Petroleum Industry

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.

Why Don’t More Corporate Executives Commit Suicide?

The business news is abuzz with reports that the fatal car crash of fracking executive Aubrey McClendon a day after he was indicted on federal bid-rigging charges may have been intentional. The high speed at which McClendon’s SUV was apparently travelling at the time of the collision and the absence of skid marks are generating speculation that he deliberately drove into a bridge support.

If McClendon did indeed take his own life for reasons connected to his indictment, it would not be the first case of scandal-induced corporate suicide. In 2002, for instance, J. Clifford Baxter, former vice chairman of the notorious energy company Enron, was reported to have shot himself in the head, leaving a note saying “where there was once great pride now it’s gone.”

Yet in comparison to the high degree of corporate misconduct, executive suicides are quite rare. Part of the reason is that so few executives are prosecuted individually, as was McClendon, and thus are less likely to feel the intense shame that usually prompts acts of self-destruction. And when those prosecutions do occur, some executives remain defiant, depicting themselves of victims of overzealous prosecutors.

A prime example of such defiance was former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship, who insisted he was targeted for political reasons despite the extensive evidence against him in a case stemming from the deaths of 29 miners in the Upper Big Branch disaster in 2010. Blankenship was convicted of conspiracy to violate federal mine safety laws but acquitted of lying to regulators.

It’s significant that McClendon’s possible suicide occurred after he was indicted on the relatively abstract charge of conspiring to rig bids for oil and natural gas leases in Oklahoma. While the charges are serious, they do not directly involve harm to people and the environment.

On the other hand, Chesapeake Energy, which McClendon co-founded in 1989 and ran until 2013, has been involved in numerous cases involving allegations of such harm in the course of fracking. In the Violation Tracker my colleagues and I at Good Jobs First created, we found more than 30 cases since 2010 in which the company has paid more than $10 million in EPA fines and settlements. Apparently, there was no shame in that.

Although it would be ghoulish to suggest that anyone commit suicide, there is no shortage of other executives who should also at least be feeling more intense shame for their actions. A number of them are at companies in the business of producing vehicles like the one in which McClendon was driving at the time of his death. McClendon’s Chevrolet Tahoe is produced by General Motors, which had to pay a fine of $900 million to resolve criminal charges in connection with an ignition switch defect linked to more than a dozen deaths.

Then there’s the case of Japan’s Takata, which is embroiled in a controversy over the production of millions of defective airbags that in some cases ruptured and sent shrapnel flying at drivers and passengers. Or else Volkswagen, which has admitted wholesale cheating on auto emissions tests, leading to untold additional amounts of air pollution.

There are plenty of additional past and present examples from industries such as chemicals, mining, tobacco and asbestos. The answer is not for more top executives to take their own lives, but for them to end their reckless behavior to protect the lives of the rest of us.

Will Big Oil Survive Long Enough to Pay for Its Climate Sins?

“Times are tough, you’d almost call them brutal right now. But we will adapt. We will make it.” So insisted the deputy chief executive of BP at a conference in Houston where industry leaders put on a brave face amid a worsening crisis for the petroleum sector.

Other speakers were even more explicit about the Darwinian environment. “We will be one of the last guys standing,” declared the CEO of Suncor Energy, which once prospered from the tar sands boom in Alberta and is now selling off assets.

Several dozen oil and gas producers have had to file for bankruptcy protection since the beginning of last year. More such moves are expected. The business consulting firm Deloitte has issued a report estimating that more than one-third of all petroleum exploration and production companies are in precarious financial condition, with dozens likely to make the trip to bankruptcy court.

Even the oil majors are in trouble. Chevron reported a fourth-quarter loss of $588 million, while BP lost over $2 billion in the quarter and more than $5 billion for 2015 as a whole. Exxon Mobil and Shell are still in the black but their profits are down sharply. The industry’s problems are already depressing stock prices and are starting to cause heavy losses at the banks that lent extravagantly to the energy sector during the boom time.

It’s difficult to summon much sympathy for the oil companies, given the damage they have wrought. As shown in the Violation Tracker database I and my colleagues created, the petroleum industry has racked up more than $31 billion in environmental, health and safety penalties since the beginning of 2010, far more than any other industry. Much of this is the result of the massive fines and settlements paid by BP in connection with the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

Yet there is one reason to hope for the survival of the petroleum producers: we need them to survive in some form so they can be taken to court over the role they’ve played in denying the reality of the climate crisis.

As Bill McKibben notes in a recent article, we’re now at the beginning of an investigation of what may prove to be one of the biggest corporate scandals in American history — the climate coverup.

At the center of the scandal is Exxon Mobil, the biggest fossil fuel corporation on earth and the one that is probably most culpable for suppressing evidence of the impact of its products on climate change. As path-breaking research by Inside Climate News showed, Exxon — reported to be the subject of current investigations by state prosecutors in New York and California — knew about global warming as early as the 1970s and quietly used that knowledge for its own benefit while keeping it from policymakers and the public.

Forty years later, the nature of the climate crisis is public information, but Exxon Mobil and the other oil companies continue to do business as usual. In fact, their obsession with exploration and production even at a time of softening demand has helped bring about the current price nosedive.

Exxon Mobil today has assets of more than $340 billion. Soon it may have to stop using those resources to produce more harmful fossil fuels and instead pay out substantial sums in damages to communities struggling to deal with the climate mess the industry has caused.

The Corporate Wrongdoers Sticking with ALEC

If a group of major drug dealers, identity thieves and bank robbers were to put out a statement calling for relaxation of the criminal code, no one would take it very seriously.

Yet complaints about the regulatory system coming from large corporations — including many with repeated environmental and safety violations — are regarded as important pronouncements by too many policymakers and political candidates. Corporate interests don’t simply complain. They use their money and influence to urge lawmakers to alter the rules in their favor.

One of the main vehicles by which big business pushes its deregulatory agenda is the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC, which is currently holding one of its periodic gatherings of corporate lobbyists and legislators, takes aim at agencies such as the EPA, which it likes to call a “regulatory train wreck.”

Since my colleagues and I at the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First released our Violation Tracker database recently, I’ve been comparing notes with the ALEC watchers at the Center for Media and Democracy. What we’ve found is a substantial overlap between the corporations that remain loyal to ALEC (more than 100 have left in response to public pressure) and the companies in Tracker with the largest penalty totals. Mary Bottari of CMD has posted a piece that focuses on the energy companies in the two groups. Here I look at the full overlap.

The current list of ALEC corporate members includes 11 corporations that rank in the Violation Tracker top 100 (in a few cases the membership is held by a subsidiary). These parents and their subsidiaries have racked up a total of $1.7 billion in federal environmental, health and safety penalties and settlements since the beginning of 2010:

Pfizer: $563,357,650
Novartis: $422,569,368
WEC Energy Group: $310,621,475
Duke Energy: $112,150,534
Honeywell International: $93,641,829
Berkshire Hathaway: $46,810,063
Exxon Mobil: $46,285,706
Energy Transfer: $25,467,251
Dominion Resources: $14,168,658
Norfolk Southern: $11,675,325
Chevron: $11,373,376

Pfizer is in the news because of its deal to merge with a smaller drug company and move its legal headquarters to Ireland, all to dodge federal taxes. It has amassed more than half a billion dollars in penalties in the past five years largely because of cases involving the illegal marketing of drugs for purposes not approved as safe by the Food and Drug Administration. In 2009, the year before Violation Tracker’s coverage begins, Pfizer had to pay $2.3 billion to settle Justice Department civil and criminal charges relating to the illegal marketing of the painkiller Bextra and three other medications. John Kopchinski, a former Pfizer sales representative whose complaint helped bring about the federal investigation, told the New York Times: “The whole culture of Pfizer is driven by sales, and if you didn’t sell drugs illegally, you were not seen as a team player.”

Novartis has also been accused of illegal marketing of drugs and has had to pay more than $400 million in penalties. Not yet included in Violation Tracker is a case in which federal prosecutors are seeking $3 billion in penalties from the company for paying illegal kickbacks to get pharmacies to encourage use of expensive drugs for kidney-transplant patients covered by Medicare and Medicaid.

WEC Energy Group, whose subsidiaries North Shore Gas and Peoples Gas are ALEC members, is on the top violators list mainly because of a $307 million settlement another subsidiary, Wisconsin Public Service Corporation, reached with the Justice Department and the EPA to resolve Clean Air Act violations at two of its power plants. Most of the settlement involves mandatory spending on new pollution control technology at the facilities.

Duke Energy earned its spot on the top violators list mainly because of a case from earlier this year in which three of its subsidiaries pled guilty to criminal violations of the Clean Water Act and paid $102 million in penalties in connection with a massive coal ash spill into the Dan River in North Carolina.

The largest portion of Honeywell International‘s $93 million in penalties comes from a 2013 case in which it agreed to pay a $3 million civil penalty and spend $66 million on new pollution control equipment to resolve Clean Air Act violations at its plant in Hopewell, Virginia.

Conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway is on the list because one of its major subsidiaries, BNSF Railway, is an ALEC member. While it has not been involved in any large cases like those above, since 2010 BNSF has accumulated more than 600 violations from the Federal Railroad Administration with total penalties of $7 million (the FRA’s fines tend to be less than onerous). BNSF was also pressured by OSHA to change its practices that the agency said discouraged workers from reporting on-the-job injuries.

Exxon Mobil‘s penalty total comes largely from its subsidiary XTO Energy, which focuses on fracking. For example, in 2013 XTO had to pay $20.1 million to the EPA to settle Clean Air Act violations linked to the discharge of wastewater in Pennsylvania.

These cases illustrate the track record of the companies that are sticking with ALEC, presumably with the hope that the organization can bring about policy changes that will allow them to continue business as usual and pay less in the way of penalties. ALEC may be correct that the regulatory system is a “train wreck,” but that’s because the rules are too weak, not too stringent.

Using Violation Tracker to Research Oil Transport Hazards

In their disappointed responses to President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL project, proponents argued that the decision would do nothing more than force tar sands oil producers to use more dangerous forms of transport such as rail.

It’s true that freight railroads have had their share of accidents, but pipelines are hardly risk-free. The new Violation Tracker database provides documentation on the hazards of both modes of moving dirty oil.

Pipeline regulation is under the purview of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), a division of the U.S. Department of Transportation. Violation Tracker has collected data on more than 200 significant enforcement cases brought by the agency since the beginning of 2010. These cases have resulted in total penalties of $28 million.

The largest share of that total comes from Enbridge, the Canadian pipeline giant with extensive operations in the United States. It has had five PHMSA cases with total penalties of $6.3 million. These include a $3.7 million penalty linked to a 2010 accident that spewed more than 800,000 gallons of oil into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River, a major waterway that flows into Lake Michigan. The agency followed the penalty announcement with a statement that there was a “lack of a safety culture” at Enbridge, which had previously been fined $2.4 million for an accident in Minnesota in which two workers were killed when the oil in a leaking pipeline ignited. (For more on Enbridge’s dubious track record, see its Corporate Rap Sheet.)

Second among the top PHMSA violators is BP with $4.6 million in penalties, most of which came from a provision of a larger settlement also involving the Justice Department and the EPA concerning a spill on the North Slope of Alaska. Third is Buckeye Partners with 18 cases involving just under $2 million in PHMSA penalties. Four other companies have been penalized in excess of $1 million by the agency since 2010: Kinder Morgan, Enterprise Products Partners, Exxon Mobil and Marathon Petroleum.

The biggest single penalty from this group was the $1,045,000 fine imposed on Exxon Mobil in connection with a 2011 rupture of a pipeline in Montana that sent more than 40,000 gallons of crude oil into the Yellowstone River.

This is the track record that Keystone XL advocates seem to think argues in favor of pipelines. As noted, they are on stronger ground when criticizing railroads. They can point to incidents such as the derailment of a CSX oil train in West Virginia that caused a fire that burned for days and forced the evacuations of hundreds of people.

The Federal Railroad Administration tends to impose modest penalties but Violation Tracker shows that half a dozen lines have managed to accumulate $1 million or more in safety fines since 2010. In the lead is Union Pacific, with $11.1 million in penalties, including the agency’s single largest fine of $565,000. Second is Berkshire Hathaway (parent of BNSF) with $7.4 million, followed by CSX with $2.7 million and Norfolk Southern with $3.4 million. All of the Class I railroads are well represented on the penalty list.

The debate between pipelines and supposedly safer railroads is a false one. The major companies in both industries have track records that make oil transport a hazardous proposition.

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New in Corporate Rap Sheets: Dollar Tree, now leading the retail sector targeting those too poor to shop at Walmart.

Also note: POGO’s Federal Contractor Misconduct Database, one of the inspirations for Violation Tracker, has been revamped.

The Limits of the Koch Charm Offensive

Charles and David Koch and their Koch Industries conglomerate, long known for an unapologetic defense of unfettered capitalism and hard-right politics, are said to be going soft. The brothers are taking pains to associate themselves with more progressive policies such as criminal justice reform, while their corporation has been running feel-good ads highlighting its purported commitment to enlightened principles such as sustainability.

At the same time, the Kochs are depicting themselves as backers of supposedly responsible Republican presidential candidates and shunning iconoclastic front-runner Donald Trump.

The Koch charm offensive does have its limits. A slew of groups funded by the billionaires are at the forefront of the campaign against the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan and are doing their best to defend fossil fuels. When it comes to environmental policy, the Kochs are still in the stone age.

That position is not merely a matter of ideology. Their opposition to environmental and other safety regulations amounts to a defense of the way the Kochs do business.

This was made clear to me in some work I’ve been doing on a new research tool called Violation Tracker that my colleagues and I at Good Jobs First are preparing. Patterned on our Subsidy Tracker, the new resource will take company-specific data on regulatory violations and link the individual entries to the parent corporations of the culprits. This will allow us to present violation totals for large firms and show which of them are the most frequent offenders.

The initial version of Violation Tracker, which will be released this fall, will cover data from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety & Health Administration and a few other federal health and safety agencies. Coverage on wage and hour violations, financial sector transgressions and other forms of corporate misconduct will come later.

A preliminary tally of EPA and OSHA data from the past five years indicates that units of Koch Industries have been hit with more than $3.5 million in penalties. The biggest amount comes from Flint Hills Resources, the conglomerate’s oil refining arm. For example, in 2014 the company had to pay $350,000 and sign a consent decree to resolve EPA allegations that it was violating the Clean Air Act through flaring and leaking equipment.

Georgia-Pacific, the Koch Industries forest products company, received more than $600,000 in penalties during the five-year period. These included $60,000 in penalties proposed in January by OSHA in connection with worker exposure to formaldehyde and other dangerous substances.

In 2013 the fertilizer company Koch Nitrogen had to pay $380,000 to settle allegations that its facilities in Iowa and Kansas violated the Clean Air Act.

Regulatory violations by Koch businesses began before the five-year period that will be initially covered in Violation Tracker.

For instance, in 2000 the Justice Department and the EPA announced that Koch Industries would pay what was then a record civil environmental fine of $30 million to settle charges relating to more than 300 oil spills. Along with the penalty, Koch agreed to spend $5 million on environmental projects in Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma, the states where most of its spills had occurred. In announcing the settlement, EPA head Carol Browner said that Koch had quit inspecting its pipelines and instead found flaws by waiting for ruptures to happen.

Later in 2000, DOJ and the EPA announced that Koch Industries would pay a penalty of $4.5 million in connection with Clean Air Act violations at its refineries in Minnesota and Texas. The company also agreed to spend up to $80 million to install improved pollution-control equipment at the facilities.

In a third major environmental case against Koch that year, a federal grand jury in Texas returned a 97-count indictment against the company and four of its employees for violating federal air pollution and hazardous waste laws in connection with benzene emissions at the Koch refinery near Corpus Christi. The company was reportedly facing potential penalties of some $350 million, but in early 2001 the newly installed Bush Administration’s Justice Department negotiated a settlement in which many of the charges were dropped and the company pled guilty to concealing violations of air quality laws and paid just $10 million in criminal fines and $10 million for environmental projects in the Corpus Christi area.

In 2002 Koch Petroleum Group, the Koch entity involved in most of these environment problems, was renamed Flint Hills Resources. That name change was as cosmetic as the current charm offensive.

If the Kochs really want to improve their reputation, they should go beyond public relations and make fundamental alterations in their business practices.

Shelling the Alaskan Coast

shell President Obama has taken pride in his “all of the above” energy philosophy, but it now seems that approach is so inclusive that it will allow a company with a horrendous safety record to proceed with plans to drill for oil in the treacherous Arctic waters of the Chukchi Sea off the coast of Alaska. Is it necessary to run the risk of another Exxon Valdez or Deepwater Horizon disaster just to prove that you’re not hostile to fossil fuels?

Abigail Ross Hopper, director of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) said the decision to give Royal Dutch Shell a green light came after the agency took “a thoughtful approach to carefully considering potential exploration in the Chukchi Sea.” Yet what has really changed in the two years since Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said “Shell screwed up in 2012” in announcing that approval for the Arctic drilling was being withheld until the company cleaned up its act? The new permit is not final but it gives unwarranted momentum to Shell’s plan.

There are many reasons why the decision is a mistake, but they all come down to Shell’s less than sterling credibility and its tarnished track record.

Shell has had a troubled relationship with the truth at least since 2004, when it admitted overstating its proven oil and natural gas reserves by 20 percent. This prompted an investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and a decision by the twin boards of the company to oust chairman Philip Watts, who was replaced by Jeroen van der Veer. It later came out that top executives, including van der Veer, knew of the deception about the reserves back in 2002. The company ended up paying penalties of about $150 million to U.S. and British authorities.

In 2008 there were reports that Shell manipulated a supposedly independent environmental audit of a huge Russian oil and gas project in which it was involved to influence financial institutions considering funding for the $22 billion project.

That same year, reports released by the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of the Interior listed Shell as one of the companies that made improper gifts to government employees overseeing offshore oil drilling. The agency involved was the Minerals Management Service, which was dismantled as a result of the scandal and replaced by two entities, including the BOEM.

In 2011 a Shell pipeline off the coast of Scotland leaked some 1,300 barrels of oil in the worst North Sea oil spill in a decade.

The 2012 screw-up to which Salazar was referring included problems in the same area it wants to drill. In one incident a spill containment system failed during testing; later, a drilling rig owned by Shell broke loose from a tug that was pulling it to a maintenance facility and crashed into an uninhabited island off the Alaskan coast.

The company is even more notorious for its operations in Nigeria, which were marked by numerous pipeline ruptures and other environmental damage caused by practices such as extensive gas flaring. Ken Saro-Wiwa, a leading critic of the company, was hanged by the Nigerian military in 1995. Shell was widely blamed for propping up the regime, while a 2011 United Nations report estimated that an environmental cleanup of the area around Shell’s operations would cost $1 billion and take 30 years.

Shell’s environmental policy states: “Our approach to sustainability starts with running a safe, efficient, responsible and profitable business.” They’ve got the profitable part covered, but the rest is another matter.

A Crowded Corporate Hall of Shame

2015_PublicEye_KeyVisual_550x275 Over the past year, Chevron has had success in getting a U.S. federal judge to block enforcement of a multi-billion-dollar judgment imposed by a court in Ecuador, and the oil giant managed to pressure the U.S. law firm representing the plaintiffs to drop out of the case and pay the company $15 million in damages. Chevron has just had another significant win but of a less desirable kind.

The Berne Declaration and Greenpeace Switzerland recently announced that Chevron had received the most votes in a competition to determine the world’s most irresponsible corporation and thus was the “winner” of the Public Eye Lifetime Award.

For the past ten years, the two groups have countered the elite mutual admiration society taking place at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland by highlighting the misdeeds of large corporations. The previous awardees ranged from banks such as Citigroup to drug companies such as Novartis to Walt Disney, which was chosen because of its use of foreign sweatshop labor to produce its toys.

A few months ago, Public Eye sponsors decided to bring the project to a close but do so with a splash by naming the company that stood out as the worst. Activists from around the world promoted their choices from among six nominees: Dow Chemical, Gazprom, Glencore, Goldman Sachs and Wal-Mart Stores, along with Chevron. Amazon Watch, which led the Chevron effort, prevailed. Glencore and Wal-Mart were the runners-up.

Public Eye’s award ceremony featured the Yes Men satirical group, which in one of its rare un-ironic pronouncements stated: “Corporate Social Responsibility is like putting a bandage on a severed head – it doesn’t help”. This sentiment is especially appropriate in relation to Chevron, which has long sought to portray itself, through ads headlined WILL YOU JOIN US, as not only mindful of environmental issues but as a leader of the sustainability movement.

Given the prevalence of business misconduct, choosing the most irresponsible corporation is no easy matter. Even within the petroleum industry, Chevron’s environmental sins in Ecuador and the rest of its rap sheet must be weighed against the record of a company such as BP, infamous for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster as well as safety deficiencies at its refineries that resulted in explosions such as one in Texas that killed 15 workers in 2005. Also worthy of consideration are Royal Dutch Shell, with its human rights abuses in Nigeria, and Exxon Mobil, with its own record of oil spills as well as climate change denial.

And what about the mining giants and their notorious treatment of indigenous communities around the world. A prominent activist once called Rio Tinto “a poster child for corporate malfeasance.” Then there is Big Pharma, made up of corporations that tend toward price-gouging and product safety lapses. And we shouldn’t leave out the auto industry, which in the past year has been shown to be a lot sloppier about safety matters than we could have imagined. Also not to be forgotten are the weapon makers, whose products are inherently anti-social.

Yet perhaps the biggest disappointment for corporate critics in the United States may be the fact that the Lifetime Award did not go to Wal-Mart. For the past two decades, the Behemoth of Bentonville has epitomized corporate misbehavior in a wide variety of areas — most notably in the labor relations sphere, but also promotion of foreign sweatshops, gender discrimination, destruction of small business, tax dodging, bribery (especially in Mexico) and the spread of suburban sprawl with its attendant impact on climate change. Yet perhaps the most infuriating thing about Wal-Mart has been its refusal to abandon its retrograde labor practices while working so hard, like Chevron, to paint itself as a sustainability pioneer.

It’s too bad that we will no longer have the annual Public Eye awards, but corporate misconduct will apparently be with us for a long time to come.

Precarious Pipelines

waterpickup Proponents of the Keystone XL pipeline in Congress were annoyed at President Obama’s wisecrack in the State of the Union, but events 1700 miles away are an even bigger embarrassment for House members of both parties who voted for a bill ordering the administration to proceed with the controversial project.

The latest reminder that oil pipelines are an especially risky business emerged recently near Glendive, Montana when a burst pipeline spilled tens of thousands of gallons of light crude into the Yellowstone River. The accident contaminated the water supply of Glendive with carcinogenic benzene, and although later tests have yielded better results, residents have been using bottled water. Evidence of the spill has been visible along some 60 miles of the river.

All this is reminiscent of the 2011 rupture of an Exxon Mobil pipeline that caused a spill in the same river. The U.S. Transportation Department’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) has proposed that the company be fined $1.7 million in connection with the accident.

This time, however, the rupture occurred in a pipeline owned by a modest-sized company, which goes to show that small business is not always immune from the ills of mega-corporations. The operator is Bridger Pipeline, a unit of a privately held group called True Companies.

According to the PHMSA website, Bridger has been involved in nine incidents since 2006, including three spills, all much smaller than the current situation. In 2007 the company was fined $100,000 for not having written guidelines for pipeline employee qualifications. Later it was fined $70,000 (reduced to $45,000) for other safety infractions. With the new accident, Bridger will probably join the ranks of the more serious violators.

What makes the Glendive accident all the more significant is that it occurred not far from where the Keystone XL would cross the Yellowstone. Those of a more pessimistic nature might say that this incident is an omen of what the bigger pipeline might bring.

Bridger’s link to Keystone XL is not just a matter of proximity. There have been reports that the firm’s Four Bears pipeline in North Dakota would have a connection to Keystone. North Dakota Sen. John Hoeven praised Four Bears for exactly this reason in 2012.

In 2012 Tad True of the True Companies appeared at a House hearing meant to celebrate the oil boom in North Dakota. His testimony argued for greater use of pipelines, calling them “safe and getting safer.” Numerous House members apparently took his message to heart, but the residents of Glendive may have another opinion on the matter.

Injustice Incorporated

Pages from pol300012014en It’s been clear for a long time that oil drilling in Ecuador’s rain forests dating back to the 1960s caused severe environmental damage. Yet for more than two decades a lawsuit against the lead drilling company, Texaco, and its new owner, Chevron, has meandered through Ecuadoran and U.S. courts.

Chevron, fighting a $19 billion judgment against it in Ecuador (later reduced to $9.5 billion), has sought to turn the tables on the plaintiffs and their U.S. lawyer, Steven Donziger. Recently, a U.S. court ruled in favor of the company, bolstering its refusal to pay anything in compensation.

The challenges faced by the plaintiffs in the Chevron case are, unfortunately, the rule rather than the exception. It is often next to impossible to get a large transnational corporation to fully rectify serious environmental, labor or human rights abuses.

This frustrating reality is analyzed at great length in a new 300-page report from Amnesty International entitled Injustice Incorporated. The study begins with a primer on the relationship between corporations and international human rights law. Amnesty points out a key dilemma:

In some respects the corporate model is antithetical to the right to effective remedy; by admitting and addressing human rights abuses companies expose themselves to financial liability and reputational harm which shareholders (if not the directors and officers of the company themselves) see as entirely contrary to their interests.

Consequently, Amnesty points out, corporations tend to respond in ways that can compound the abuse: “deals with governments, denying victims access to vital information and using vastly greater financial means to delay and frustrate attempts to bring cases to court.”

Another problem highlighted by Amnesty is that large companies tend to be structured as a collection of separate legal entities whose liability is compartmentalized. While recognizing that it is not realistic to try to change this well-entrenched feature of corporation-friendly legal systems, Amnesty argues that “a counter-balance is needed to protect public interest and the international human rights framework.”

Amnesty amplifies its analysis through four detailed case studies. The first is the 1984 Bhopal catastrophe, in which a massive leak of toxic methyl isocyanate gas at a facility owned by a subsidiary of Union Carbide killed thousands and caused debilitating illnesses in tens of thousands more. Union Carbide paid what the victims considered grossly inadequate compensation while its CEO, with the help of the U.S. government, evaded extradition on criminal charges. Dow Chemical, which acquired Union Carbide in 2001, has refused to do anything more to help the victims.

The other situations examined in the Amnesty report are not as well known. The first is the Omai gold mine in Guyana, where the rupture of a tailings dam in 1995 spilled a vast quantity of effluent laced with cyanide and heavy metals into two rivers. The mining operation and the dam were run by Omai Gold Mines Limited, a company controlled at the time by Canada’s Cambior Inc. Soon after the accident, Cambior paid out modest amounts in compensation to local residents while vigorously contesting legal actions brought both in Guyana and in Canada. The company, which later merged with another Canadian firm, Iamgold, never paid out anything more.

Amnesty’s third case study deals with the Ok Tedi mine in Papua New Guinea, where for many years waste products were dumped into a river used by some 250 communities of indigenous people. In 1994 a lawsuit on behalf of local residents was filed in Australia, the home country of the company, Broken Hill Proprietary, which at the time was the primary operator of the mine. BHP, now part of BHP Billiton, eventually agreed to an out-of-court settlement that included the equivalent of $86 million in compensation but did not require it to build a long overdue tailings dam.

The final case study in the Amnesty report is also the most recent. In 2006 the Dutch oil trading company Trafigura signed a dubious agreement with a small firm in Ivory Coast that allowed it to dump petroleum waste products at various sites in the city of Abidjan. Thousands of residents exposed to the substances suffered from nausea, headaches, breathing difficulties, stinging eyes and burning skin. At least 15 were reported to have died. Trafigura reached a settlement that Amnesty labels as insufficient.

Amnesty finishes its report with an analysis of what it calls the three biggest obstacles in such cases: the legal hurdles to extraterritorial action, the lack of information needed to support claims for adequate reparations and the unwillingness of the governments of the countries involved to hold foreign corporations to full account. While offering a set of reforms aimed at alleviating these challenges, Amnesty harbors no illusions about the difficulty of bringing about such changes. Legal systems, it admits, exist primarily to protect powerful corporate interests.