Chevron Should Follow BP’s Lead

In its negotiations with the White House to fund a $20 billion escrow account, BP could have stuck to its legal guns and followed Chevron's example of thumbing its nose at victims of its environmental practices in Ecuador. Instead, BP distanced itself from Chevron's strategy of blaming anyone but itself for the extensive oil contamination it caused to Ecuador's rainforest.

We will see how BP handles liability issues going forward, but this is a step in the right direction.

Chevron should accept what the BP spill makes abundantly clear: profits over safety is not a business plan. In fact, it could put you out of business.

That is proving true for Chevron in Ecuador, where an independent court expert has determined that the company faces more than $27 billion in damages for illegally dumping billions of gallons of oil-related toxins directly into the Amazon from 1964-1990. Audits conducted by Chevron, as well as the company's own sampling results, overwhelmingly prove the company's culpability.

While the BP disaster was an accident, Chevron's dumping was done intentionally as part of a plan to cut costs.

In regard to Chevron's Ecuador liability, two other things have become abundantly clear:

• Had oil companies like Chevron been held accountable for what happened in Ecuador the likelihood of accidents like the one in the Gulf would have been drastically reduced. Incentives would be different. Companies would have been forced to invest in safety, because they would have known they could not externalize environmental damage to local inhabitants, as has been done in Ecuador and the Gulf.
  

• The $27 billion in damages for the Ecuador mess is beginning to sound modest considering the astounding scope of the toxins that Chevron has admitted to dumping in Ecuador. Chevron refers to the number as a "shakedown." But in light of the $60 billion (and growing) price tag of the BP liability and cleanup, $27 billion sounds like a bargain given that the contamination in Ecuador is far larger than the Gulf spill estimates.
  

How many more Ecuadors and Gulf of Mexicos do we need to suffer through before the oil industry is held accountable?

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Chevron’s Deepwater Drilling: Blind Faith or Dump Luck?

Chevron has its own ticking time bomb in the Gulf of Mexico. The following article, from John Collins Rudolph, appeared on the New York Times' "Green Blog" today:

On a Wing and a Prayer: Chevron's Deep Well

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/on-a-wing-and-a-prayer-chevrons-deep-well/

One of the deepest offshore oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico lies beneath 7,000 feet of water and under more than 20,000 feet of rock and sand. Estimated to hold as much as 100 million barrels of crude, the field was discovered by Chevron in 2001, and production began in 2008. It is less than 20 miles west of the Deepwater Horizon blowout.

The name of the field, and the rig anchored above it, is Blind Faith.

It's a curious choice for a high-tech drilling operation pushing the boundaries of modern engineering, perhaps a bit like NASA naming a new shuttle "Dumb Luck." But there's an explanation: Blind Faith is in fact the name of a short-lived 1960s psychedelic rock supergroup, fronted by the guitar god Eric Clapton.

The investigative reporter and former 60 Minutes correspondent Peter W. Klein uncovered this factoid during a visit to the Blind Faith rig last summer while filming a story for ABC News on deepwater drilling. The segment features video of submersible robots thousands of feet down on the seafloor manipulating drilling equipment.

"When I asked the manager of Chevron's gulf rigs what he would do if there was a leak at his wellhead more than a mile down, he assured me they had robot-controlled devices that could handle any contingency," Mr. Klein wrote in a recent essay on the National Public Radio Web site.

In Congressional testimony this week, Chevron's chairman and chief executive, John S. Watson, testified that his wells and rigs – presumably including Blind Faith – were far safer than the BP well that continues to gush after 50-plus days of desperate attempts to cap it.

"We have multiple systems to prevent a tragedy like the Deepwater Horizon," Mr. Watson said. "Our drilling policies and procedures are rigorous. We require continuous training. We certify our drilling personnel to ensure they are qualified to manage unusual circumstances. And we verify that contractors have the skills to execute well control."

Mr. Watson joined three other oil company executives in rhetorically throwing BP under the bus during Wednesday's hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The leaders of Shell, Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips also claimed that their deepwater operations were safe, and that it was negligence by BP – not the inherent risks of drilling in ultra-deep waters, or lax regulation of the industry – that led to the uncontrolled blowout.

Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, the Democratic chairman of the committee, was having none of it.

"BP failed miserably when confronted with a real leak," Mr. Waxman said, "and Exxon Mobil and the other companies would do no better."

As for Blind Faith – well, it is perhaps BP, not Chevron, who could find some solace in one of the band's hits: "Had to Cry Today," by Steve Winwood.

"The feeling's the same as being outside of the law," the song laments. "Had to cry today."

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Bob Herbert of NYT on Chevron: Rain Forest Jekyll and Hyde

Bob Herbert's column today detailing the extent of the disaster caused by Chevron in Ecuador is not the first time his attention has turned to the tragedy in the region. The below article appeared in the New York Times on October 20, 2005.

You can find the original at: http://select.nytimes.com/2005/10/20/opinion/20herbert.html

October 20, 2005

Op-Ed Columnist

Rain Forest Jekyll and Hyde?

By BOB HERBERT

Please welcome the latest entry to the Chutzpah Hall of Fame: the mighty Chevron Corporation.

On Oct. 28, during a gala ceremony at its headquarters in San Ramon, Calif., the company, which until May was known as ChevronTexaco, will honor the latest recipients of the annual Chevron Conservation Awards. The awards are meant to recognize the achievements of men and women who have "helped to protect wildlife, restore wilderness, create natural preserves and parks, and institute educational programs to heighten environmental awareness."

Meanwhile, Chevron's lawyers are in Ecuador defending the company against charges that it contributed to one of the worst environmental disasters on the planet. The company is accused of dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste, over a period of 20 years, into the soil and water of a previously pristine section of the Amazon rain forest.

According to a class-action lawsuit brought on behalf of some 30,000 impoverished residents of the rain forest, this massive, long-term pollution has ruined portions of the jungle, contaminated drinking water, sickened livestock, driven off wildlife and threatened the very survival of the indigenous tribes, which have been plagued with serious illnesses, including a variety of cancers.

Chevron, which likes to promote itself as a champion of the environment, contends that no such catastrophe occurred. A spokesman told me yesterday that the billions of gallons of waste that was dumped "wasn't necessarily toxic."

"We've done inspections," the spokesman said. "We've done a deep scientific analysis, and that analysis has shown no harmful impacts from the operations. There just aren't any."

You would have a very difficult time selling that story to the people in the rain forest who have been drinking and bathing in water fouled with the byproducts of oil-drilling processes. Parents have watched their children play and their livestock feed in areas contaminated with oily substances. Pits that perpetually ooze gunk and oil are ubiquitous.

Two years ago, a reporter from The Times interviewed a man named René Arévalo who lived near a separation plant that was once operated by a Texaco subsidiary. The house in which Mr. Arévalo and his five children lived had been built on a mound of dirt that covered a pit where wastewater had been dumped.

The family got its water from a well. "If you dig here just a meter deep," said Mr. Arévalo, "you hit oil. The water is contaminated, very contaminated. But we drink it. What else can we do?"

Texaco merged with Chevron in 2001. From the early 1970's to 1992, the Texaco subsidiary was part of a consortium that ran the oil-drilling operations in an area of virgin rain forest known simply as the Oriente - the East. Texaco discovered oil there in the late 60's.

According to nearly all accounts, neither Texaco nor its primary partner in the consortium, Ecuador's state oil company - Petroecuador - paid much attention to the effects of the venture on the surrounding environment and its people. Tremendous amounts of waste generated from the drilling, extraction, processing and transportation operations - billions upon billions of gallons - were dumped into unlined pits in the ground or poured into freshwater streams.

"The systematic way that they disposed of toxic waste in Ecuador was to dump it into open-air pits that they dug out of the jungle soil, or directly into rivers, streams and swamps in one of the most delicate ecosystems on the planet," said Steven Donziger, who is part of a team of American and Ecuadorean lawyers handling the lawsuit.

Crude oil was also spilled in the jungle, millions of gallons of it.

Disasters of this kind, involving poor people in remote areas of foreign countries, tend to stay low on the level of awareness of the American news media. The suffering tends to go unnoticed by the outside world.

The families in the vicinity of the Ecuadorean oil-drilling operations have had to drink from contaminated rivers and streams because they had such limited access to running water. And any pollution-related illnesses they may contract pose an even greater danger than normal because of their abject poverty and the absence of adequate health care.

Officials at Chevron do not see any of this as their problem. They will tell you that they've cleaned up any mess they might have made, and then some. And they will deny to their dying breath that they have harmed anyone.

After all, they're champions of the environment.

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Bob Herbert of NYT: Chevron Has Its Own BP Disaster In Ecuador

The following article appeared in today's New York Times:

Disaster in the Amazon

By BOB HERBERT

BP’s calamitous behavior in the Gulf of Mexico is the big oil story of the moment. But for many years, indigenous people from a formerly pristine region of the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador have been trying to get relief from an American company, Texaco (which later merged with Chevron), for what has been described as the largest oil-related environmental catastrophe ever.

“As horrible as the gulf spill has been, what happened in the Amazon was worse,” said Jonathan Abady, a New York lawyer who is part of the legal team that is suing Chevron on behalf of the rainforest inhabitants.

It has been a long and ugly legal fight and the outcome is uncertain. But what has happened in the rainforest is heartbreaking, although it has not gotten nearly the coverage that the BP spill has.

What’s not in dispute is that Texaco operated more than 300 oil wells for the better part of three decades in a vast swath of Ecuador’s northern Amazon region, just south of the border with Colombia. Much of that area has been horribly polluted. The lives and culture of the local inhabitants, who fished in the intricate waterways and cultivated the land as their ancestors had done for generations, have been upended in ways that have led to widespread misery.

Texaco came barreling into this delicate ancient landscape in the early 1960s with all the subtlety and grace of an invading army. And when it left in 1992, it left behind, according to the lawsuit, widespread toxic contamination that devastated the livelihoods and traditions of the local people, and took a severe toll on their physical well-being.

A brief filed by the plaintiffs said: “It deliberately dumped many billions of gallons of waste byproduct from oil drilling directly into the rivers and streams of the rainforest covering an area the size of Rhode Island. It gouged more than 900 unlined waste pits out of the jungle floor — pits which to this day leach toxic waste into soils and groundwater. It burned hundreds of millions of cubic feet of gas and waste oil into the atmosphere, poisoning the air and creating ‘black rain’ which inundated the area during tropical thunderstorms.”

The quest for oil is, by its nature, colossally destructive. And the giant oil companies, when left to their own devices, will treat even the most magnificent of nature’s wonders like a sewer. But the riches to be made are so vastly corrupting that governments refuse to impose the kinds of rigid oversight and safeguards that would mitigate the damage to the environment and its human and animal inhabitants.

Pick your venue. The families whose lives and culture are dependent upon the intricate web of waterways along the Gulf Coast of the United States are in a fix similar to that of the indigenous people zapped by nonstop oil spills and the oil-related pollution in the Ecuadorian rainforest. Each group is fearful about its future. Both have been treated contemptuously.

The oil companies don’t care. Shell can’t wait to begin drilling in the Arctic Ocean off the northern coast of Alaska, an area that would pose monumental problems for anyone trying to deal with a catastrophic spill. The companies pretend that the spills won’t happen. They always say that their drilling operations are safe. They said that before drilling off Santa Barbara, and in the rainforest in Ecuador, and in the Gulf of Mexico, and everywhere else they drill.

Their assurances mean nothing.

President Obama has suspended Shell’s Arctic drilling permits and has temporarily halted the so-called Arctic oil rush. What we’ve learned from the BP debacle in the gulf, and from the rainforest, and so many other places, is just how reckless and inept the oil companies can be when it comes to safeguarding life, limb and the environment.

They’re dangerous. They need the most stringent kind of oversight, and swift and severe sanctions for serious wrongdoing. At the same time, we need to be searching with a much, much greater sense of urgency for viable energy alternatives. Treating the Amazon and the gulf and the Arctic as if they were nothing more than toxic waste sites is an affront to the planet and all life-forms that inhabit it.

Chevron doesn’t believe it should be called to account for any of the sins Texaco may have committed in the Amazon. A spokesman told me that the allegations of environmental damage were wildly overstated and that even if Texaco had caused some pollution, it had cleaned it up and reached an agreement with the Ecuadorian government that precluded further liability.

The indigenous residents may be suffering (they’re in much worse shape than the people on the gulf coast) but the Chevron-Texaco crowd feels real good about itself. The big money was made, and the trash was left behind.

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Pat Murphy: Chevron’s Bogus Blogger Up to Old Tricks

Surprise, surprise: Pat Murphy, purveyor of the SanFranciscoSentinel.com (a small online "newspaper" that sells editorial control of its opinions while pretending to offer neutral commentary) is once again carrying Chevron's water in the company's never-ending campaign to escape justice for its environmental catastrophe in Ecuador.

Pat Murphy

This time, Murphy has attacked the indigenous people of Ecuador suing Chevron for having the temerity to characterize Chevron's man-made, planned disaster in Ecuador as larger than BP's accidental spill in the Gulf. In Ecuador, Chevron discharged the equivalent of at least 345 million gallons of crude into the rainforest where six indigenous groups lived for centuries. Due to Chevron, all of those indigenous groups have seen their lifestyles devastated – not dissimilar to what is happening right now to the fisherman of Louisiana.

The U.S. government's most recent estimate is that BP has discharged between 18 and 39 million gallons of crude into the Gulf. At the top end, that's about one-tenth as large as the dumping Chevron did in Ecuador when its predecessor company Texaco operated a large oil concession from 1964 to 1990. Texaco's sludge, now Chevron's problem, is still there: Take a look at photos of the contamination and its impacts.

The question for Murphy is: Why is it a tragedy when 18 to 39 million gallons of contamination are spilled in America, but Chevron is getting "defrauded" when people call attention to 345 million gallons the company systematically dumped in Ecuador?

The answer is simple: Because in the world according to Chevron, Ecuadorian lives aren't worth much – particularly when they are indigenous people living in the forest. And, of course, BP isn't paying Pat Murphy to spread their propaganda while Chevron is.

Amazon Watch and the Amazon Defense Coalition have demonstrated that Pat Murphy is a paid blogger who has sold editorial control of his website to Chevron – an accusation that Murphy has never denied. (He once stated that he was not being paid directly by Chevron.) Over the past two years Murphy has offered a steady stream of commentary and misleading facts meant to discredit Chevron's critics – critics that Chevron is working hard to silence. And if you are Googling the Chevron case in Ecuador from Rotterdam or some other far-flung place, you might actually think the "San Francisco Sentinel" is the leading newspaper of San Francisco rather than one of the least-trafficked news sites on the Web (it ranked 171,939 in popularity among websites, compared to 851 for the San Francisco Chronicle).

Of course, the practice of blogging or writing articles on behalf of clients without disclosing payments is considered highly unethical. But that's never stopped Murphy before, and we don't expect it to stop him now. When you lay down with dogs, as Murphy has with Chevron, you get fleas.

If Murphy really wants to understand the issues in Ecuador – and not just squander any semblance of journalistic integrity that he might have once had (or thought he had) – we would invite him to visit the impacted region. If Murphy had to drink the poisoned water being forced on the local inhabitants because of Chevron, he might be slower to take what amounts to "blood money" to help cover up an environmental and human rights tragedy that is unparalleled on Earth.

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Chevron’s Corrupt and Cozy Relationships with Oil Industry Regulators

President Obama recently promised Americans to end the "cozy relationship" between government and the oil industry. No oil company has been better at developing these "cozy relationships" with regulators than Chevron, which is being sued in Ecuador for the worst oil-related contamination on earth. The sordid tales below give you a glimpse of just how far Chevron will go to evade laws designed to protect people and the environment.

Chevron Courts US Regulators With Money, Drugs & Sex: The news media has reported widely about the "cozy relationship" between the U.S. Minerals Management Service and the oil industry, and President Obama has promised to end it by separating conflicting regulatory functions. Recently news broke about an upcoming Inspector General's report which will detail how MMS officials allowed oil companies to write their own oversight reports.

We should not, though, forget about Chevron's corruption of the MMS detailed in a 2008 report.

In September 2008, the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of the Interior accused MMS employees of accepting thousands of dollars in gifts, including ski trips, from Chevron and three other oil companies. The report also alleged drug use and sexual affairs between MMS and Chevron officials and charged that

Chevron was the only oil company that did not cooperate with the IG's investigation.

Chevron's Phony Lab Results:
The New York Times reported recently on the "cozy relationship" between oil companies and laboratories that test for contamination. The article focused on the potential conflict of interest between BP and the laboratories being used by the federal government to test for contamination of the water and soil on the Gulf Coast. State and local leaders are concerned that the labs could distort information about given that they also work for all the major oil companies. They should be concerned. In the lawsuit against Chevron for oil contamination in Ecuador, Chevron is testing soil and water samples at a lab where its own contractor worked even though it tried to pass off the lab as "independent".

Several weeks ago, the indigenous and farmer communities suing Chevron revealed new information that Chevron "cooked" evidence in the Ecuador trial to avoid a judgment – and that the oil company was providing financial support to employee Diego Borja to prevent him from going public with the company's fraud. Among Chevron's corrupt and fraudulent acts, according to Borja: the oil giant directed Borja to create dummy companies in Ecuador to make it appear that a laboratory Chevron used to process soil and water samples during the environmental trial was independent, when in fact it was controlled by Chevron.

The plaintiffs have long contended that Chevron has intentionally and fraudulently used bogus lab testing procedures to artificially lower the amount of contamination reported to the Court.

Chevron Corrupts Weak Governments: Details about the waivers and permits that U.S. federal agencies granted BP on the Gulf Coast prior to the oil spill are not comforting – they suggest that the regulators the American people were depending on to protect us from disasters have been thoroughly compromised by their cozy relationship to the oil industry. But this shouldn't be surprising to anyone who pays attention to this sector. Chevron in particular has a long history of colluding with government officials to exploit natural resources at the expense of that country's citizenry.

The most destructive and disturbing incidents occurred over four decades in Ecuador's rainforest, where Texaco (now Chevron) intentionally contaminated the waterways and soils and destroyed a way of life for indigenous groups that has led to suffering, illness and ultimately death for untold numbers of people. The "cozy relationship" that Texaco developed with the governments of Ecuador during this time (from 1964 to 1992) resulted in the largest environmental disaster on the planet.

It also produced a fraudulent remediation agreement between Texaco and the government – an agreement that Texaco and now Chevron argue releases it from any liability. Chevron says Texaco cleaned up a small number of oil sites in exchange for the release and cites the agreement as its main defense in the 17-year-old lawsuit. However, recent testing conducted during the Lago Agrio trial at the oil sites Texaco said it cleaned found them to be just as contaminated as the oil sites not cleaned. For their part in the scam, two Chevron lawyers, involved in the negotiation of the remediation agreement, along with seven former government officials, have been indicted for fraud in Ecuador.

As the oil pours into the marshes and onto the beaches of the Gulf Coast, people need to pay more attention to Chevron's disastrous story in Ecuador.

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Gulf Oil Disaster an Ominous Sign for Chevron

In what can only be interpreted as an ominous development for Chevron in its 17-year odyssey to escape liability for dumping billions of gallons of toxic waste in Ecuador's Amazon, The Economist reported this week that BP faces complete liability for the Deepwater Horizon disaster and that the event has already reduced the capitalization of the company by $30 billion, or roughly 16% of its market value.

Specifically, the magazine reported that:

The costs fall to BP because, as the majority shareholder in the consortium leasing the Deepwater Horizon (the junior partners are America's Anadarko and Japan's Mitsui) and the project's operator, it is liable under American law for the costs of cleaning up.

(Under U.S. law either being the majority shareholder OR being the operator is sufficient to make a company liable for the costs of cleaning up).

Why is this ominous for Chevron? Because one its main excuses to avoid a potential $27.3 billion liability in Ecuador is that it doesn't currently own the oil fields where it contaminated, even though it operated them alone for 25 years from 1965 to 1990.

Nice try, John Watson (Chevron CEO) and Hew Pate (Chevron General Counsel).

What Watson and Pate try to hide from the public markets is what the Economist recognizes: under the law, the operator of the oil fields is 100% responsible for any pollution caused under its watch, regardless of the overall ownership structure.

So as BP is responsible for the damage caused in the Deepwater Horizon disaster, it is setting a harrowing precedent for Chevron – one that must have the lawyers and executives in the company casting a wary eye at the company's toxic legacy in Ecuador. A damages assessment in the trial there (taking place in Ecuador at Chevron's request) places the cost of clean-up at roughly $27 billion, with a final decision expected later this year.

Chevron has refused to fully disclose this potential liability in its SEC filings. Stay tuned.

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Obama, Ecuador, and Chevron: Big Oil’s Hypocrisy

As the economic and environmental losses mount on the Gulf Coast so do the similarities between the growing BP oil spill and the existing oil contamination in the Ecuadorian rainforest, the latter courtesy of Chevron.

First and foremost, they both are ecological disasters that have forever changed the landscape’s environment and way of life for both the people and business owners of the Gulf Coast and the indigenous tribes of Ecuador.

In testimony on Capitol Hill BP, Transocean and Halliburton blamed each other for the accidental spill on the Gulf Coast, sounding much like Chevron in Ecuador, where the oil company has blamed everyone but itself for the billions of gallons of oil and toxic water dumped intentionally into the rainforest by Texaco, purchased by Chevron in 2001.

BP blamed Transocean and Transocean blamed Halliburton, just as Chevron has blamed Ecuador’s state-owned oil company, Petroecuador, and, oddly enough, even Texaco, arguing that just because it bought the oil company does not mean it is responsible for what Texaco did. (Never mind that this argument undoes about 150 years of legal rulings.)

Like Chevron, BP and its oil exploration partners are being very careful in their public statements about legal liability. But U.S. and Ecuadorian laws are clear on this point. The Economist reported this week that because BP is “majority shareholder in the consortium” and the “project’s operator, it is liable under American law for the costs of cleaning up.” Under US law either being the majority shareholder or being the operator is sufficient to make a company liable for the costs of cleaning up. Texaco was the exclusive operator of the oil well sites in Ecuador.

Meanwhile, President Obama has not been shy about pointing his finger directly at BP.

Twelve days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, President Obama, visited Venice, Louisiana, to meet with local fishermen, industry representatives and local leaders. President Obama made it clear BP was to blame for the spill:

“BP is responsible for this leak — BP will be paying the bill,” he said.

President Obama’s press secretary said the White House would “keep a boot to the throat of BP” to ensure that it fulfilled its responsibilities.

In 2007, six months after his election as President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa visited the former concession area of Texaco, now owned by Chevron, to see firsthand the contamination and destruction left behind by the oil company after almost three decades of oil exploration. President Correa expressed support and concern for the residents who suffer from cancer, respiratory illness and other diseases as a result of living near toxic materials. He lifted soil from the ground and stated the obvious, “Soil with oil, friends.”

He was the first President of Ecuador to visit the contaminated sites since Texaco left Ecuador in 1992.

Chevron’s new attack-dog law firm, Gibson Dunn, points to this moment as evidence that Ecuador is a corrupt and backwards country and that Chevron cannot get a fair trial there -- even though Chevron pleaded with a U.S. court to move the lawsuit to Ecuador in the first place.

When President Correa visited several of over 900 unlined oil pits where Texaco left its toxic sludge, Chevron said it was “sorry” the President had gotten involved by expressing concern for the people living in the contaminated area.

Is Chevron sorry the President of the United States did the same thing on the Gulf Coast? Does Chevron think the United States is a corrupt and backwards country?

Chevron is drowning not only in a multi-billion liability in Ecuador, but also in its own hypocrisy.

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BP: 200,000 gallons per day by accident. Chevron: 4 million gallons per day on purpose.

Try comparing the environmental disaster that Chevron created in Ecuador's Amazon to the oil slick that now threatens the Gulf Coast states.

The disaster at "Deepwater Horizon" is causing an oil well to bleed some 200,000 gallons of oil a day into the ecosystem. And this was a horrible accident.

If you can believe it, this is only a fraction of what Texaco (now Chevron) deliberately dumped in Ecuador's rainforest when it operated hundreds of oil wells there from 1964 to 1990.

Chevron has admitted that Texaco dumped toxic "produced water" into the Ecuadorian rainforest and into the streams and rivers that 30,000 people used for their bathing and drinking water. "Produced water" can contain a toxic mixture of chemicals, including benzene and other components of crude oil. Some believe that approximately 2% of produced water is pure crude oil.

Over the course of 26 years, Chevron has acknowledged that it dumped more than 18.5 billion gallons of the industrial waste into the waterways of the populated and sensitive ecosystem, or 4 million gallons per day at the height of its operation. Put another way, Chevron's dumping of 18.5 billion gallons of produced water is the equivalent of discharging 332 million gallons of crude directly into the rainforest.

Without taking anything away from the tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico, at the rate that the Deepwater Horizon spill is going, it will have to discharge 200,000 gallons per day for 1,660 days to dump as much oil as Chevron deliberately dumped into the Ecuadorian rainforest. That is a little over 4.5 years.

And that only accounts for the pure crude oil Chevron dumped – not the oil it spilled from shoddy operation practices, or the 98% of the "produced water" that isn't pure crude, but encompasses a toxic "cocktail" of industrial runoff, salty water, and other chemicals. If you want to start comparing the Gulf of Mexico oil spill to the entirety of Chevron's dumping in Ecuador (all the produced water it has admitted to dumping, not just the crude oil), consider this: at a rate of 200,000 gallons a day, the Deepwater Horizon spill would have to go on for 92,500 days to spill 18.5 billion gallons into the environment. 92,500 days. 253 years. And no, that isn't a typo.

The worst part? Deepwater Horizon was an accident. But Chevron's actions in Ecuador, through its predecessor company Texaco, were the product of a system designed to dump toxic waste directly into the environment to keep production costs to a bare minimum.

Since the Deepwater Horizon incident happened, BP has taken full responsibility for the spill. More than 2,500 people have been mobilized to respond to the disaster, and the company has insisted that it will pay for a full clean up. Of course, we will see what ultimately happens – but at least it's a good start.

Chevron's response to their disaster in Ecuador? The opposite. Chevron has launched a full-scale litigation war to cover up the disaster and the company's own fraud in a purported remediation in the mid-1990s. It has committed fraud on the court by engaging in deceptive sampling practices and by controlling a laboratory that it represented as independent, according to audio recordings of one of Chevron's longtime contractors involved in the fraud, Diego Borja.

If the Ecuador disaster happened within the U.S., Chevron would be pressured and shamed into cleaning it up. In Ecuador, where the company disregarded the rights of the local indigenous groups on its way to ever higher profits, we see nothing of the sort.

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