In Ecuador in 2003 a trial began against Texaco who were accused of dumping toxic material in the Amazon. They were ordered to pay $18bn in damages. Chevron bought Texaco, and they are fighting back. Their evidence includes out-takes from the documentary movie Crude. Wizbang links to some of the video (via Small dead animals, via Counting Cats). One of the video’s protagonists talks of using smoke and mirrors and bullshit in the Ecuadorian court to explain away the fact that the scientific reports only showed localised contamination.
Chevron have some web pages with the background and more videos. I like it when companies bluntly defend themselves so publicly. None of this is to do with fracking, but it does shed some light on the opponents of oil exploration.
Meanwhile, an Investors Business Daily piece (via Junk Science) suggests that as of May, the Environmental Protection Agency was not aware of a proven case of water being affected by fracking, and that recent concerns about this may be due to contamination from the chemicals the EPA used when drilling its own wells. Update: Now Instapundit is saying that the EPA struck gas!
All of which suggests we need to be on our toes when faced with evidence of the dangers of fracking.
The Ecuadorian government is demented. This does not mean that Chevron is automatically innocent – but any charges from the Ecuadoraian government (or their friends) must have a massive question mark against them.
Seems to me that, since the oil did not contaminate the drinking water, fracking chems won’t either.
I believe there are Federal regulations that require expensive cleanup and mitigation once a fuel source has been tapped into. The locals should sue the EPA for everything they can, God knows they won’t clean up as well as the energy companies would.
Great to see that the “localised” environmental damage and “localised” diseases were only caused by the localised contamination.
That will male the “localised” villagers really happy..that and all the money they received for trashing their “localised” homes..
Cricket noises about why the original polluters never cleaned up the mess they originally caused..so much for balance of this site.. 🙁
Mike Williams: the actual quote from the video is, “Right now all the reports are saying it’s just at the pits and the stations, and nothing has spread anywhere at all” and, “that’s just right under the pits.” There aren’t any villagers living on the oil pits.
‘Localised’ was my, perhaps poor, choice of words.
The basis of modern civilization is energy. All the machines, all the technology, all the communications, the food, the clothes, just about everything we use to live our daily lives depends on copious supplies of energy.
All those who oppose technological society know this very well. Their opposition to developing, transporting, or using energy is grounded in the realization that if the energy supply is curtailed, technological cicilization begins to slow, growth stops, and, eventually, the technology cannot be supported.
Deep ecology considers humanity to be a form of vermin. It postulates an appropriate human population for the well-being of the planet to be about 100 million, living at a pre-tech level.
One of the methods to bring about the conditions which would result in such a population collapse is to cut off the life support systems powered by the development of expanding energy supplies.
The basis for life is energy. These people are anti-life.