> Untrue: I hope the Ecuadorean government will one day compensate them for the awful pollution it has caused
This is the part that does it for me. If Chevron participated in the destruction of their environment then Chevron should have to compensate them. Even if the law says they were allowed to it should be the type of thing that’s not tolerated. You can’t give someone permission to murder you and I think it should be the same for the environment. A government or land owner shouldn’t be able to give the ok for environmental destruction and everyone who’s involved should be liable.
I think you’re making a slippery slope argument here where none exists. The damage Chevron did In Ecuador was exceptional. It was not run of the mill stuff but really gross pollution of the natural world. If you’ve not learned about this case I suggest reading up on it. It’s worthwhile to understand what corporations are getting away with out there.
We have polluted our environment so badly already that fertility is on a global drop. Mean sperm count in the West has dropped to ~50% in the last half century. For the rest of the world it's probably the same given how passionate so many countries are to achieve a Western lifestyle.
Edit: Over the coming 50 years, the "boomers" are on their way out. This might already be enough to relax the overpopulation issue in the West. But if fertility continues to drop, there will be huge issues with ageing populations.
Globally raise standards of living, promote education, and empower women so that they don't feel the need to have zillions of kids. This would likely have to be done via wealth transfer from developed nations to less developed nations.
In order to save the planet this way (the only sustainable way, IMO), standards of living in Western nations will need to decline for at least a couple of decades. After population stabilizes, standards of living can rise again.
Anyone who has family members under 40 should be onboard with this plan, unless they prefer that their relatives' retirement plan be "die in the coming resource wars 30-50 years from now."
> Globally raise standards of living, promote education, and empower women so that they don't feel the need to have zillions of kids. This would likely have to be done via wealth transfer from developed nations to less developed nations.
That all sounds good to me and I think the vast majority would be on board with that. However, it's kind of odd to frame those ideas under the guise of "reducing population".
Very few people talk about the need to actively reduce the global population because it's not something that needs to be talked about - plummeting fertility and replacement rates are going to accomplish the same thing much quicker and the actions you are proposing are already something people care about. By talking about lowering the global population you just risk getting lumped in with a mostly pro-eugenics or antinatalism crowd (which I'm not saying is fair, it's just how it is).
There's a ton of more optically favorable angles from which you can advocate for those changes.
It's not particularly odd once you realize that, historically, higher standards of living, higher levels of education, and giving women options other than having children have been the dominant factors in reducing population growth rate everywhere in the world. They're the primary reason Japan has a shrinking population now.
As for allowing it to happen gradually, if you look at global population growth estimates, things aren't really expected to even level off until around 2100 at about 10 billion people, give or take. That's far too late if we continue on our current course, and having ~30% more people on the planet, all other things being equal, just makes it 30% harder to stop the death spiral we're locked into. Global societal collapse is probably going to happen 20 years before that, but, even if not, continuing to put more humans on the planet for the next 80 years consuming resources is going to make reversing the trajectory towards collapse that much harder.
And, while this line of thought is certainly not pro-eugenics (I don't want to pick and choose which people end up being born), it is explicitly antinatalist to a point. The point is that there just ain't room on this planet for 10 billion of us. And, the reasoning is exactly the opposite that traditional antinatalists use. It's more that human life and human civilization are worth preserving, rather than "humans don't consent to being born," and "all life is suffering."
But, back to the real point, which is why reducing population makes sense at all, the problem we have is that we're just consuming too much of the Earth's bounty every year, and it's not sustainable. Technological progress can help here, and I expect it will be a part of the solution, even though we're not really committed as a planet toward using technology to reduce consumption. But, technological progress aside, the simplest and easiest way to reduce consumption is to just have fewer people consuming.
That is it. That's the argument, that's the plan, and that's really the only semi-realistic way forward that I can see.
Now, about most people being in favor of such a program, the issue is the bit I mentioned about Western standards of living needing to decline for a few decades. People are in favor of a lot of stuff, as long as they don't have to sacrifice for it. Nobody in the West really wants their standard of living to decline, and few seem on board with agreeing to it for the sake of the future. This is why I think we're actually doomed, to be honest, and this is the part I fully and wholly blame capitalism for, but I'd love to see myself proven wrong by the time I die.
That’s not true. If we could even just scale back global consumption of resources to 1960 levels, we’d be able to have a sustainable global civilization with enough of a buffer that we wouldn’t have to impose a hard cap on individual consumers. Instead, capitalism depends on constant growth to sustain itself, otherwise share prices won’t go up, which leads to all sorts of things that the capital class considers bad.
Edit: Oh, I see we'd rather just make this argument go away rather than address it, still. This is why we can't have nice things, y'all.
> scale back global consumption of resources to 1960 levels
Probably more than that we can't sustain population growth like we have over the last century. Blaming capitalism is easy, but the more nuanced, difficult, and important conversation about population still languishes as taboo.
> Probably more than that we can't sustain population growth like we have over the last century
And that's a problem how? Fuck taboos when the continuation of global civilization depends on it. It's not like we've got another planet to fuck off to after we use this one up.
It makes a bunch of people feel uncomfortable. Those who've had children, those who want children, and those hoping for grandchildren. That and government, and most of the economic order, is interested in increasing GDP, available productivity, and consumer spending. I've seen more principled environmentalists raise the issue, only to be shot down by their peers for their 'abhorrent' views.
Edit: Oh, and there's a conspiracy theory that floats around white supremacy groups:
I hardly think white people will go extinct, but that might be a concern for some people in the western world.
The best way I've encountered to reduce population growth is actually to empower women, particularly in the developing world or for poorer populations. Having better education and employment opportunities for women strongly correlates with fewer children (and of course those children will be vastly better off, as will national GDP with a better skilled labour pool)... but even this idea could be seen as 'imperialist' or 'colonialist' if such an agenda is driven by the western world, even if it's feminist and environmentalist at heart.
Well, it should make them uncomfortable, but more for the fact that those children and grandchildren need a fucking world to live in.
I actually posted the same thing about empowering women in another comment here. Call me imperialist if you want while I help save the planet. I don't mind.
> Call me imperialist if you want while I help save the planet. I don't mind.
Not sure why you're projecting your resentment towards me given them I'm sympathetic to your viewpoint. <rant>But moreover, such a tone can be hurtful to your message. Even if their interlocutor is right, people loathe condescension, and it can often galvanize them into their cherished bad ideas. Not everyone is acting in bad faith. Understand peoples' motivations and fears, and then you might have a path to persuade them you have the better idea. But also learn where you might be wrong, or where the subject is more complicated and nuanced than you've conceived it to be.</rant>
Oh, that wasn't intended as a personal jab. It was a response to what you said about these ideas being considered imperialist and such.
If anyone else comes up with a better and more workable idea to save the planet and stave off global societal collapse, I'm all ears. No arrogance here, and no condescension intended.
It’s always interesting to read 2 news articles which seem to disagree on the key points. but maybe reading between the lines on the guardian article it’s that this lawyer did commit fraud, but the punishment has been disproportionately harsh.
He probably should have got a lawyer when he was ordered to produce confidential materials. Instead, he tried to handle it himself. The moment he was faced with a contempt charge for not complying was the moment his personal liberty was at stake. That is the moment to get a lawyer and not try to represent yourself. Now he is in a world of hurt.
I feel courts ought not to have their own power to punish people for contempt — certainly not in the US, anyway, where we go to great lengths to avoid giving power to tyrants. It's an unfortunate oversight in our Constitution.
Consider, for instance, the unrelated case of Judge William H Coward, who ordered a man in contempt to write an apology to the court, post it on social media, and delete negative comments — running roughshod over what ought to have been his First Amendment rights: https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/politics-government/a...
The common law offence of contempt in the US, Canada, UK, etc. is an old power, vague in scope, and without much in the way of the normal process. The objection is usually not to the concept of punishing itself, but to the judge being effectively witness, prosecutor, judge and jury combined.
So create a statute that outlines such offences. Charge people if they break it. Put it through the normal trial process. At a very minimum, the judge alleging contempt should not be the judge to try the matter. It might be appropriate to leave a curtailed power of contempt, so that judges can act quickly when they hear someone has bought a paper shredder. But I really don't think it's appropriate that a single judge can decide to have someone imprisoned potentially indefinitely without a proper trial governed by the normal procedures.
I don't think contempt charges are without oversight. They can be appealed. But they are enforced immediately because otherwise the court system would be very inefficient.
Yes, it's already partially codified in many places, and the courts use their internal procedures even where not.
Still, in the USA for example, the Supreme Court has ruled that contempt is a privilege of the courts. It is not subject to such things as the right to trial by jury. A person can, in actual practice, end up in prison for decades without ever having been charged with a crime or having gone before a jury: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/us/12contempt.html
I'm more familiar with it here in Canada, though it's my understanding the basic concept is the same in many US states still. It is the last vestige of true common law. Which is really quite an unusual situation. Authority is derived directly from the head of state through the judicial branch. While laws that the legislature has passed, like the constitution, do restrict the courts, they pretty much otherwise make it up as they go. In the sense of how the old common law system always worked.
When the logging companies vs. environmental activist issue in British Columbia was very hot a couple decades ago, a whole stream of injunctions got issued and some case law had to be spun up real quick on people willfully and publicly defying injunctions. It was odd to read judges debating whether they should criminally sentence people for contempt in accordance to the Criminal Code's general sentencing provisions or not. After all, they don't have to, as statute doesn't require them to. In one case on appeal, the BC Supreme Court decided it would be very prudent to adopt that as the standard used, and so that's now precedent at least.
I guess the question here is whether there is any need for a meta-meta-judicial system, given that court orders by and large already have a path of appeal, and that most orders that lead to contempt charges cause no irreparable harm.
This case is a perfect example. All he has to do to be freed of house arrest is turn over his devices. He has this objection about attorney client privilege, which he may prevail on (though it doesn't seem likely). But he or his client could always seek later judicial remedy in the unlikely event that that privilege is violated as a result of Chevron's searching for evidence related to this case.
It's also worth noting the protracted nature of his confinement is partly due to a lot of legal wrangling that's been going on, not all of it on the side of the court. For example, the trial was scheduled to occur in September last year, but Donziger's lawyer asked that it be postponed because they didn't want to have it virtually.
You say this with such glee, when in fact what's happening is that an innocent man is being punished for lawfully using the court system as it's supposed to be used.
The matter is whether Chevron did spill oil, or did not spill oil.
A case of evidentiary fraud to dismiss that in it entirety? How that works?
Man A killed man B, caught on camera, red handed, with wittnesses. Man B's family pays off a wittness to testify, but get caught. Man A claims fraud, racketeering, that the whole case is "tainted," and throw it to the garbage bin. A zealously officious judge then happily complies using every technicality imaginable to cancel an overarching issue.
How that worked is that the US courts concluded that Donziger's own chosen experts found smoking-gun evidence showing the oil was spilled not by Chevron but by Ecuador's state-owned oil company, and that he then decided to conceal this evidence from the Ecuadorian courts, get those experts to count all that oil as Chevron's doing, strong-armed one expert to send them a bunch of signed blank pieces of paper which were used to fraudulently claim a report was written by that expert, and engaged in a whole bunch of other equally shady business. From what I can tell, most of this seems to have been undisputed and based on his own words.
I think you can let people decide the narrative for themselves. The stakes were high on both sides, along with the motivation to distort the outcome, but also this was a time long before PR-blowback was even a consideration by big oil. It seems foolish to think that Chevron put the resources into mitigating environmental damage in some poor country for their oil projects in the 70s/80s. They only factor this in now because of the PR and local political implications.
>It seems foolish to think that Chevron put the resources into mitigating environmental damage in some poor country for their oil projects in the 70s/80s.
No one is claiming they did as I'm reading it. They did however pay $40 million to fix some damage in 1995 and were granted indemnity by the Ecuador government in return. Other environmental damage was found but it likely happened after Chevron was no longer involved in the project. Together that means they're off the hook legally.
> Other environmental damage was found but it likely happened after Chevron was no longer involved in the project
If you're referring to the findings in the case of Chevron vs Donziger[0], Donziger claims that Chevron and the judge colluded. The claim is likely difficult to prove, but when you consider the billions at stake, Chevron have a strong motivation here to dissuade future activist work.
> They did however pay $40 million to fix some damage in 1995 and were granted indemnity by the Ecuador government in return.
Yes, but did that remediation include the the extensive damage to surrounding forests? And the poisoning of 100s/1000s of indigenous people? Cancers, malformed children, ruined water supply, etc.? The class action of the people impacted was warranted, if you've taken the time to look at some of the video. It could be that domestically based or other companies are partly responsible though.
Edit: Attracting inexplicable downvotes on my threads here, including this one which was basically asking for a source. Not sure why someone would downvote a comment like that unless they don't want people to dig deeper.
What's worse is that Man A, in this case, is even more unscrupulous, has a bigger legal war chest at their disposal, and lobbyists and associates in power across the justice and political systems. They can fight dirty with little recourse. Man B may decide to fight dirty as a counter-attack, but this topples their whole pretense as the innocent and exploited victim when they are found out.
> His contempt charge will be heard by Judge Loretta Preska, who was on the advisory board of the New York chapter of the Federalist Society, who took the unusual step of appointing a law firm that has previously done work for Chevron, Seward & Kissel, to prosecute Donziger after the department of justice declined to take the case.
I'm hearing more and more very bad stuff from both sides of the aisle about the Federalist Society, in particular their judges. Especially when it comes to protecting big institutionally connected organizations.
The Federalist Society is more nakedly pro corporate than trying to protect "institutionally connected organizations." They don't try to hide this bias either.
The responsibility on one individual to change the world can be onerous. There needs to be viable alternatives, enforced by institutions, for correcting systemic issues.
>Chevron relocated Alberto Guerra, an Ecuadorian judge, and his family to the US, paid for his health insurance and a car while meeting with him more than 50 times before he provided testimony that Donziger discussed the bribe with him at a Quito restaurant. Guerra has since admitted that his testimony was exaggerated in parts, untrue in others.
You're factually wrong. Donzinger's house arrest stems from a contempt charge brought in the aftermath of the RICO suit brought against him by Chevron. He was placed under house arrest while his appeal of the contempt charge processes.
Chevron would have had no reason to bring a RICO action against Donzinger if it were not for Donzinger's suits against Chevron in Ecuador.
> This article is a soft-pad for a criminal. Stop it.
This seems disingenuous. Casting a human right and environmental activist who's devoted himself to the well-being of Amazon tribes as a brazen criminal? On allegations, not a conviction, no less.
As I understand it, the big problem was that the "oil spilled by a chevron sub" wasn't, at least not according to the evidence that had been discovered through the usual legal process... it was probably spilled by a company owned by the Ecuadorian state long after Chevron and their subsidiaries ceased to have any involvement. Then some really shady business happened where, as far as anyone can tell, the Ecuadorian judge threw out the existing independent expert reports and replaced them with an "independent" report that was secretly ghost-written by him and his team for no justifiable reason in order to find Chevron liable anyway. He also left a considerable paper trail when doing this which the US courts got their hands on, hence all the hand-wringing in the article about "sensitive client information". (The confession from the judge probably didn't help, even if some of it was later retracted, but even without that he'd be in huge legal hot water.)
Somehow, I suspect this quote from the article is at least as much about that development as it is about the lawyer in question somehow being persecuted by Big Oil: "It is this strange multi-front battle with one extraordinary explosive development after another. It has had this magical quality to enrage everyone involved in it."
At least some of this is mentioned in the US court judgement linked to in the article: https://casetext.com/case/chevron-corp-v-donziger-28 (under the heading "Donziger Causes a Change to Less Probative Tests When the LAPs' Experts Find Pollution that Likely Was Not Caused by Texaco" and in subsequent and preceding sections). I think there may have been news coverage that went into further details, can't remember where though.
Thank you for that. I view the case a little more skeptically now. The stakes were high on both sides, and ergo the motivation to distort the process just as high. However, the motivation for Chevron to mitigate environmental impacts in the 70s/80s/90s were negligible, until lawsuits and stories like this provided the PR incentive. So I'm inclined to believe they are responsible for much - but perhaps not all - of the destruction. I think it's a little naive to think otherwise.
As I'm reading it no one is claiming they mitigated damage in the 70s/80s or that they didn't cause damage. They did however pay $40 million to fix some damage in 1995 and were granted indemnity by the Ecuador government in return. Some arguing on how good of a job they did but seems to have been at least somewhat decent. Other environmental damage was found but it likely happened after Chevron was no longer involved in the project. Together that means they're off the hook legally which is all that a lawsuit is about (rather than morals or ethics). Chevron covered its backside legally very well it seems to the point where the other side resorted to less than legal behavior.
The lawsuit was a class action by indigenous peoples against Chevron, and was separate to the agreement between Chevron and the government. There was plenty of financial incentive for both Chevron and the government to look away from the plight of the indigenous people.
US law procedure is very good at defending the powerless. That's almost always never the case elsewhere.
It was Chevron who wanted the case heard in Ecuador. It was originally filed in NY (Chevron's HQ at the time). US courts agreed Ecuador had jurisdiction and exacted a promise from Chevron to abide by the Ecuadorian court's ruling, which Chevron promptly ignored.
I think it comes from the pattern of people seeking it out.
A relevant example is Argentina's issuance of bonds in the past and subsequent travails. They didn't have to make themselves subject to US courts in the way they did.
For some reason, despite all the disadvantages (potential and actual in hindsight) of borrowing in US dollars and being subject to New York law, they did it anyway.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelkrauss/2018/09/16/justic...