Big Green gets taken down a notch
Great story from James Delingpole at
Breitbart:
Chevron vs Big Green: Capitalism Finally Grows a Pair
This week the environmental movement suffered its biggest defeat since Climategate. And at the hands of its most hated enemy: Big Oil.
Here are the reasons why the court ruling by a US federal judge that Chevron should not have to pay $9.5 billion in damages to victims of oil pollution in Ecuador is a victory for common sense and justice which we should all be celebrating.
1. It's not about David v Goliath.
Though, of course, that's how it was spun by the left-liberal media: on the one hand, plucky maverick New York lawyer Steven Donziger, representing thousands of Ecuadorean natives whose forest lands had been polluted; on the other, the oil giant Chevron, America's third largest company.
But if anyone was being bullied here, it was Chevron. As Donziger well knew, it is almost impossible for an oil company to get a fair hearing in a world brainwashed by environmentalist propaganda. Chevron knew this too. It could have settled for much less out of court - and most oil companies in its position probably would have done. However, Chevron's chief executive John S Watson took the bold and principled decision to fight it all the way.
2. Chevron had done nothing wrong. No really.
The damage was done in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties in the Oriente region of Ecuador by Texaco and the national oil company Petroecuador.
Texaco later reached a settlement with the Ecuadorian government whereby it paid $40 million to clear up the 37 per cent of oil damage for which it accepted responsibility; the rest were assumed to be the responsibility of the Ecuador national oil company (which didn't clear up its share).
Chevron has never drilled in Ecuador. But when a Chevron subsidiary absorbed Texaco in 2001 it became a target for environmentalists who still held Texaco partly responsible for the remaining pollution.
More at the site including the following:
- The case against Chevron was rigged.
- Read the ruling: it's great entertainment!
- Donziger's dodgy past.
- Green Greed
- Green parasites.
- The complicit media: if it's green it must be good.
- The usual rent-a-celeb suspects weigh in...
- Big Green sticks its oar in too.
- Green hubris.
Nice to see some push-back -- hope that this is the beginning of a landslide...
Posted by DaveH at March 7, 2014 2:23 PM