Chevron's Inhumane Energy Exposed to Light of Day but Oil Giant Keeps on Spinning

By Ben Terrall, AlterNet. Posted June 5, 2009.

Though 2008 was Chevron’s most profitable year in its more than 130 year history, the oil giant is facing opposition from increasing numbers of global citizens who say the company’s environmental, public health, and human rights record leaves much to be desired.

Representatives of a broad coalition of “Chevron-affected communities” in Richmond, CA, Nigeria, Ecuador, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, Burma, and elsewhere presented “The True Cost of Chevron: An Alternative Annual Report,” to Chevron shareholders at their May 27 meeting in San Ramon, California. The coalition plans to again bring its report to Chevron CEO David O’Reilly when he debates Carl Pope of the Sierra Club in San Francisco on June 10.

O’Reilly, ranked by Forbes as the 15th highest paid CEO in the country with nearly $50 million in total compensation for the past year, responded to grievances detailed in the report by saying they “are an insult to Chevron employees, and should be thrown in the trash.”

Antonia Juhasz, lead author and editor of the report, later reflected, “In response to our presence, Chevron offered no answers to our substantive concerns, but rather continued its misinformation campaign to shareholders, employees, and the public by trying to keep the true cost of its human rights and environmental liabilities off its balance sheet.”

The report was written by activists from a diverse international network of movements from populations damaged by Chevron’s practices.  It describes destruction caused by the oil giant in U.S. states from Alaska to New York, and in Angola, Burma, Canada, Chad, Cameroon, Ecuador, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, and the Philippines.   The study’s introduction states, “These accounts are demonstrative, not conclusive.  We would need 100 reports to take account of all such impacts.”

Chevron’s current ad campaign is designed to paint the oil giant greenish.  Print and TV ads are filled with environmentally-friendly conservation tips.  But critics say the strength of Chevron’s commitment to environmentalism is epitomized in one ad featuring a man holding  a hand to his head over the words, “I will at least consider a hybrid.”

At the May 27 demonstration outside the annual meeting where the coalition delivered its findings, several hundred people from a variety of groups made noise and waved signs.  Activists satirized  Chevron’s ads, holding clear plexiglass panels in front of their faces, with slogans including “I will expose toxic polluting” along the bottom.  Protestors also held enlargements of several mock Chevron ads created by a progressive advertising agency.  Those parodies can be seen at truecostofchevron.com; several other spoof Chevron ads, which can be seen at oil watchdog.org, were also on display.

As the Alternative Report points out, Chevron spent less than 3% of its total capital and exploratory expenditures on clean alternative energy in 2008.  The corporation is expanding into environmentally destructive methods of oil production, including extraction of Canadian oil sands and Midwestern shale, and is investing hugely in biofuels, which do nothing to reduce greenhouse gasses.  In addition, Chevron lobbied from the 1990s until 2002 against science confirming that emissions of heat-trapping gasses lead to global warming.

Chevron’s PR offensive is perhaps ill-served by the recent history of its new chief counsel, William J. Hayes.  Hayes was the Pentagon’s former chief civilian lawyer, and wrote or supervised memoranda that secrety authorized harsh treatment for detainees at Guantanamo and in Iraq, including, the recommendation that dogs be used “to exploit phobias” of suspects.

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Ben Terrall is a freelance writer who lives in San Francisco.

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