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$16 billion environmental lawsuit tests Chevron

By Kelly Hearn, The Christian Science Monitor, April 9 2008

On a chaotic street in this sweltering jungle town, Emergildo Criollo spent several days near the entrance to a courthouse that looks more like a run-down mall.

He was, he says, "vigilando" – watching.

"We waited to know the moment he arrived," says the middle-aged indigenous man who was raised in this oil-rich Amazonian rain forest near Ecuador's northern border with Colombia.

The man Mr. Criollo and his friends were waiting for is Richard Cabrera, a court-appointed expert who last week poured fuel on an epic environmental lawsuit filed by Ecuadorean indigenous groups against US-based Chevron-Texaco.

Mr. Cabrera, an Ecuadorean geological engineer, recommended to an Ecuadorean judge last Tuesday that Chevron pay $8 billion to $16 billion for environmental damages if the company loses a bitterly contested case that started in 1993 with a lawsuit in New York courts, which ruled that the case should be tried in Ecuador.

The Ecuadorean case, which Chevron has repeatedly rejected as flawed, is one of the largest environmental suits against an oil company and could raise the political risks for multinationals extracting resources from similar remote and pristine regions.

"The litigation is terribly important," says Professor Robert Benson, law professor emeritus at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. "If Chevron loses the case there, certainly a historic precedent will be set putting oil companies on notice."

 Read more.

 

 
The Grim Face of Drought

By Tesfalem Waldyes, Special to Fortune, march 30 2008 [edited]

Reports are emerging from international organizations alarmed by the combined effects of a strong La Nina weather condition and the cooling of Western Indian Ocean waters; both developments lead to a forecast that there will be below normal rainfall during the March to May rainy season in countries along the Horn of Africa, including Ethiopia. According to a Food Security Update for East Africa, released in February 2008 by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), these environmental developments have consequences such as unusual livestock migration as well as significant deterioration of livestock body conditions, negatively impacting both  on livestock production and their market value in these countries.

Read more. 

 
Carbon Output Must Near Zero To Avert Danger, New Studies Say
By Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post, March 10 2008
 

The task of cutting greenhouse gas emissions enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperatures may be far more difficult than previous research suggested, say scientists who have just published studies indicating that it would require the world to cease carbon emissions altogether within a matter of decades.

Their findings, published in separate journals over the past few weeks, suggest that both industrialized and developing nations must wean themselves off fossil fuels by as early as mid-century in order to prevent warming that could change precipitation patterns and dry up sources of water worldwide.

Using advanced computer models to factor in deep-sea warming and other aspects of the carbon cycle that naturally creates and removes carbon dioxide (CO2), the scientists, from countries including the United States, Canada and Germany, are delivering a simple message: The world must bring carbon emissions down to near zero to keep temperatures from rising further.

Read more. 

 
 
Antarctic glaciers surge to ocean

By Martin Redfern, BBC News, February 24, 2008

UK scientists working in Antarctica have found some of the clearest evidence yet of instabilities in the ice of part of West Antarctica.

If the trend continues, they say, it could lead to a significant rise in global sea level.

The new evidence comes from a group of glaciers covering an area the size of Texas, in a remote and seldom visited part of West Antarctica.

The "rivers of ice" have surged sharply in speed towards the ocean.

Read more. 

 

 
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