Environment

Bayer and Monsanto: Another Dubious Chemical Industry Marriage

If the chemical industry spent as much time on product safety as it does on corporate restructuring, the world would be a healthier place. In 2015 DuPont spun off a bunch of its operations with tainted environmental and safety records into a new company called Chemours. Then DuPont engineered a merger with its longtime rival Dow Chemical, which had its own checkered history, to form DowDuPont. The combined company is now making more structural adjustments.

More changes are in the works in connection with the recently completed merger of German chemical giant Bayer and Monsanto. This is another case of a marriage between two highly controversial corporations.

Bayer was one of the German companies that combined in the 1920s to form IG Farben, which would go on to use slave labor during the Nazi period and was then split up after the Second World War. The largest of the resulting companies were Bayer, BASF and Hoechst (now part of Sanofi).

As Bayer has stepped up its U.S. involvement over the past two decades it has gotten embroiled in one scandal after another. In 1997 one of its subsidiaries based in New Jersey pled guilty to criminal price-fixing and had to pay a $50 million fine. In 2000 Bayer had to pay $14 million to the federal government and the states to settle allegations that it inflated prices on drugs sold to the Medicaid program. In 2001 it was accused of price-gouging on the antibiotic Cipro, which was then in high demand because of the anthrax scare. It later had to pay $257 million to settle a federal lawsuit on Cipro overcharging.

In 2003 documents emerged suggesting that Bayer was aware of serious safety problems with its cholesterol drug Baycol long before the medication was withdrawn from the market. In 2004 Bayer had to pay a $66 million fine in another criminal price-fixing case. A 2008 explosion at a Bayer pesticide plant in West Virginia that killed two workers led to regulatory penalties including a $5.6 million settlement with the EPA. A report found that management deficiencies played a significant role in creating the conditions that caused the explosion. Environmental and workplace safety fines have continued in recent years.

Monsanto, now absorbed into Bayer, was long one of the most hated corporations in the United States, due to the hardball tactics its employed in marketing genetically modified seeds and Roundup herbicides to farmers. It brought aggressive lawsuits against farmers accused of violating its patents. The company somehow managed to avoid antitrust charges, but in 2016 it was fined $80 million by the Securities and Exchange Commission for accounting violations relating to Roundup.

Bayer’s pursuit of Monsanto is part of its effort to brand itself as a life sciences company rather than merely a chemical producer. Its three main divisions are Crop Science, Pharmaceuticals and Consumer Health (the latter being what used to be known as over-the-counter medications such as aspirin, which Bayer is credited with inventing).

Of these, the most problematic is crop science. Bayer, along with DowDuPont and ChemChina (which bought Syngenta), increasingly dominate world markets for seeds, pesticides and related agribusiness products, giving them unprecedented control over the global food supply. This may give us a headache no amount of aspirin can relieve.

Big Polluters and Big Penalties

At a moment when there is all too much talk in Washington about deregulation, a helpful counterpoint has arrived from the Political Economy Research Institute in the form of the latest edition of the Toxic 100, a compilation of the companies responsible for the highest volumes of industrial pollution.

The project, which has been providing this information since 2004, now has rankings on three kinds of pollution: air, water and greenhouse gases. The lists include environmental justice indicators that highlight the disproportionate effect on low-income and minority communities.

The companies on these lists represent some of the biggest threats to the physical well-being of the people of the United States.

The top tier of the air pollution list, which is based on data from the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory, contains the kind of industrial giants one might expect: DowDuPont, General Electric, Royal Dutch Shell and Arconic (a spinoff of Alcoa). Yet number one is the less well known Zachry Group, an engineering company that operates dirty manufacturing facilities in North Carolina and Texas. Also in the top ten is Berkshire Hathaway by virtue of its ownership of companies such as Johns Manville, Pacificorp and MidAmerican Energy.

The top tier of the greenhouse gas list, based on other EPA data, is dominated by companies operating lots of fossil fuel power plants: Southern Company, Duke Energy, American Electric Power and NRG Energy. These are the companies Trump is aiding with his attack on the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan.

Berkshire Hathaway is the only parent company in the top ten on both the air and greenhouse gas lists; it ranks 21^st in water pollution.

I could not resist the temptation to check where the companies that rank high on the Toxic 100 lists show up in Violation Tracker. This is partly because Rich Puchalsky, who serves as the data management specialist for the Toxic 100, has also played an essential role in the construction and expansion of Violation Tracker.

Rich kindly created for me a spreadsheet combining rankings from the two projects. Looking first at the Toxic Air 100, I see there are unsurprising overlaps with the 100 most penalized companies in Violation Tracker—BP, Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Phillips 66, etc. Yet there are some very large air polluters that have faced much smaller penalties, including the Zachry Group cited above and TMS International, a steel industry service company. The EPA should take note.

As for the Greenhouse 100, there are expected overlaps with the Violation Tracker top 100—such as Duke Energy, American Electric Power, FirstEnergy, etc. But there are some discrepancies. Large CO2 emitters such as Energy Future Holdings, Great Plains Energy, and OGE Energy have not received substantial penalties. The EPA might want to check these as well.

Beyond the specifics of individual companies, there is a broader issue here: what is the connection between fines and emissions? Although the releases reported in the Toxic 100 are technically not illegal, those companies are likely to be creating unsanctioned emissions as well. Fines could bring about reductions in both categories. Yet many big polluters treat the penalties as a tolerable cost of doing business and fail to do enough to clean up their facilities. That suggests the need for newer and more effective forms of enforcement. Deregulation is not one of them.

Who Pays the Penalties for Volkswagen’s Crimes?

It’s refreshing to see the book thrown at a corporate criminal, but it would have been even better if federal prosecutors had aimed higher.

Oliver Schmidt, who had once been a mid-level manager at VW’s engineering and environmental office in Michigan, was sentenced to seven years in prison for his role in the company’s long-running scheme to defraud the federal government in diesel emissions testing. The charges against him included conspiracy and violations of the Clean Air Act. He was also fined $400,000.

Schmidt, who was arrested when he foolishly came to the United States for a family vacation, must be pissed off at having to pay such a severe personal price while higher ranking VW officials back in Germany will probably remain unscathed. Appearing at his sentencing hearing in a prison jumpsuit with his wrists shackled, Schmidt admitted culpability and did not point the finger at any company superiors. However, he did not let VW completely off the hook.

In a letter to the judge overseeing his case, Schmidt said he felt “misused” by the company and that he was following VW talking points when he met with a California air pollution official in 2015 and concealed the existence of the software that made the cheating possible.

Schmidt could not have participated in a conspiracy all by himself. Yet the Justice Department does not appear to have tried very hard to land any bigger fish (though at least one person senior to Schmidt is being prosecuted in Germany).

Instead, the DOJ took the typical route of bringing a case against the company as a whole and letting it buy its way out of the entanglement. In 2015 the DOJ, along with the Federal Trade Commission and the State of California, agreed on a civil settlement under which VW had to spend up about $10 billion to compensate customers and $4.7 billion on pollution mitigation.

That was followed by a criminal case in which VW had to pay a $2.8 billion penalty. At least this involved a real criminal plea rather than one of those deferred-prosecution or non-prosecution shams, but it is unclear what consequences VW has faced beyond the payout.

The company is technically on probation and has a compliance monitor, but that will probably not mean much. Even before these cases, the company had already been under federal supervision because of a consent decree stemming from a 2005 case also involving emissions irregularities.

Given the severity of the VW cheating and the fact that it was in effect a repeat offense, the DOJ should have done more to prosecute top executives, and the case against the company itself should have had more than financial consequences.

Whereas strict limitations are placed on the activities of individual felons, VW has been able to go on operating as if the scandal had never happened. A case can be made that the company should have been shut out of the U.S. market, but instead it has been advertising heavily and seeking to regain market share. The main challenge is that it can no longer promote its vehicles under the banner of “clean diesel.” Presumably, VW is working on a new way to deceive the public.

Should Taxpayers Foot the Bill for Rebuilding the Gulf Coast’s Petrochemical Industry?

Much of the Gulf region remains flooded, people are still being rescued, and the full magnitude of the damage is not yet known. But soon the center of attention will be the rebuilding effort and how to pay for it.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is talking about the need for a federal aid package well in excess of $100 billion. Whatever the amount turns out to be, the critical issue will be how the money is distributed.

It’s already clear that the petrochemical facilities clustered in southeastern Texas have been hard hit by the flooding, and there will no doubt be calls to use both federal and state financial resources to help repair these plants.

While there should be no hesitation about using public funds to help the people of the Gulf rebuild their lives, we shouldn’t automatically do the same for the petro giants.

The first reason is that these companies can well afford to rebuild on their own dime. Exxon Mobil, which owns the giant refinery in Baytown, earned more than $130 billion in profits during the past five years. The Motiva refinery in Port Arthur, another massive facility, is owned by Aramco, which in turn is owned by the fabulously wealthy government of Saudi Arabia.

Second, taxpayers made enormous financial contributions to the construction and operation of these facilities. As shown in Subsidy Tracker, the Motiva refinery was awarded a $257 million state and local subsidy package in 2006 to help underwrite its expansion. Earlier this year, Exxon and SABIC, another Saudi company, were granted a $460 million package to jointly build a petrochemical plant near Corpus Christi.

Apart from being subsidized, many of the Gulf region’s petrochemical plants have horrible compliance records regarding toxic emissions and worker safety. The most notorious example is the refinery in Texas City between Houston and Galveston that was previously owned by BP and subsequently sold to Marathon Petroleum. In the wake of a 2005 explosion at the facility that killed 15 workers, BP was fined a then record amount of $21 million by OSHA for a pattern of egregious safety violations in Texas City. The company failed to make the necessary corrections and was later hit with an even larger penalty. BP also had to pay nearly $180 million to settle a federal environmental case involving the refinery.

As shown in Violation Tracker, in 2013 Shell Oil had to pay more than $117 million to resolve Clean Air Act violations at its Deer Park refinery outside Houston. The chemical plant in Crosby, Texas owned by the French company Arkema, where flooding has caused explosions, was fined $107,918 earlier this year by OSHA for serious safety violations (company later negotiated a reduction down to $91,724).

Providing more subsidies for these facilities would in effect negate the impact of the penalties the corporations paid for their negligence.

Finally, there is the difficult question of whether all these facilities should be rebuilt at all, especially if taxpayer funds are involved. The Gulf refineries play a significant role in an energy system that exacerbates the climate crisis, which likely contributed to the intensity of Harvey. We may not be free of fossil fuels yet, but does it make sense to use public resources to prolong the life of facilities linked to extreme weather events that threaten our future?

Pitting Jobs Against the Environment Again

Jobs versus the environment: The notion that the interests of workers were inherently anti-ecological was widely held in the 1980s. Much of the world now accepts that employment and environmental protection can go hand in hand, but the Trump Administration is trying hard to turn back the clock. Dismantling safeguards is presented as the key to job creation.

That same misguided approach can be seen in the terms of the deal that Wisconsin’s Gov. Scott Walker is offering the Taiwanese electronics firm Foxconn in exchange for a commitment to build a $10 billion flat-screen plant that will supposedly create up to 13,000 jobs.

The plan — which Walker announced at the White House along with Trump, Vice President Pence and Speaker Paul Ryan, whose district is expected to be the site of the facility — is generating a great deal of controversy in Wisconsin over the $3 billion subsidy package the governor wants to offer the company.

Yet those special tax breaks are not the only incentive being dangled in front of Foxconn. The draft bill being considered by the state legislature would also free the company from having to file an environmental impact statement and exempt it from a variety of state environmental rules. It would also ease regulations for utilities that build facilities inside the special zone that would be created for Foxconn.

Environmental groups in the Badger State are sounding the alarm, but there is no indication that their concerns are having much of an impact on Walker, who has said that critics of the Foxconn deal can go “suck lemons.”

The special regulatory breaks Wisconsin has cooked up would be troubling in any project, but they are especially worrisome in this deal, given the company involved. It’s widely known that Foxconn has a lousy record on labor rights in Asia, but it also has a troubled history when it comes to the environment.

In 2011 a coalition of Chinese environmental groups published a report listing Foxconn as one of several Apple contractors whose operations were causing serious environmental damage. Two years later, the watchdogs released a film with footage they said showed Foxconn releasing water with high levels of heavy metals into a river feeding Shanghai’s Huangpu River.

Foxconn was also said to be lax when it came to workplace safety. An explosion at its iPad plant in Chengdu that killed three workers and injured 15 others was attributed to the accumulation of combustible dust.

As with its record of abusive labor practices, Foxconn has claimed that it has cleaned up its act on environmental matters. Maybe so, but any plant of the size that the company is promising will have an enormous impact on water and air quality in Wisconsin. Rather than weakening environmental safeguards, the state should be tightening them for this project.

Walker, who has a terrible track record on environmental issues, may be treating the Foxconn deal as an experiment in deregulation. Letting Walker — and by extension Trump, Pence and Ryan — use the Foxconn deal to bring back the bad old days of jobs-versus-the-environment would do no one any good.

The Emissions Scandal Widens

Big business would have us believe that it is on the side of the angels when it comes to the Paris climate agreement. A group of large companies just published full-page ads in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal urging (unsuccessfully, it turned out) President Trump to remain in the accord.

Not included in the list of blue chip signatories were the big auto producers, which may reflect the realization among those companies that it is becoming increasingly difficult for them to present themselves as defenders of the environment.

On the contrary, recent developments could cause them to be regarded as among the worst environmental criminals. That’s because evidence is growing that the kind of emissions cheating associated with Volkswagen is more pervasive in the industry.

Recently, the Justice Department, acting on behalf of the Environmental Protection Agency, filed a civil complaint against Fiat Chrysler alleging that the company produced more than 100,000 diesel vehicles with systems designed to evade federal emission standards. As a result, those vehicles end up producing pollutants (especially oxides of nitrogen or NOx) well above the acceptable levels set by EPA. In its announcement of the case, DOJ noted: “NOx pollution contributes to the formation of harmful smog and soot, exposure to which is linked to a number of respiratory- and cardiovascular-related health effects as well as premature death.” This is a polite way of accusing the company of homicide.

Around the same time, a class action lawsuit was filed against General Motors accusing the company of programming some of its heavy-duty pickup trucks to cheat on diesel emissions tests.

The two companies are responding differently. GM is denying the allegations, calling them “baseless” and vowing to defend itself “vigorously.” Fiat Chrysler tried to ward off the federal lawsuit by promising to modify the vehicles. It expressed disappointment at the DOJ filing but is still vowing to work with regulators to resolve the issue. Fiat Chrysler is also maintaining that its systems are different from those used by Volkswagen, which has had to pay out billions in settlements and criminal fines; several of its executives are facing individual criminal charges.

Whether the response involves stonewalling, remediation or splitting hairs, the emergence of these new cases turns the emissions scandal from one involving a single rogue corporation to a pattern of misconduct that may turn out to be standard practice throughout the auto sector.

This in turn raises broader issues about deregulation. The Trump Administration and its Republican allies in Congress try to depict corporations as helpless victims of regulatory overreach in need of relief. What the widening emissions scandal shows is that large companies are often instead flagrantly violating the rules and in doing so are putting public health at risk. Rather than relaxing regulation, policymakers should be intensifying oversight to make it harder for cheating to occur.

The car industry would be a good place to start. Misconduct among automakers dates back decades. It was GM’s resistance to safety improvements that inspired Ralph Nader to launch the modern public interest movement in the 1960’s, and it was Ford’s negligence in the deadly Pinto scandal of the 1970s that gave new meaning to corporate greed and irresponsibility. It’s time for these companies to clean up their act once and for all.

Targeting Those at the Top

It remains to be seen how high the new special counsel Robert Mueller aims his probe of the Trump campaign, but there are reports that another prominent investigation is targeting those at the top. German prosecutors are said to be examining the role of Volkswagen chief executive Matthias Muller and his predecessor Martin Winterkorn in the emissions cheating scheme perpetrated by the automaker. They are also looking at the chairman of Porsche SE, which has a controlling interest in VW.

Mueller and Muller, by the way, have more of a connection than the similarity of their names. Last year, the former FBI director was chosen by a federal judge to serve as the “settlement master” to help resolve hundreds of lawsuits brought against VW in U.S. courts. Mueller has played a similar role regarding suits brought against Japanese airbag maker Takata.

Although Winterkorn was forced to resign after the emissions scandal erupted in 2015, he and Muller — who was VW’s head of product planning while the cheating was taking place — denied any wrongdoing, and the company sought to pin the blame on lower-level managers.

The initial U.S. Justice Department case against VW named no executives at all, though a company engineer later pleaded guilty to fraud charges and in January DOJ indicted six other VW middle managers.

There is no question that many individuals had to be involved in a scheme as widespread as the one at VW. Although it was corrupt, VW was also bureaucratic, so it is to be expected that lower-level managers either sought permission from their superiors for undertaking a risky scheme — or they were carrying out a plot that originated from above.

In fact, the New York Times reports that it has been shown internal company emails and memos suggesting that VW engineers implementing the scheme were operating with the knowledge and consent of top managers.

As the evidence mounts, the issue for German prosecutors may no longer be whether the likes of Muller and Winterkorn were involved but whether they, the prosecutors, are willing to bring charges against those at the apex of the corporate hierarchy.

In the United States, a reluctance to take that step has tainted the prosecution of business crime for more than a decade. At a time when discussion of whether anyone is above the law is the focus of discussion in the government realm, we should not forget that the principle applies in the corporate sector as well.

Another Form of Denial

Lurking behind the assault on regulation being carried out by the Trump Administration and its Congressional allies is the assumption that corporations, freed from bureaucratic meddling, will tend to do the right thing. That assumption is belied by a mountain of evidence that companies, if allowed to pursue profit without restraint, will act in ways that harm workers, consumers and communities. In fact, they will do so even when those restraints are theoretically in effect.

The latest indication of the true proclivities of big business comes in a report just released by the U.S. Chemical Safety Board on a 2015 explosion at the Exxon Mobil refinery in Torrance, California. That accident spewed toxic debris and kept the facility at limited capacity for a year, boosting gasoline prices in the region and costing drivers in the state an estimated $2.4 billion.

According to the safety board, the accident was not an act of god but rather the result of substandard practices on the part of Exxon. The report states:

The CSB found that this incident occurred due to weaknesses in the ExxonMobil Torrance refinery’s process safety management system. These weaknesses led to operation of the FCC [fluid catalytic cracking] unit without pre-established safe operating limits and criteria for unit shutdown, reliance on safeguards that could not be verified, the degradation of a safety-critical safeguard, and the re-use of a previous procedure deviation without a sufficient hazard analysis that confirmed that the assumed process conditions were still valid.

Exxon was also found to have used critical equipment beyond its expected safe operating life. The CSB investigation also discovered that a large piece of debris from the explosion narrowly missed hitting a tank containing tens of thousands of pounds of highly toxic modified hydrofluoric acid. Exxon refused to respond to the agency’s request for information detailing the safeguards it had (or did not have) in place to prevent or mitigate a release of the acid. The agency has gone to court to try to get the information.

The CSB is an investigatory and not a regulatory body, so it does not have the power to penalize Exxon for its role in bringing about what the agency called a “preventable” incident. Yet its report adds another entry to Exxon’s dismal corporate rap sheet. The Torrance refinery itself, which came from the Mobil side of the family, has a long history of fires, explosions and leaks. The rest of Exxon has a track record that includes the disastrous Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, numerous pipeline accidents and much more, including many years of climate denial. This tainted record did not prevent the company’s CEO from being the U.S. Secretary of State.

Last year, the Torrance refinery was sold by Exxon to PBF Energy, which has subsequently experienced “multiple incidents,” as the CSB diplomatically put it.

No matter how many instances of corporate negligence are brought to light, there are always business apologists ready to point the finger at regulators instead. The gospel of deregulation is now the state religion of the Trump Administration. How many preventable disasters will it take to share that belief?

Trump’s Misguided Crusade Against the EPA

Executives at Volkswagen must be cursing the bad timing. If only they had been able to keep their emissions cheating scheme quiet for a while longer, they could have avoided a lot of grief. That’s because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s enforcement capacity may soon be crippled.

This is a likely consequence of the Trump Administration’s plans, just reported by the Washington Post, to cut the staff of the agency by one-fifth and eliminate dozens of programs. It’s not yet known exactly what functions are being targeted, but cuts of this magnitude will certainly make it more difficult for the EPA to pursue the kind of investigations that led to the filing of civil and criminal charges against VW.

In January, shortly before Trump took office, the company agreed to plead guilty to three federal felony counts and pay a criminal penalty of $2.8 billion along with another $1.5 billion to settle civil claims. VW previously reached a settlement with the EPA and other agencies under which it committed to spend more than $14 billion to buy back cars containing “defeat devices” and undertake projects to mitigate the extra pollution generated by those vehicles.

VW is one of the thousands of polluters whose activities have been thwarted by the EPA. As shown in Violation Tracker, since the beginning of 2010 the agency (on its own or with the Justice Department) has collected more than $43 billion in fines and settlements in more than 15,000 cases. That does not include billions more from companies such as BP in cases in which the EPA joined with other agencies in joint referrals to the DOJ. Apart from VW and BP, here are the biggest EPA penalty cases over the past seven years:

In 2015 a $5 billion settlement with the EPA and the DOJ went into effect under which Anadarko Petroleum agreed to pay for the clean-up of toxic waste sites across the country linked to Tronox Inc., a spinoff of Anadarko’s subsidiary Kerr-McGee.

In 2013 Wisconsin Power and Light Company, a subsidiary of Alliant Energy, agreed to spend over $1 billion on new equipment to substantially reduce air pollution generated by three coal-fired power plants.

In 2013 Transocean agreed to pay a $1 billion civil penalty to the EPA in connection with its role in the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico three years earlier.

In a 2015 settlement with the EPA, fertilizer giant Mosaic agreed to establish a $630 million trust fund to pay for the future closure of and treatment of hazardous wastewater at four facilities in Florida and Louisiana. The company also agreed to spend $170 million on environmental mitigation at its operations.

In 2011 Hovensa, now owned by ArcLight Capital, agreed to spend more than $700 million on new air pollution controls at its massive petroleum refinery in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Not all the companies are from the industrial and energy sectors. Retail behemoth Wal-Mart Stores has had to pay more than $90 million in EPA fines and settlements to resolve cases involving improper disposal of hazardous waste and other violations.

Data collected for an extension of Violation Tracker coverage back an additional ten years to 2000 includes EPA cases with total fines and settlements of more than $20 billion. Among these are a 2007 agreement by utility giant American Electric Power to spend an estimated $4.6 billion to reduce toxic air emissions at its power plants and a $50 million criminal penalty BP paid for environmental violations at its refinery in Texas City, Texas (now owned by Marathon Petroleum) where 15 workers were killed in an explosion in 2005.

These various examples do not include the many Superfund cases brought by EPA against multiple parties in connection with long-term toxic dumping or cases brought against government entities; nor do they include all the work EPA does apart from enforcement.

Trump’s assault on the EPA is based on the once common but now widely debunked notion that there is an inherent conflict between jobs and environmental protection. Today there is greater recognition that workers also need to breathe clean air and drink clean water, and that there are many business and employment opportunities associated with environmental clean-up and sustainable practices.

Decimating the EPA will serve only to empower rogue corporations such as Volkswagen. There is nothing to be gained from making polluters great again.

Principles versus Interests

The website of every large corporation these days has a section labeled Corporate Social Responsibility containing high-minded language about its commitment to sustainability, community development, human rights and the like.

For the most part, these positions serve mainly as a form of corporate image-burnishing and have little real-world applicability. Now, however, a group of large U.S. and foreign banks are being challenged to live up to their CSR principles in connection with one of the most contentious projects of our day: the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Following a recent decision by the Army Corps of Engineers to block the final permit needed to route the pipeline (usually referred to as DAPL) under North Dakota’s Lake Oahe and dangerously closely to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, the project is stalled. Yet that could quickly change with the incoming Trump Administration.

Meanwhile, attention has turned to a syndicate of 17 lenders that have committed a $2.5 billion line of credit to the project. Among the leaders of the pack are Citigroup and TD Securities, owned by Canada’s Toronto-Dominion Bank. Of the 17, all but two are endorsers of a CSR document known as the Equator Principles. (The list of endorsers is here; the two members of the syndicate not among them are China’s ICBC Bank and Suntrust Robinson Humphrey.)

The principles were drawn up in 2003 by a group of major banks facing increasing pressure from environmental and human rights groups over their involvement in controversial projects undertaken by mining, petroleum and timber corporations.

In adopting the principles, banks committed to providing loans only to those projects whose sponsors could demonstrate that they would be performed in a “socially responsible” manner and according to “sound environmental principles.” Sponsors were also supposed to conduct assessments that took into consideration issues such as the impact on indigenous communities.

The current version of the Equator Principles states that projects affecting indigenous peoples should include “a process of Informed Consultation and Participation, and will need to comply with the rights and protections for indigenous peoples contained in relevant national law, including those laws implementing host country obligations under international law…Projects with adverse impacts on indigenous people will require their Free, Prior and Informed Consent.”

It is highly questionable that Equity Transfer Partners and the other companies involved in DAPL have met this test. On the contrary, the harsh response of the project sponsors and local law enforcement agencies to the peaceful protests at the site has demonstrated an utter disregard for the concerns of Native water protectors.

It is no surprise that opponents of the pipeline are calling the lenders to task. In November a group of more than 500 civil society organizations from 50 countries issued a joint letter to the 17 lenders citing the Equator Principles and calling on them to suspend their financial support of the project until the concerns of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe are fully addressed.

So far there is no sign that the lenders are prepared to withdraw their support of the pipeline. This means there will be more clashes ahead — both between police and protestors, and between the profit interests of the lenders and their purported principles.