The Case Against Chevron
An unprecedented campaign by at least a dozen nonprofit groups targets the oil company's global operations and reputation.
By Peter AsmusArticle Tools
- TrueCostOfChevron.org
- The activist groups are satirizing Chevron's "Human Energy" ad campaign with their own campaign, dubbed "Inhumane Energy."
The oil industry is more powerful today than at any other time in history save the early 20th century. Thanks to last year's record run-up in oil prices, seven of the world's most valuable corporations are now oil companies. Yet just one of those companies has become the focus of intense consumer ire.
Perhaps the largest coordinated activist campaign in history is being launched against the San Ramon-based Chevron Corporation. Foregoing boycotts and other traditional market campaign techniques, non-governmental organizations are creatively communicating the business case for why Chevron should change its ways, focusing on mobilizing company shareholders and consumers to compel the company to come clean and pursue social and environmental leadership.
This unprecedented campaign to make Chevron the poster child of corporate irresponsibility has already persuaded pension funds in California, Maryland, New York, and Pennsylvania to consider selling a total of $12 billion in Chevron shares on the grounds that the firm is mismanaging its operations around the globe. The prime focus of this ongoing anti-Chevron effort has been the company's annual shareholder meetings, but protests at the Richmond refinery and a series of movie and PR stunts have been also been effective tactics.
The brains behind the campaign is a small firecracker of a woman, Antonia Juhasz, director of a special new Chevron program for Global Exchange, the San Francisco activist organization. Author of the book entitled The Tyranny of Oil, Juhasz brings to the campaign a depth of knowledge about the oil industry and a penchant for understanding how the media works. It was her idea, for example, to create an alternative shareholder report — The True Cost of Chevron — released in time for Chevron's annual shareholder meeting this past spring. The report, to which more than a dozen activist groups contributed, chronicles environmental and social issues confronting Chevron around the globe. Among other things, it pokes fun at Chevron's "Human Energy" PR campaign.
In its billboards and television ads, Chevron paints itself as part of the solution, and implies that the ingenuity of California and its citizens are already solving the challenges that climate change poses to society. One subtext of this advertising campaign is that global warming can be solved by everyday people. Indeed, the contented Americans depicted in the ads vow "I will use less energy," "I will leave the car at home more," and "I will finally get a programmable thermostat." The True Cost of Chevron campaign mocks this notion, by depicting put-upon villagers who stoically vow, "I will not breathe when outside," "I will give my baby contaminated water," and "I will ignore the toxic waste pits in my village."
"Chevron is emblematic of an industry that is out of control," Juhasz said. "They are not the worst oil company, but they hold themselves up to be a model corporate citizen, and they don't deserve it." Why then focus exclusively on Chevron? Focusing on one company makes the story more manageable, said Juhasz, exhibiting a clear understanding of modern campaigning techniques. And Chevron is everywhere, she noted, which allows activists to go to gas stations and distribute propaganda, or engage in publicity stunts that take advantage of the company's global profile.
"Our issues of peace, democracy, and environmental sustainability overlap with Chevron's actions around the globe," she said. "We want to take a closer look at the local impacts Chevron has globally in order to put pressure on them to be a better corporate citizen here, and everywhere else they operate. Our goal is to build a regional network not so much aimed at Chevron directly, but rather at policymakers who can adopt better regulations governing big oil."
While each of the activist organizations involved in this campaign has a different regional focus, they regularly hold conference calls and coordinate strategy to maximize impact. Their common theme is that the issues haunting Chevron in Richmond, Ecuador, Burma, Kazakhstan, and Nigeria are all really the same, and stem from a corporate culture that is out of sync with the values of the Bay Area.
Chevron repeatedly declined to comment on the charges leveled against it by activists. This should come as no surprise since outgoing CEO David O'Reilly suggested at the company's last shareholder meeting that the report pulled together by Global Exchange and various other groups should be thrown in the trash.
The company known as Chevron was once part of Standard Oil, which was started by the infamous Rockefeller family, and broken up under the Sherman Antitrust Act. Successor companies of Standard Oil — which once controlled 88 percent of US oil flows — comprised what were known as the "Seven Sisters" and included Exxon, Mobil, BP, Shell, Gulf, Mobil, and Standard Oil of California, which ultimately became Chevron. The sequential subsuming of Gulf (1985), Texaco (2001), and then Unocal (2005) allowed Chevron to become the world's second-largest oil company. Just 36 countries have a larger gross domestic product than Chevron. Based on annual revenues, it is California's largest and the world's fifth-largest corporation, with operations in 122 countries. Chevron was the second-most-profitable US corporation last year, edging out General Electric.
The campaign against the oil company can be seen within the context of a larger global examination of what Karin Lissakers, director of the Revenue Watch Institute, calls the "paradox of plenty." Lissakers and others describe this paradox as the persistent inability of resource-rich countries to transform their wealth in oil and other extractive industries into economic development that benefits their citizens.
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correcting the correction, it is $700 billion--with a B, not million that has been extracted in profit by Big Oil and the Nigerian government from the Delta.
JINN
JINN wants to thank the East Bay Express and journalist Peter Asmus for thoughtful and detailed coverage of “The Case Against Chevron,” which describes the strength of the coalition that is demanding the company act responsibly with regard to its past liabilities and current operations. I need to offer a few corrections:
Justice in Nigeria Now (JINN), the organization I founded and volunteer with may do the work of a larger organization, but it presently is staffed by one Coordinator.
The sentence attributed to me stating that "military rogues" blew up the oil facilities is not an accurate quote. In fact, it was armed political militants who took this action in response to military attacks on civilians living in villages near Chevron's facility in Warri. According to these political militants, they were motivated to substantially shut down oil production because the military attacks injured, killed and displaced villagers who were innocent civilians.
The situation in the Delta is complex. It is important to note that for the first 50 years of oil extraction the strongest message by villagers trying to survive in their own communities consisted of non violent protest. Civil disobedience was aimed at oil companies by villagers whose self sufficient lifestyle was destroyed by oil operations that polluted and salinized their water, decimating the fish they ate and ruining their livelihood. Over the last few years, an armed militancy developed in the region. Nonetheless, the large majority of the Delta’s estimated 20 million residents continue to act and live peacefully and nonviolently. To this day, many villagers demonstrate in the spirit of Martin Luther King or Ken Saro Wiwa armed only with placards and songs.
At the same time, there is also a set of armed militant groups with political demands who witnessed the suppression of peaceful protests by military might sometimes at the behest of oil companies (who have admitted flying the notoriously brutal Nigerian military to the site of a sit in and paying the Nigerian military field allowances.) The political militants demand the development of the Delta by reinvesting some of the massive $700 million in profits that Big Oil and the Nigerian government have reaped back into local communities who seek to survive on the land from which this money was extracted. Their demands include jobs, electrification, clean water, and education. When pondering the relatively new development of the armed militancy, one must be take into account that interrupting oil production garners the attention of the international media, the U.S. government, the Nigerian government and even U.S. consumers concerned about prices at the pump. This attention is something that peaceful protesters were unable to muster. All of us who use gas are complicit in the circumstances that make militancy seem attractive.
While there are actors employing a range of tactics it is important not to confuse peaceful villagers and armed militant groups, even when they make the same demands. I’m afraid at times Mr. Asmus’ article fails to make that distinction.
Laura Livoti
Founder
Justice In Nigeria Now
When the Chevron ad comes on as the PBS News Hour is starting I generally turn the channel and return when I know it's finished. The ads are extremely well done, extremely well financed and extremely disturbing if you understand their purpose. In depth analyses of Chevron on Public Radio or Public television? In the Main Stream Media? If they own the state legislature, which I don't doubt, what else are they up to in the name of profit?
The Case Against Chevron also extends to remote Northwestern Australia where Big Oil is in a fossil fuel frenzy to exploit natural gas reserves off the remote Kimberley coast – just south of the recent Timor Sea oil spill. Last week, Chevron broke ground on its Gorgon LNG facility, sited directly on top of rare flatback sea turtle nesting beaches on tiny, but unique, Barrow Island. Worse, Chevron plans to pump millions of tons of carbon dioxide under the island in an unproven process to contain GHG emissions.
Chevron is also battling with Woodside Petroleum, Shell and Conoco to be the first to construct new LNG operations in Australian Aborginal country with the usual overblown promises of jobs and prosperity. Chevron is so sure of success it has inked multi-billion deals with Japan and China to deliver natural from the region. Western Australian Premier Collin Barnett, a right-wing conservative, has ignored the state’s own environmental agency to green light a new LNG plant near untouched James Price Point adjacent to one of the most important humpback whale calving and feeding grounds in the world. Dozens more projects are on the books to industrialize the mostly wild, red rock desert coastline carved by aqua-blue ocean waters and sandy coves.
While Australia is not considered “third world,” Chevron’s irresponsible actions toward the environment and the community is straight out of its corporate colonial playbook. I hope the big U. S. groups campaigning against Chevron will join me and Australian activists in appending these environmental and community outrages to the Case Against Chevron.
Teri Shore
Turtle Island Restoration Network
P. O. Box 370
Forest Knolls, CA 94933
415-663-8590, ext. 105
tshore@tirn.net
www.seaturtles.org
Thank you, Peter, for this important article. I am an organizer with the Mobilization for Climate Justice, a coalition of more than 30 environmental and social justice gruops in the Bay Area. We are organizing a massive protest at Chevron's headquarters in San Ramon next Monday, Dec 7th, to call attention to Chevron's role in contributing to climate change and lobbying against effective solutions. Locally, Chevron's refinery in Richmond, in addition to polluting the local community, is the single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in California, according to the Air Resources Board. • Chevron’s refusal to take significant action on climate change is in line with its history of environmental and human rights abuses in communities all over the world, from Ecuador and Nigeria to Richmond, CA.
More information on Monday's protest: http://west.actforclimatejustice.org
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