Drill baby drill?
 

Indigenous Ecuadoran woman humbles US oil giant - Yahoo! News

Not always "low impact"...

This is what happens when people worship the Dollar Almighty above all else.

Nice to see that Chevron is even now trying to weasel its way out of paying its fine. Scumsuckers.

A grandma with cojones! I wonder if she's related to Lorena Bobbitt? Of course, Chevron has already bragged it has no assets in Ecuador for the plaintiffs to seize to satisfy the judgment. That's corporate responsibility for you.

Doesn't surprise me in the least.

No doubt they will also just keep this in the courts until twenty years from now , when everyone forgets about it and they end up paying a few hundred thousand dollars - or it gets thrown out all together.

...gee, here I thought this was about the E-Trade Baby moving from Stocks into Dentistry...ala' the 'Marathon Man' movie (wink,wink)!

Chevron will make some kind of 'donation' somewhere and a politician will see it reversed, it is after all the second oldest profession. As that old codger Reagan once said (one of his good ones)

While everybody is trashing Chevron, the article states that Texaco made the mess. Chevron only bought the liability.
I would think Chevron could go after Texaco for "undisclosed issues" from when they bought the field.
If Texaco buried the sludge, they can be held liable for attemptting to defraud during the sale.

What a mess.

Well I've not been there personally, but it sure sounds bad enough, for long enough time, that the problems/lapses in operations should have been obvious to anyone who inspected the site and for sure if you buy something you should inspect it first.

Chevron may not have owned texaco when this happened but they still knew about it when they merged, besides chevron is an evil company that has gotten charged with several other environmental issues else where, not to mention in the early 2000's they bought several battery company's to basically keep the battery tech from ever going into EV's

An evil company? I doubt it. Conspiracies about suppressing EV tech have abounded for years with (to my knowledge) little proof...
An $8.6 billion fine? Seems ludicrously high. Make em clean up the mess if its theirs, and damages to the locals. I'm sure the company would be willing to do that much - what company would want any more bad PR? Of course they'll fight a near-$9B fine.. who wouldn't.