Who Wanted Ecuador to Try the Biggest Environmental Case in History? That Would be the Defendant, Chevron
On Monday, Valentine’s Day, a judge in Ecuador sent Chevron the opposite of a valentine: it ordered the giant oil company to pay $8.6 billion in damages and cleanup costs for harm caused by exploration and drilling by Texaco (acquired by Chevron in 2001) in a giant tract of rain forest near the headwaters of the Amazon River. The plaintiffs brought the class action on behalf of 30,000 indigenous residents of the region, who have long claimed that by dumping billions of gallons of toxic sludge into local waterways between 1964 and 1990, Texaco destroyed the local environment and caused hundreds of deaths by cancer.
The award is the latest chapter in one of the longest-running environmental cases ever, but it’s certain not to end the dispute: Chevron immediately called the decision “illegitimate and unenforceable” and appealed on Thursday. Attorneys for the plaintiffs suggested that they might appeal too, since the award was far below the $27.3 billion recommended by an independent expert. That’s a lot of money even by Chevron’s standards – it only earned $19 billion in profit last year. (Ecuador’s GDP, by way of comparison, is $61.5 billion.)
A …
CPR President Rena Steinzor is testifying at 1pm today before the House Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy. The hearing will be the latest in a string attempting to make a case that public health and safety protections must be weakened right now given the state of the economy.
In her testimony, Steinzor argues:
I appreciate that the majority feels it has a mandate as a result of the election. But I would urge all Members to consider whether gutting environmental protection is really what voters had in mind, or whether this attack on regulation is simply an effort to re-fight past battles over the nation’s environmental laws, this time by objecting not to the laws themselves but to their enforcement. It’s bad enough that the agencies are underfunded to the point that they are barely able to do their jobs. But …
On March 23, 2005, the worst industrial accident in 15 years killed 15 workers and injured more than 180 others as highly flammable liquids from a distillation tower were vented directly to the ground and were ignited by a spark at the huge BP Corporation Refinery in Texas City, Texas. A two-year investigation by the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSHIB) concluded that the BP Texas City refinery was “an extremely dangerous workplace by any objective standard.” An “Independent Review Panel” that BP assembled to investigate the explosion and BP’s safety practices throughout all of its operations issued a similarly devastating critique.
The CSHIB also found that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) had acted irresponsibly. The facility was subject to OSHA’s 1992 process safety management standard, but plant managers had failed to implement many of its requirements. The standard itself was out …
Cross-posted from Legal Planet.
Here’s some of what’s going on in the ocean policy world:
- BOEMRE is reviewing the first post-moratorium application to drill an exploratory deepwater well in the Gulf of Mexico. As required by a June Notice to Lessees, Shell’s application to drill 130 miles from shore in 2000 to 2900 feet of water includes a blowout scenario. Shell anticipates that drilling a relief well would take 109 days, during which time 12.3 million barrels of oil could be discharged, more than twice what the Deepwater Horizon dumped into the Gulf. The application includes a brief environmental impact assessment which acknowledges that the Macondo blowout showed that the impacts of a large spill could be worse than previously thought, but offers very little in the way of analysis of potential impacts. Mostly it repeats over and over again that a large …
On last night’s PBS NewsHour, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, took a shot at CPR’s Sidney Shapiro, who was the lone witness that Committee Democrats were allowed to invite to testify at yesterday’s hearing on the costs of regulation. Issa badly mischaracterized Shapiro’s testimony, saying:
The minority chose a witness. Mr. Shapiro spoke on behalf of his views, which were, in a nutshell -- and he reiterated them -- that he sees no reason to have a cost-vs.-benefit analysis. He thinks it's futile, meaning that no matter how much it costs, go ahead and do regulations. I would hope that, instead of the progressive witness that they had, that they would have sensible groups that see an advantage to environmental progress, while at the same time getting business progress, that win-win that we often look …
GOP leaders in the House of Representatives will push a resolution today directing the various committees of the House to “inventory and review existing, pending, and proposed regulations and orders from agencies of the federal government, particularly with respect to their effect on jobs and economic growth.” Thus begins what Republicans and their industry friends hope will be a productive hunting season in the rich woods of regulatory safeguards that protect public health, worker and consumer safety, and the environment. Not content to leave the agencies alone to eliminate gratuitous and outmoded rules, as President Obama has directed them to do, House Republicans are in search of far bigger game.
They’ll have plenty of help. Also this week, House Government Oversight and Government Affairs Committee Chairman Darrel Issa released a passel of letters (57 megs and 1,947 pages in all) from a variety of corporate …
This morning, CPR Member Scholar Sidney Shapiro will testify before Rep. Darrell Issa's House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on the economic value of regulation. He'll be a lone voice on the roster of witnesses. The hearing will have two panels of witnesses. The first will feature five industry representatives, and the second will feature two representatives of right-wing think tanks (Heritage and Mercatus), one leader of a nonprofit that advocates for small businesses, and Shapiro. That would be eight witnesses who may be expected to support Issa's witch hunt for burdensome regulations, versus one defender of efforts to actually enforce the laws Congress has passed to protect health, safety, the environment, workplace safety, consumer rights and more.
Shapiro's may be a lone voice, but it'll be a clear one. And Shapiro's testimony will cover a fair amount of territory. Among …
CPR Member Scholar Noah Sachs has a piece on The New Republic's website dismantling the GOP House majority's favority piece of anti-regulatory legislation, the REINS Act. The proposal would block all regulations from taking effect unless they are specifically approved by both houses of Congress within 70 days of submission and then signed into effect by the President. He writes:
Last year, the Office of Management and Budget concluded that the annual cost of major rules issued between FY 1999 and 2009 was $43 to $55 billion, while the annual societal benefits of those same regulations ranged from $128 billion to $616 billion—an excellent return on investment by any standard. To see why the REINS Act would jeopardize these benefits, take a look under the hood. The bill would apply to any agency regulation with an expected annual economic impact of $100 million or …
We'll be live-tweeting today's hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Follow @CPRBlog.
Cross-posted from Legal Planet.
Conservative media and bloggers are making much of a ruling last week by Judge Martin Feldman of the Eastern District of Louisiana that the Department of Interior was in contempt of his June 2010 order enjoining enforcement of the May moratorium on new deepwater exploratory drilling for oil. The Washington Times, for example, accused the administration of “tempting a constitutional confrontation.” Not so fast. Judge Feldman’s latest decision says more about the contempt of some conservative judges for the law than it does about the administration. Can you say “activist judge”?
Judge Feldman, who was appointed to the federal bench by Ronald Reagan, is a staunch friend of the Gulf energy industry. Until recently, he was also an investor. In 2008, he owned stock in Transocean (the owner of the Deepwater Horizon and other drilling rigs) and several other energy companies. He …
