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Chevron's Sham Remediation in Ecuador: Toxic Oil Pits Continue to Contaminate

(1) Comments | Posted November 14, 2014 | 1:15 PM

Chevron, Chevron Quite Contrary, How Does Your Garden Grow
With Polluted Soil & Toxic Water
And Healthy Lawyers All in a Row
During the historic contamination trial against Chevron in Ecuador, the company often took journalists to its so-called "remediated" oil pits to prove its predecessor Texaco...

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Chevron Will Lose Ecuador Pollution Case on Both Law and Facts

(5) Comments | Posted October 22, 2014 | 1:04 PM

Prediction: Chevron will lose the historic Ecuador pollution case on both the law and the facts, despite what you may have read in articles by U.S. legal reporters about the 20-year plus lawsuit.
In fact, you may think the Ecuadorians have lost already. They haven't.
If you...

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Chevron Will Lose Ecuador Pollution Case on Both Law and Facts

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Prediction: Chevron will lose the historic Ecuador pollution case on both law and the facts, despite what you may have read in articles by U.S. legal reporters about 20-year plus lawsuit.

In fact, you may think the Ecuadorians have lost already. They haven't.

If you care about the plight of indigenous people everywhere, you should consider another set of facts you haven't heard much about, at least in the U.S., and then make your own prediction.

How Chevron's Scientists Misled Courts and Public About Death and Disease in Ecuador

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"Scientists"...involved in developing public health and environmental protections recognize we do not need (and we almost never obtain) proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Waiting for absolute certainty is a recipe for failure: People will die, and the environment will be damaged if we wait for absolute proof...Out of all scientific uncertainties, few are more complex than understanding the causes of human disease. Scientists cannot feed toxic chemicals to humans to see what dose causes cancer."

Doubt Is Their Product, Dr. David Michaels, 2008

This is how Dr. David Michaels, a leading epidemiologist and former U.S. government scientist, begins a chapter in his seminal and groundbreaking book, Doubt Is Their Product.

The book describes in depressing detail how industries, their scientists, corporate lawyers and large PR firms have "shaped and skewed" science to create doubt about the dangers of chemicals and other toxins industries produce.

Hinton Communications Racks Up Media Hits For Clients This Summer At Affordable Prices

To visit Hinton Communications website, click here.  For the latest media placements, click here New York, NY (August 28, 2014) —With offices in New York and Washington, DC, Hinton Communications has had a productive summer for its clients, continuing to deliver highly effective PR campaigns for clients across a broad range of industries and socially responsible issues. Leveraging an extensive network of relationships with top-tier media as well as crafting creative strategies with its team of seasoned practitioners, Hinton Communications earned clients, on tight budgets, broad exposure with traditional and digital media channels on local, regional and national levels.

False Testimony Forced Chevron To 'Prep' Its Million-Dollar Witness For 50 Days in Ecuador Case

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Just when you thought the long-running and bitter Chevron/Ecuador legal battle could not get any more bizarre, it does.

Legal briefs recently filed in a U.S. court revealed that for 50 day Chevron lawyers prepped their million-dollar star witness about a bribe alleged in the oil giant's retaliatory RICO lawsuit against a group of Ecuadorian indigenous peoples and their U.S. lawyer. (See page 61 of this legal brief.)

It took Chevron that long to try and get Alberto Guerra's story straight.

Will Mississippi GOP Return Political Favor To Black Voters?

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On a Saturday afternoon in the fall of 1984, a few weeks before the November election of that year, a white man walked into the Greenville, Mississippi campaign office of Robert Clark, the first black person to win a Democratic congressional nomination in Mississippi since Reconstruction.

As the press secretary for Clark, I happened to be in the mostly empty office that day. The white man (I long ago forgot his name) looked like he had just walked out of a Mississippi country club after a round of golf. He wore pink pants and a green-and-pink-checkered sports jacket. In his right hand was a briefcase. The man entered into the office of Clark's campaign manager, heaved the briefcase onto a desk and opened it.

New Report Confirms Texaco’s Massive Contamination of Ecuador Rainforest & Chevron’s Effort to Mislead Court

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New York, NY -- A highly respected U.S. environmental engineering firm recently found illegal and dangerous levels of contaminated soil and drinking water at well sites in the Ecuadorian rainforest, where only Texaco, now owned by Chevron, operated from 1964 to 1992.

The findings by the New Jersey-based Louis Berger Group (LBG) are similar to findings released in dozens of earlier expert reports during an eight-year Ecuador trial that documented massive contamination by Texaco.

The LBG report also offers additional evidence that Chevron intentionally misled the Ecuador court about the contamination, which continues over 20 years later to harm the residents and their environment.

Benzene, A Known Carcinogen, Found in Chevron's Own Contamination Tests

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From 1964 to 1990, Texaco drilled for oil in Ecuador. Though illegal in the U.S., Texaco dumped toxic production water directly into the waterways of the Ecuadorian rainforest. Texaco also built about 900 huge, unlined oil pits to store permanently leftover crude at well sites.

During this time, people living near the well sites consumed the water and ate food grown in the soil without knowing that both had been contaminated with benzene, a known carcinogen, and other toxic chemicals and metals.

Chevron, which bought Texaco, blames Petroecuador, Ecuador's oil company, for any damage to the environment and to individuals. But Petroecuador did not operate the well sites. It did not build them. Only Texaco.

Chevron tried to prove Texaco's innocence by taking contamination tests during the Ecuador trial, but the oil giant's own tests came back toxic.

Chevron's experts found illegal amounts of benzene, barium, cadmium, lead and other chemicals in the environment -- all toxic and dangerous to human health. For example:

Benzene: 18 mg found at the Sacha Norte 2 well site; Ecuador law allows only 0.05 mg. Benzene is a colorless liquid made mostly from petroleum; it is also a known human carcinogen.

The Center for Disease Control says this about benzene:


"Long-term exposure to benzene can cause cancer of the blood-forming organs. This condition is called leukemia ... The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has determined that benzene is a known carcinogen (can cause cancer)."

The Ecuadorians' lawyers tried to submit this evidence to the U.S. court where Chevron accused them of fraud, but federal judge Lewis Kaplan denied their request.