it sounds like you're saying that it does take a stand on whose fault the situation is, but not necessarily what that means in a court of law.
It's not only Texaco, either. I think the government has a role in it, and blind consumers have a role in it too, because I think if more people paid attention to how products are procured in our name, it should have an effect on our behavior. But the larger issue is that Texaco never should have set up a system that was designed to pollute. Whether they should be held liable from a strict definition of the law, I'm not smart enough to know.
I didn't feel like the film weighed in on the technicality that Texaco's liability stems from designing the system. Do you think I missed something?
I think it's in the film. A number of times, they talk about the people who set up the system are the ones who are responsible. It's one of the last things that you hear: As the helicopter is leaving the Amazon and you hear the media reps battle it out, the last things that's said is that "Amazon Watch counters that this was a system that was designed to pollute, and set up by Texaco so any pollution that happened afterward is also their fault." And that is the premise of the lawsuit. But maybe it could have been a stronger point, I don't know.
As a filmmaker, not necessarily as the maker of this film, what insights do you have about the videotapes Chevron released purporting to show bribery?
This is all speculation because I'm not accusing anyone of anything, but I find those tapes incredibly suspicious—it feels like bad acting. At the end of the tapes, they're talking about "Oh, if this was ever released in the New York Times." And later, it was in the New York Times! As a filmmaker, as somebody who has made a living detecting authenticity, they struck me as incredibly inauthentic. And the fact that [Chevron is] not allowing the tapes to be verified, for me is suspicious. The filmmaker in me looks at that footage and it does not feel legit.
As someone who's been around the world in multiple language-translation situations—and this has not been talked about it—if you actually look at the 20 minutes [of videotape], you have this American businessman who's putting this judge in a very uncomfortable situation. The judge says a number of times, "I can't answer that question. I'm here as a judge." Towards the end there are a number of dumb, easy, logistical questions about how the court operates. The businessman says to [Judge Nuñez], "So Chevron is the guilty party?"; He didn't say, "Are you going to find Chevron guilty?" I can tell you as someone who's been in situations where I'm not in command of the language, that easily can read to the judge that he was being asked who the defendants in the case.
How do you feel about the fact that Amazon Watch and groups like it have really made this film their own?
I have mixed feelings about Amazon Watch embracing the film to the degree that it's embraced it because I have maintained throughout the entire production period and release an arms-length relationship with everybody involved, so that the film is treated as a piece of objective journalism—because it is. It's not just an advocacy film; it also critiques the advocacy movement: what plaintiffs have to do to press their case forward, the enlisting of celebrities. All that behind-the-scenes stuff that you don't normally see in this kind of a film. I thought that was very important, because films that bang a singular message over your head are a passive experience for the audience and generally they preach to the converted. The message of this film is intended for people who haven't already been converted, who want to actively engage with the material and come up with their own conclusion.
My big concern about Amazon Watch marketing the movie is that it blunts that message a little bit; it takes away from the objectivity of the film. I don't want the audience to be confused that this film is an extension of [Amazon Watch]. But on the other hand they have a tremendous ability to leverage and audience. From a purely selfish standpoint, it's very hard to release a movie like this and the fact that there's an audience embracing it is very useful. I offered several times to Chevron to screen the movie, and they could have embraced the film and used it for their own purposes, too. I know that sounds kind of mercenary.
But Amazon Watch is hosting the (sold-out) premiere tonight in S.F., right?
I've allowed them at the San Francisco and L.A. premieres to have Amazon Watch-branded fund-raising events. At [first], I felt like the film needed to stand on its own two feet and establish itself as an objective piece of journalism. Luckily it has: In all the early press, the film was widely praised as being incredibly balanced and objective. Once I had those credentials, I loosed up a little bit.
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| September 25 2009 at 12:55 PM
I'm funding the greatest new source of global warming: Ask me why!
A proposed new coal plant in the state of Gujarat, India, would emit 26.7 million metric tonnes of CO2 a year for the next 50 years, making it likely the largest new contributor to climate-changing emissions.
An existing coal-fired power plant in Tatamund, India
Who's paying for the $850 million project? Why, you and I are, through the World Bank's "Clean Technology Fund," of all things. The bank has issued strong statements on the disproportionate effects climate change will have on developing countries, and the need to move away from fossil fuel-based infrastructure, but the Times of London disclosed its funding of less-than-green projects.
Confronted with its funding of the Gujarat plant and others in Botswana and South Africa, the bank insisted that its "policy is to continue funding coal to the extent that there is no alternative and to push for the most efficient coal plants possible."
Which might be descriptive of Botswana, but both Gujarat and South Africa have renewable energy projects underway backed by the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism.
The World Bank has also supported the Wilmar Group, one of the world's most environmentally and socially destructive companies, in which the U.S.'s own ADM has a controlling share.
In the name of producing so-called green fuels (specifically biodiesel from palm oil), Wilmar has torn down pristine rainforest in Indonesia and set peat swamps on fire, not to mention the short-shrift it made of the indigenous groups that had lived on the lands for centuries. As a result of these practices (which other companies also engage in), tiny Indonesia contributed a full 15 percent of the world's greenhouse gases in 2005.
Tim Jones, policy officer of the World Development Movement, may have a point when he says, "The World Bank is acting in the interests of Western countries and companies and not in the long-term interests of the world's poor."
| September 17 2009 at 01:18 PM
Why Chevron is so desperate
Developments this week in San Ramon-based Chevron's giant environmental lawsuit over contamination of the Amazon rainforest offer a flashback to the dark ages of U.S. corporate power in developing countries, complete with sex, lies and videotape.
On Monday, the company produced bizarre video recordings that it claims reveal a scheme to bribe the Ecuadorian judge who will decide whether the company must pay an estimated $27 billion in damages related to its 1964-1990 activities in the Amazon rainforest.
The recordings—made supposedly without Chevron's knowledge or encouragement by a former contractor for the company—in fact, show no such thing. Nor do the circumstances surrounding them pass the whiff test: The former employee has been relocated at the company's expense and is not being made available for press interviews. Chevron held on to the recordings for months and released them first to the media, not to legal bodies in the U.S. or Ecuador. Amazon Watch's Han Shan offers a complete analysis, arguing that the tapes say more about Chevron than they do anything else.
The company has used this dubious evidence to make the sweeping statement that the case against it "is a judicial farce." Charles James, Chevron's executive vice president, told the A.P., "When you have government complicity with the plaintiffs, a weak legal system and a rush to judgment against you, the only thing you do in these circumstances is fight the enforcement." Read: We won't pay, even if a new judge is appointed or the recordings are discounted.
Is it a farce? Let's review the facts of the case. Chevron fought to have the lawsuit heard in Ecuador (the legal strategy was begun by Texaco, but continued by Chevron after it purchased that company). As part of that process, the corporation produced 10 experts to testify to the integrity of the Ecuadorian legal system and agreed to be bound by the rulings of its courts. (Follow this link and read the Executive Summary of Amazon Watch's report on the case.)
According to an L.A. Times editorial, the strategy relied on the belief that the then-conservative government in Ecuador would favor the oil giant, as it long had. But Chevron got a surprise when a populist president was elected and took his countrymen's, the plaintiffs', side. "Weak legal system" and "government complicity" indeed.
The L.A. Times editorial also offers a glimpse of what were, for Chevron (then Texaco), the good old days of raping indigenous women.
Things will get still worse for Chevron this month, as renowned documentary-maker Joe Berlinger releases some videotape of his own—the feature-length doc, Crude. The film is largely in Spanish, which will limit its impact. But a picture's worth a thousand words, and the film clearly shows the contamination left behind. The look on the face of the Chevron lawyer when he loses his bid to direct the court expert where to draw his samples—the same expert who would later estimate damages at $27 billion—is, well, priceless. (TGL will interview Berlinger prior to the S.F. premiere.)
One question that the film does not sufficiently answer is, Why Chevron? The company has repeatedly pointed a finger at Petroecuador, which took over its operations in the 90s. Digging through Amazon Watch's documents on the case, I got my answer. Texaco (now Chevron) was the operator of the sites in question. It also designed the system of extraction whose cost-saving feature was that it routed toxic waste through natural waterways. The system was environmentally substandard even for the time, and even according to internal company documents. As the architect for the system, Chevron is, as a matter of law, responsible for damages that took place even after Petroecuador took over.
And what were the damages, exactly?
Waste intentionally dumped: 18 billion gallons
Waste pits abandoned: 900
Indigenous groups eradicated: One
Indigenous groups decimated: Five
Excess deaths: 1,041
With facts like these, it's no wonder Chevron would turn to trumped up videotapes.
UPDATE: Though he still denies wrongdoing, the judge has recused himself and will be replaced.
| September 03 2009 at 12:15 PM
Chevron's September surprise
Among today's environmental headlines is news that Chevron has turned tapes suggesting a bribery scheme in the company's high-stakes lawsuit in Ecuador over to the Dept. of Justice.
I've opted not to put the story up on SFGreen because I don't think there's much there there. People who claim to represent the government talk about trying to bribe people, and the judge indirectly suggests that he plans to rule against Chevron. The latter is, by the letter of the law, improper but in an utterly banal way.
I'm going on record saying that this little alarmist scam is going to, at best, fizzle, and at worst be revealed to be a sting operation conducted by Chevron operatives—which would speak volumes about how the company does business.
Read the story yourself and see if you don't agree. (The New York Times also covered it.)
Also of interest is a two-part editorial in the L.A. Times documenting the destructive effects of the oil boom on native groups and urging Chevron to embrace corporate responsibility.
Update: In this case, I really do hate to say I told you so, but, before even weeding out what's on the mysterious tapes, Chevron is using them to justify non-payment in the (likely) event that it loses its lawsuit. Disgusting.
| September 01 2009 at 12:32 PM
Mass human extinction?
A breathtaking article in the New York Times reports that tribes living in the Amazon rainforest are facing starvation as supplies of fish in the ecosystem's many rivers dwindle due to climate change. The Amazon gets less and less rain, leaving rivers low and fish stranded.
I'm excerpting it here, but the full article is a must-read.
Chief Kotok, who like all of the Kamayurá people goes by only one name, said that men can now fish all night without a bite in streams where fish used to be abundant; they safely swim in lakes previously teeming with piranhas.
Tacuma, the tribe's wizened senior shaman, said that the only threat he could remember rivaling climate change was a measles virus that arrived deep in the Amazon in 1954, killing more than 90 percent of the Kamayurá.
Fish stocks began to dwindle in the 1990s and "have just collapsed" since 2006, said Chief Kotok...
Throughout history, the traditional final response for indigenous cultures threatened by untenable climate conditions or political strife was to move. But today, moving is often impossible. Land surrounding tribes is now usually occupied by an expanding global population, and once-nomadic groups have often settled down, building homes and schools and even declaring statehood.
The Kamayurá live in the middle of Xingu National Park, a vast territory that was once deep in the Amazon but is now surrounded by farms and ranches.
| July 27 2009 at 10:55 AM
The many colors of green
Last week, the Politics blog flagged a controversy California's Senator Barbara Boxer found herself in, when she told the president of the National Black Chamber of Commerce that the NAACP supports the American Clean Energy and Security Act.
Alford
Henry Alford was testifying before Boxer to oppose the act and claimed to represent the "black community." But when Boxer pointed to the NAACP position, Alford accused Boxer of being "racial."
Alford, whose group is largely funded by Exxon, has a lot at stake in claiming to represent the black community. If clean energy continues to be cast as a white concern, it will be that much easier to dispel carbon regulation as a pie-in-the-sky move that will break the wallets of the disadvantaged (which it won't).
Industrial apologists love to call environmentalism a form of white privilege. But a growing body of polls of minority communities reveals precisely the opposite. The polls find high levels of support for clean energy and climate regulation.
A recent poll by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies' Commission to Engage African Americans on Climate Change showed that 81 percent of African Americans support strong action by the federal government to deal with climate change. The poll also found that
On balance, while African Americans do not believe dealing with global warming will be cost free, they do believe that not dealing with global warming will be more costly, and that a clean energy economy represents a better future.
A May poll of California's Asian communities done by the California League of Conservation Voters found (according to a press release) that four of of five call themselves environmentalists and that 72 percent see environmental regulation as a benefit to society.
A 2008 Sierra Club-commissioned national poll of Latino voters similarly found that 81 percent considered global warming a "major problem" and 80 percent recognized that "energy usage had a substantial impact on their environment."
And yesterday, the Navajo National Council created a Navajo Green Economy Commission to spur green jobs in their community.
Poor communities and communities of color disproportionately suffer the brunt of dirty energy. The Navajo Nation has been saddled with uranium mining on its lands. [Update: The NY Times covers the effects of uranium mining on Navajo lands.] And two-thirds of the Latinos polled knew of toxic sites near where they live or work.
Texas State Senator Rodney Ellis, Co-Chair of CEAC, said, "Addressing climate change must be a priority for all Americans, but it's especially important for African Americans, who have been and will continue to be one of the most impacted groups."
By all accounts, minority communities see opportunities for cleaner air and more jobs in the American Clean Energy and Security Act. That's bad news for the right-wing propaganda machine that uses faux populism tinged with racism to persuade people to vote against their own interests. It is they that have some "'splainin' to do."
| July 22 2009 at 01:55 PM
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