Chevron's 'Conservation' Awards: Greenwashing Oil Disaster Away
Amazon Watch
28 October 2005 - FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Karen Hinton at +1.703.798.3109
What: Chevron Destruction Awards (coinciding with the 51st annual "Chevron Conservation Awards"). There will be strong visuals featuring larger-than-life puppets of Chevron's senior executives and street theater presenting top executives with their "destruction" awards.
Where: In front of Chevron's World Headquarters, 6001 Bollinger Canyon Road (off I-680), San Ramon, California
When: From 5pm, Friday, October 28, 2005
Chevron (formerly Texaco)1 will host its 51st Annual Conservation Awards tonight. Aimed at burnishing the corporation's environmental credentials, the ceremony will avoid any mention of the Ecuadorian Amazon - the location of the world's worst oil-related environmental and human health catastrophe, caused by the company itself.
Over two decades, Texaco deliberately dumped more than 30 times the amount of crude spilled in the Exxon Valdez disaster into the pristine Amazon rainforest.
Now, Chevron is fighting a losing battle in an Ecuadorian court against 30,000 indigenous and other local people whose lives have been devastated by the company's toxic legacy. The affected local people have sued Chevron for damages worth $6 billion. High levels of birth defects, miscarriages, cancer and other adverse health problems have been recorded among affected communities by independent researchers.2
Highlighting Chevron's breathtaking hypocrisy, environmental and human rights campaigners will hold an alternative awards ceremony honoring the most environmentally destructive individuals and organizations of 2005. Chevron and its CEO, David O'Reilly, are expected to feature prominently among the winners!
For comprehensive details of Chevron's rainforest destruction, the landmark trial in Ecuador and the international campaign to hold the corporation accountable, see: http://www.chevrontoxico.com/.
1 Chevron merged with Texaco in 2001 to create ChevronTexaco. In May 2005, the corporation dropped the word "Texaco" from its name, in an apparent attempt to distance its brand name from the corporation's legal and moral liabilities in Ecuador.
2 For details of and links to these health studies, visit: http://www.chevrontoxico.com/