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Chevron

Big Oil Rallies To Obstruct Accountability

In the face of mounting scrutiny from local, state, and federal officials, fossil fuel companies and their allies are deploying a range of tactics to obstruct ongoing lawsuits and investigations concerning evidence that the industry has misled the public about the harms it knew its products would cause to the climate, environment, and human health. Far-right industry allies with ties to Chevron have mounted an “unprecedented” pressure campaign calling on the Supreme Court to stop a potentially historic climate deception lawsuit against oil majors from going to trial. Republican attorneys general are separately urging the Supreme Court to throw out similar climate fraud lawsuits from five states.

The Supreme Court Made Regulating Corporations Nearly Impossible

On June 28, the Supreme Court published its decision in the case Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. While the case has not attracted as much attention as some of the Court’s recent spate of controversial rulings, it revoked a long held precedent and will limit government agencies’ ability to do their jobs. Loper Bright deals with seemingly mundane questions of commercial fishing regulation. Current federal law requires fishing companies to allow National Marine Fisheries Services (NMFS) monitors to board their boats for regulatory purposes. The NMFS, however, has interpreted federal law to create a new rule requiring the industry to subsidize this monitoring at a cost of roughly $700 per day.

SCOTUS Overturns ‘Chevron’ Deference, Massive Transfer Of Power To Courts

The Supreme Court ruled along ideological lines on Friday to overturn a 40-year-old doctrine known as Chevron deference in a seismic decision that could see a major erosion of federal administrative rule in issues of public health, labor rights, environmental protection, food safety, and more. The Court ruled 6 to 3 in a pair of decisions that hands a massive amount of control over federal regulatory powers to the courts, overturning the doctrine that allowed federal agencies to have interpretive authority when there was any ambiguity in a law. Chevron deference allowed experts at federal agencies — as people better situated to make decisions on issues within their regulatory purview — to interpret statutes rather than judges.

Pro-Palestinian Protesters Block Chevron Headquarters During Meeting

Around 50 Bay Area protesters blocked the entrance to Chevron’s headquarters in San Ramon ahead of the company’s annual meeting Wednesday morning to draw attention to the company’s links to Israel’s military offensive in Gaza. As shareholders and company officials gathered to discuss financial results for the oil and gas giant, chants from the crowd rang out: “Chevron, Chevron, you can’t hide! Blood for oil is a crime!” Wassim Haj, a member of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, said the aim of the protest was to “demand an end to Chevron’s complicity in the ongoing war in Gaza.” Haj said the protesters demanded that Chevron completely withdraw from their holdings in and around Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories and encouraged consumers to boycott Chevron until a full divestment was reached.

Report Exposes The Oil Giants ‘Fueling Israel’s War Machine’

A report published Thursday shows that major fossil fuel companies such as Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP are playing a key role in propelling Israel's devastating military assault on Gaza, facilitating the country's supply of energy that powers Israeli jets and tanks as they bomb and shell civilians. The new research, conducted by Data Desk and commissioned by the advocacy group Oil Change International, examines the sources of Israeli jet fuel and crude imports in an effort to shine light on the web of countries and corporations implicated in the war on the Gaza Strip.

SCOTUS Case May Slash Regulation Of Everything

In an ominous but unsurprising development, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that may well imperil our health, safety, labor, clean air and water, food and environmental protections. On May 1, the court decided to reconsider its 40-year-old precedent in the current case of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. This right-wing court, which demonstrated its disregard for legal precedent when it overruled Roe v. Wade, may now overturn the well-settled “Chevron deference.” Doing so would be consistent with the conservative fealty to deregulation in order to protect corporate profits.

US Corporations Cash In On Ukraine’s Oil And Gas

US fossil fuel corporations like ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Halliburton are in discussions to take over the Eastern European nation’s oil and gas industry, as Kiev pushes to increase production to replace Russian energy exports. This comes after Ukraine’s Western-backed leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, virtually opened the New York Stock Exchange in September and announced that his country is “open for business”, pledging more than $400 billion in “public-private partnerships, privatization, and private ventures” for US companies. In an attempt to bring an end to the war, China has taken the lead in proposing peace talks. Brazil’s President Lula da Silva has done the same.

The Natural Gas Industry Sees Cow Manure Gas As The Key To Net Zero

Chevron has been talking a lot about cows lately. Alongside POLITICO articles about clean energy, in D.C. newsletters, on Facebook and LinkedIn, are Chevron’s recent ads featuring taglines like “We’re looking to turn the methane from cow 💩 into the fuels of the future.” Each ad links to a page on Chevron’s website which explains how methane captured from manure is actually “renewable natural gas.” But Chevron isn’t the only one talking cow manure. As world leaders convened in Egypt last November to negotiate climate action at the United Nations COP27 summit, a dairy industry trade association also ran a social media campaign highlighting efforts to “upcycle methane” from cattle.

Venezuelan Government And Opposition Sign ‘Social Agreement’

Following the renewed talks in Mexico, Washington issued an expanded sanctions waiver for Chevron to partly resume its Venezuela operations. The Nicolás Maduro government and the US-backed rightwing opposition have signed a partial agreement focused on social issues following the resumption of the dialogue process. After a year-long hiatus, the government delegation disclosed that the agreement had been “exhaustively discussed” in Caracas with Norway as a mediator. On Saturday, they traveled to Mexico City to present a new deal that relates to the management of US $3 billion in Venezuelan funds seized by Washington. The document established a joint commission to follow and verify the correct implementation of the agreement.

Steven Donziger: A Tale For Our Times

29 years ago, in 1993, Steven Donziger, a New York lawyer, visited Ecuador and saw communities who lived their lives with their bare feet and hands permanently covered in oil sludge and other pollutants, whose agriculture was ruined and who suffered high levels of mortality and birth defects. He started a class action against Texaco in the United States, representing over 30,000 local people. Texaco, confident that they had control of Ecuador, requested the US court to rule that jurisdiction lay in Ecuador. It also set about obtaining the agreement from the Government of Ecuador to cancel any liability. In 2002 the New York court finally agreed with Texaco (now Chevron) that is had no jurisdiction and the case moved to Ecuador, much to Chevron’s delight.

Steven Donziger Walks Free After 993 Days Of ‘Completely Unjust’ Detention

Human rights lawyer Steven Donziger walked free Monday after 993 days of detention stemming from his decades-long legal fight with Chevron, which deployed its vast resources in a campaign to destroy Donziger after he won a $9.5 billion settlement against the fossil fuel giant over its pollution of the Amazon rainforest. "It's over. Just left with release papers in hand," Donziger wrote on Twitter. "Completely unjust that I spent even one day in this Kafkaesque situation. Not looking back. Onward." Donziger's case has attracted global attention and outrage, with the United Nations high commissioner on human rights calling his prolonged detention a violation of international law.

Chevron Workers Strike To Demand Higher Wages, Shorter Work Hours

Nearly 600 oil workers at Chevron’s Richmond, California refinery walked out on strike early Monday morning after rejecting two local contract proposals pushed by the United Steelworkers (USW) union. The refinery workers are demanding higher wages, shorter work hours and better health and safety protections after laboring up to 70 hours a week and risking their lives as “essential workers” throughout the pandemic. The strike by the Chevron workers—the first at the facility since the nationwide strike in 1980—is a thorough rebuke to the USW. Over the last month, the USW has been trying to bully 30,000 oil refinery and petrochemical workers at a dozen energy companies across the country into accepting a four-year national agreement dictated by Big Oil and the Biden administration.

100+ Groups Urge Biden To Pardon Steven Donziger

More than 100 environmental and human rights groups on Tuesday sent a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden urging him to pardon Steven Donziger, the attorney under house arrest for refusing to hand over privileged client information in a high-profile environmental case. In the letter, the groups decry the prosecution of Donziger—who has been jailed in his home and federal prison since 2019—as "retaliation for his work in defense of the rights of Indigenous peoples in Ecuador who were victims of Chevron Corporation's oil dumping." Donziger represented tens of thousands of Ecuadorian farmers and Indigenous people in a class-action lawsuit against Chevron that resulted in a multibillion-dollar judgment—which the fossil fuel giant has never paid—for its subsidiary Texaco's dumping of more than 16 billion gallons of toxic wastewater into rivers and pits in the Amazon rainforest.

Steven Donziger’s First Letter From Prison

I am finally able to write directly from inside the belly of the beast: the federal prison in Danbury, CT. I am now on day 23 of my incarceration, and the experience has been nothing short of mind-blowing. I am living with another person in a 54 sq ft cell; next door is a 37-year-old man, one of the kindest people I have ever met. He was sentenced to a 35-year term for gang violence when he was 19. Three people in my unit of 80 or so men are lifers and have over 30 years in the system. The length of the sentences for various crimes is astounding. We are unique as a country for the extraordinarily punitive nature of our criminal justice system. And it sickens me to see it from the inside. All of us here are simply raw material for a business built largely on money and politics that has virtually nothing to do with rehabilitation (although there are staff here working miracles against all odds to help inmates adjust to the outside).

‘Every Turn In This Case Has Been Another Brick Wall’

Janine Jackson: I will introduce our guest essentially the same way I did in May 2017: When we talk about environmental justice, the emphasis is usually on the first word. That might be what comes to mind when you think about Chevron, formerly Texaco, dumping some 16 billion gallons of toxic oil waste into the land and water of Indigenous and farmer communities in Ecuador. But when, having poisoned those communities, Chevron refuses to clean it up, and instead embarks on a decades-long effort to intimidate and silence anyone who tries to call attention to the disaster they created and profited from—well, then, it’s clear that it’s a story about justice, as well as years of cross-national organizing and solidarity.
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