Crude

So I was taking a break and for fun I was looking at some of the things I have written before.  I was reading an old paper I turned in for engaged learning in an international law class.  I watched a "documentary" on Netflix about an environmental lawsuit in south america.  Anyway, I thought I would post it.

Crude

           

            One of the movies I watched was the documentary Crude about an on gong case in Ecuador against Chevron-Texaco for oil contamination.  Clearly this documentary is highly polemic and was presented and edited so as to leave complete agreement with the Plaintiff the only possible reaction for the viewer to have.  But as I watched the film I became more sympathetic to Chevron as I began to see problems both with the overall position and strategy and tactics of the environmentalist lawyers and specific acts things they did to 'seek justice'.  To understand an issue you need to be able to see it from both sides.  Therefore, I wish to kritik [sic] the plaintiffs in this case. 

            The first thing to note is that while plaintiff's counsel truly believed in the cause, the funding law firm, without who's help the lawsuit would not have happened, saw the case as nothing more than a high risk, high yield, long term investment.  Environmental lawsuits, as with class action suits in general, promise a huge profit to plaintiff's counsel and financiers if won.  Funding environmental lawsuits is big business.  Even if those directly involved are, as many are, true believers in the cause the expected monetary gains from victory are huge and will affect the case.

             In fact, the true believers are probably a bigger problem than the profiteers.  The profiteers are interested in a case by looking at its individual merits and coldly calculating profit.  They might be willing to fund one case where the harms and case is clear but not pursue any that were murkier.  As a result of their ideology and personal self image true believers want and need perpetual lawsuits and will use winnings or settlement money from one case to finance their next case.  They become a predatory state in the same sense of the Mongols under Genghis Khan, seeking perpetual conflict to prevent their own collapse.  If they stop suing, their purpose and funding collapse and they will not be able to make the difference in the world they want.  A decrease in the overall number and severity of environmental lawsuits has no necessary correlation to the number of lawsuits and amount of damages sought.

            The environmentalist activists see themselves as noble and selfless do-gooders fighting a David and Goliath struggle to single handedly save the planet from the brink of destruction.  The corporations, however, see a band of self righteous Robin hoods out to plunder them in the name of the little guy.  For some environmentalist lawyers their only career is suing big corporations for environmental violations who use their plunder when they win to finance more lawsuits.  In the famous Anderson v. Cryovac environmental contamination case the plaintiffs used a smaller defendant's settlement to cover the legal fees of ongoing litigation against the richer defendants.  The lead lawyer for the plaintiff of the instant case joined the case right out of law school and this case is his entire career.  They estimate the case will take another 10 years so job security is good. 

            What is commonly mistaken for repugnant corporate greed in fighting these cases may be an attempt to protect themselves other corporations from the shake down.  Because the true believers are so committed to the cause and have such distrust, hatred and determination to continue fighting corporations the only way to keep them in check is to slow them down and expend their resources at every opportunity.

            Now before we assume that the Plaintiffs are interested in legal process and obtaining justice from the law let us consider how they responded when a judge ordered lab that did all of their testing inspected. Chevron's own testing comes up clear, as one would expect.  Plaintiff's testing comes up dirtier than sewage, as one would expect.  When Chevron got a judge to order an official inspection of the lab used by the plaintiffs they did not react using legal proceeding.  As they marched into the office of the judge who issued the order the American lawyer explained while this would never be done in the US, sometimes they often have to resort to pressure tactics "because the corporations are so big and ruthless."  Their arguments to the judge were along the lines of these are bad guys, they are trying to fool you, etc without good solid or relevant reasoning.  When Chevron's council showed up to see the brow beaten judge vacating his order they tried to protest the environmental lawyers just shouted over him telling him was a bad guy.  Because of their beliefs and world views, the environmentalists in this case have adopted a self-justifying rational for disregarding and circumventing legal process. 

            This is a pattern we see throughout.  Plaintiff's counsel spent the vast majority of their effort on the case not pursuing the legal proceedings but trying to gain public support to pressure the other side to give up.  This seems to be very common to liberal cases celebre and is especially useful when dealing with celebrities, as was done in this case.  The situation is framed in a way so that it would be morally wrong to disagree with them.  Positive peer pressure to accept and negative peer pressure to reject combined with guilt tripping the very rich and non-intellectual has been extremely successful.

            It should be noted that in 1995, when Texaco pulled out of the region and handed it over to a state run oil company, the Ecuadorian Government released them from all "past, present and future" liability at the end of an extensive cleanup project.  Texaco-Chevron maintains that any contamination problems are from the state oil company after they left. Plaintiffs argue that the cleanup was fraudulent and eventually got the Government to find fraud and take criminal action against those involved in the cleanup.

            The reason, Plaintiffs argue, is because oil collection pits were covered over with dirt to hide it without mitigating the damage.  I used to work on small oil wells and collecting spilled oil in pits and burying them in dirt is the standard and EPA required practice.  While it may seem obvious, oil is naturally occurring and naturally belongs under dirt.  The contention that it is now close the surface and can leak out where as naturally it wouldn't is also false.  Oil is everywhere, the key is finding economically feasible deposits to extract. 

            Oil naturally seeps to the surface due to the centrifugal force of the rotation of the earth. Where I was working in Kentucky the ground below us was fractured rock.  300 feet down we would find an abscess in the rock and pump it about an hour till the hole was dry.  Overnight more oil would seep into the hole and we would pump for an hour the next day.  Oil belongs under dirt and oil seeping towards the surface is a natural phenomenon.  This area being rich in oil would seep oil naturally.

            I guess what bothers me is that the Plaintiffs are focused on media propaganda, not on the legal case.  Pretty much everything the environmentalists did (including the documentary) was aimed at provoking popular outrage.  Chevron seemed much more interested in the legal process and did not attempt to manipulate the legal system improperly.  I have no idea what the truth is.  We would expect Chevron to act in the same way that they are acting now whether the claims are true or not.  What gives me pause is that the environmentalists are acting in a way that is not tied to the truth either.  If their claims were truly legitimist, they might need to take similar action.  If they are illegitimate, they will probably still be successful because their tactics do not need truth behind them to win.