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.

have you so soon forgotten BP ?
according to the latest independent study's done, there is billions of gallons of sludge sitting on the gulf bottom. this is, of course, AFTER both BP and our Govt claimed it was mostly gone....

and 8-9 Billion in fines... are you fn kidding me !?
wtf are you smokin ?
they will make that up in less than a week.

it is HIGH time these oil companies are held responsible for their ecological messes, and Im not even going to touch into other areas of responsibility...

I don't see where BP relates to Chevron though. I would imagine Chevron readily admits theres oil near this village in Ecuador - the article mentioned (Chevrons?) crews trying to suck it up.

Chevron's '09 total annual profit was $10.5B... not likely to make up $9B in a week. We fight a measly $150 ticket, it'd be kinda like us fighting a ticket equal to our net yearly income after expenses. Make em clean it up, and pay fair damages.

Texaco in Ecuador: Background

Found this link from Texaco / Chevron over this. ( Published by Chevron )

Excellent work Cd, thanks for the link.

There's two sides to the story...

it relates because the area of contamination is larger over all, and BP was asked to put a measly 20m aside, which is a pittance in comparison to the decades of damage we're about to experience, along with the severe loss of an ecosystem already strained from the fishing/crabbing industry in the region, and the industrial runoff off the mississippi.
which is what your seeing in the Chevron article. think of it like this, that same devastation will now be off the shores of our gulf coastal waters for at least a decade, probably much longer, and is too deep to be able to really do much about.

I think that $9b is letting them off easy.
also, about the $10.5b...
you dont honestly believe that was their true profit margin do you ?
from an industry that has seen record levels of profit that has been steadily growing semi-annually for a decade now ?

two sides- the truth- and the truth written by texaco

btw not conspiracy read their electric car section,

Chevron Corporation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Chevron is currently squelching all access to large NiMH batteries through its control of patent licenses in order to remove a competitor to gasoline.[13] This culminated in a lawsuit against Panasonic and Toyota over production of the EV-95 battery used in the RAV4 EV. However the Lithium-ion battery appears to be making up for this despite Chevron's best efforts, albeit, at a higher price."

Evil yes, when you are willing to do anything to protect profits no matter the cost.

...people, there's a profitable *reason* for the two "S's" in legal ASSETs.

So texaco can only be lying, just because there trying to make money? and whoever's on the other side of the courtroom isnt trying to rake in billions of dollars as well? Chevron's statement may have the same merit as the villagers statement (consider the remote villagers know only what their gov't has told them about the spills - the gov't has just as much reason to lie as Chevron, and conveniently is running the court too).

Wiki may or may not always be reliable, and the one line relating to EVs doesnt quote facts, just an authors opinion. Buying out your competition is nothing new... or evil.

I try to give their report the same (somewhat) open mind I do anything else I read. If a news-blog report from a place we've never been to on a subject we know little about is to be taken at face-value, then Chevron's published, signed, sworn reported income cannot just be discarded as dung because it doesn't fit our viewpoint.

Man this is like an oil-company lynching in here... y'all should be happy that you're saving on gas :D the more of us, the fewer messes like this one in Ecuador.

The land and water are poisoned. Can't be cleaned up. People are harmed, and their land ruined. Ooops.

They deserve the fine.

You trust an oil company who's goal is to make as much money as possible (that is how a large corporation works) over a web site which is known for accuracy maintained by thousands of dedicated individuals and who's main goal is simply the truth. Kinda illogical dude. besides look up the reference- the info came from direct interviews and patents (read the book). you can look up the patents its not hidden info. They expire in 2015 which a lot of company's are waiting for

besides "buying the competition" is more commonly called monopolizing which last time i checked is Illegal- hrm shady illegal acts, sounds evil to me
are you working for chevron or what?

Chevron has a horrible track record. Here in Utah they have had 2 major oil leaks on the same 60 year old crude pipeline in the past year!

Both leaks came dangerously close to trashing the drinking water for a million people.

They bribed the Federal politicians to reopen the pipeline. Local Mayor did not want it to reopen.

Idiots did not even have a leak detection system, they had to walk 6 miles of the pipeline to find the leak!

I believe most of this, but the bold txt is just hearsay without proof of any kind :)

I wonder, is there such a thing a "pre-bribe"? You know, like making election campain contributions in the last election. I am amused by the US supreme court desision that a limit on political campain contributions would amount to an empedement to free speach. It would seem that we are as free as our cash flow will allow. :rolleyes:

Do I trust the corporation? No. Do I trust the corporation - whose motive (making as much money as possible) I know - over liability lawyers and political activists with axes to grind? You bet I do!

The battery thing has never made sense to me. Chevron is in business to make money, no? So it could obviously make tons of money from selling batteries, in addition to the money it makes from selling oil, because A) it'd take the world decades to ramp up to full EV penetration; B) even in a full EV world, there are plenty of uses for oil; C) there are other, better battery technologies that can be (and have been) developed; and D) their management aren't idiots, and obviously know all about Peak Oil.

So knowing all that, why would I buy into a conspiracy theory?

because it isn't a conspiracy theory. They want to run gas as long as possible because there isn't near as much money with EV tech, sure you have the battery and all initial costs but after that they can go a long time needing very little major work. Chevron basically admitted to it anyways when they sued Panasonic over use of their batteries which for several years were the only ones that were viable and still are the most practical. Every time someone tries to buy from them and they say yes they always cancel the orders. There is more money in the fuel industry thus oil company's will try very hard to keep EV's out. You guys act like major corporations all act as logically as possible without looking at a track record that shows the opposite.

[QUOTE=jamesqf;222364]Do I trust the corporation? No. Do I trust the corporation - whose motive (making as much money as possible) I know - over liability lawyers and political activists with axes to grind? You bet I do!

How is an axe ground for profit different than an axe ground for liability cases or political actavism. What would make one more trust werthy than the other? I would suggest to you that the range of trust werthyness is the same for all three groups. :confused:

are you saying we should trust large billion dollar corporations who's goal is money the same as the farmer who just wants the oil off of his field?

Yes. There may be two sides to this story, but I'd actually like a third.

One that is unbiased on both ends.

Investigating all the facts is the proper way to go about things, but in the case of the oil companies, all i have to do is look at companies such as Exxon and BP.
You don't have to do much research at all to plainly see the evil.
You have to be truly blinded by greed to not see the obvious corruption and lack of respect for human life and the Environment that these corporations are guilty of.

Are you saying that there are no untrust werthy farmers? Are farmers any less interested in makeing money. The diference is in the means at there disposal. In a dispute between a farmer with oil on his fields and a large billion dollar corporations the outcome is determined by who has the most money for aternies, ie exxon vadies & BP in the golf.

pretty much sums it up right there

It is interesting to me that the frustration is directed at the corporation. A corporation can not be evil or good or any mix their of. The people running them on the other hand.

it could be argued the people running the corporation *are* the corporation, seeing as they are directly representing said corporation. :)

I believe that a corperation achieved the legal status of person in the first half of the 20th century. The fun hasn't stoped since. :confused:

And I wouldn't really disagree. But the thing is, I don't really TRUST any of them at all. Rather, I work on what I know of their motivations. A corporation (if its management is intelligent, which is not a given) wants to go on making a profit from me, and from the rest of its customers, which means that it will act in ways which its management believes will maximize profit, and which will allow it to go on making that profit in the future.

The liability lawyer is motivated by a desire to collect maximum damages, and thus is motivated to distort the facts & play on emotions in order to win large judgements. The political activists want to gain power for their faction, and thus have not even the restraint of potentially being cited for contempt to restrain their distortions & outright lies - which ALL political activists resort to, whenever it suits their ends.

Which seems to be a rather circular argument. Seems as though you're constructing this false argument that there's less money in selling batteries plus oil than in selling oil alone, simply to explain your belief that they're blocking the technology. I'll admit that it's possible that Chevron's management could really think this, but it doesn't seem at all likely.

You wear rose-tinted glasses when you look at corporations, and take them off when assessing liability lawyers and political activists. History is chock full of corporate maximum profit examples that had no plans whatsoever for the corporation's future. The recent example of PG&E failing to pressure test its gas pipeline that blew up in San Bruno, CA is one. BP's failure to have an operational or backup blowout preventer on the Deepwater Horizon is another. How about Arthur Andersen's classic collapse? Or we can skip the niceties and just use Enron, Earl Jones, Allen Stanford or Bernie Madoff to blow your claim about corporations planning for future profits. I'll bet the list of crooked corporations that made the headlines in the past 3 years would outnumber all the political activist examples you could find in the entire history of the United States.

just because you refuse to look at evidence, doesn't mean its not there.

And just because you've decided to see evidence in random patterns doesn't mean it's really there :-)

It's really down to evolutionary neurobiology: the human brain has evolved to be a very good pattern-detector. It's so good that it can even see patterns that don't exist. After all, what's the evolutionary cost of thinking you see a tiger that's not really there, versus the cost of not seeing the one that is? So you look at something random - clouds, leaves against the sky, the texture of a ceiling - let your mind unfocus a bit, and you'll start seeing all sorts of things. That's why people can see Jesus in a scorched tortilla, or a corporate conspiracy in perfectly rational acts.

Your explanation has nothing to do with anything-
chevron (a company with a major history of anti anything not oil) holds majority share of NiMH battery pattens/ many company's have tried to buy rights to produce these batteries for electric cars/ Cheveron has said NO every single time even though many have tried.

This isn't marry magdalen in a grilled cheese sandwich this is monopolizing a market, Which by US law is illegal. They are breaking the law, end of story.
try using google to look at the track records of these company's, then defend them.