The Alberta tar sands is well known as the largest and most destructive industrial project in human history – causing massive environmental damage to the natural eco-system, killing resident and visiting animal and bird species, irrevocably polluting water and poisoning land and communities downstream of the Athabasca River and trampling on treaty and Indigenous rights in northern Alberta.

In 2008 I traveled with a group of fellow Canadians to the tar sands to understand the impact of bad government policy, corporate malfeasance and US oil addiction at this ‘ground zero’. We created this short video to convey the scope of the project and raise the alarm.

It’s astounding to think that what our small delegation saw in 2008 has continued to expand and wreak more havoc on people and planet. Approval of the Keystone XL would dramatically increase the strain on the tar sands and is a climate and pollution horror beyond description.

THE TIME TO ACT IS NOW!

From August 20th to September 3rd, thousands of North Americans – including Danny Glover, and NASA’s Dr. James Hansen – will be at the White House, day after day, demanding Obama reject Keystone XL. Many protesters will engage in peaceful civil disobedience, day after day to make their voices heard.

Twenty-eight organizational leaders including Global Exchange’s Founding Director Kirsten Moller, have endorsed the days of action and we want YOU to participate.

• Learn more about how to make it the biggest act of civil disobedience in the climate movement’s history.
• Sign up today to take part in this peaceful action.

Black Tide: the Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill is a searing look at the human face of BP’s disaster in the Gulf. This book tour lands in Colorado Tue 5/3 (tonight) at the Boulder Bookstore in Boulder and Wed 5/4 at the Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver. 7:30pm start time both nights. Then on to Moe’s Books in Berkeley, CA on Wed 5/11 at 7:30pm and last but not least, the tour culminates on Thur 5/12 at 7pm at the Book Passage in Corte Madera, CA.

Find more details about these events on our Black Tide Book Tour Dates page.

To get an idea of what to expect at the book launch events, here’s a video of Black Tide author Antonia Juhasz:

More GRITtv

Earlier this week, the President of Turkmenistan announced a short list of companies from whom his country will accept proposals to develop two offshore blocks in the Caspian Sea.[i] Since President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov came to power nearly four years ago, Turkmenistan’s vast hydrocarbon reserves have been the source of intense lobbying by petroleum giants from around the globe.  The efforts of four of these companies were rewarded, in part, this week.  Not unexpectedly, Chevron is among the shortlisted companies, joined by ConocoPhilips, Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Development Co. and newcomer TX Oil Limited, chaired by Neil Bush, son of US President George H.W. Bush.

Turkmenistan is one of the world’s most closed and repressive countries.  A small nation of approximately 5 million people, it is located in Central Asia and is bordered by the Caspian Sea to the west, Iran and Afghanistan to the south, Uzbekistan to the east, and Kazakhstan to the north.  Identified by Freedom House as one of the World’s Most Repressive Regimes in 2009 (and almost every year prior), Turkmenistan is a country with no freedom of the press, an authoritarian government, and a President who is quickly building a cult of personality rivaling that of the previous “President for Life,” Niyazov, who died suddenly of a heart attack in December 2006.[ii] Civil society has been all but destroyed by the repressive policies of the government of Turkmenistan.

Further alarming is the fact that Turkmenistan’s government has no accountability mechanisms for reporting oil and gas revenues.  The country’s previous president deposited petroleum funds in a semi-private, off budget account in Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt.[iii] President Berdymukhammedov has made no reforms in this area, and a newly touted “Stabilization Fund,” into which oil and gas revenues would be placed, remains a mystery as there is no public documentation that such a fund actually exists.[iv]

As we have seen repeatedly in neighboring Kazakhstan, where Chevron is the largest private oil producer, and elsewhere around the world, engaging with corrupt and opaque regimes to secure hydrocarbons without first insisting on significant improvements in transparency, rule of law and human rights leads to unjust and unsustainable policies and practices.[v]

When I raised this issue at Chevron’s Annual Shareholder Meeting this past May, CEO John Watson confirmed that his company was in negotiations with the government of Turkmenistan, adding “I think we can do some good in Turkmenistan” even though “we may not meet your standards”.[vi] Perhaps I had not been clear about my concerns, for at stake are not the standards of any single individual, nonprofit organization or even corporation.  At stake are the standards and best practices enshrined in national and international laws and regulations.  These are the standards that Chevron is obligated to meet, and encouraged to exceed.  These are the standards by which Chevron’s shareholders, the international community and the citizens of the Chevron’s host countries evaluate whether or not the company is “doing some good”.

As Chevron has yet to finalize a contract with Turkmenistan, we have a unique, but waning opportunity to urge the company to insist upon significant improvements in human rights and rule of law prior to active operations in the country.  For more on how you can get involved at this critical moment, please visit www.crudeaccountability.org.

Michelle Kinman is Deputy Director of Crude Accountability.

(michelle@crudeaccountability.org)

[ii] http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=505

[iii] http://www.globalwitness.org/media_library_detail.php/879/en/all_that_gas_the_eu_and_turkmenistan

[iv] http://www.globalwitness.org/media_library_detail.php/879/en/all_that_gas_the_eu_and_turkmenistan

[v] www.truecostofchevron.com

[vi] http://www.crudeaccountability.org/en/index.php?page=hagel

This article originally appeared in the August 2010 issue of Progressive Magazine, The Big Spill.

IT SHOULD BE BLATANTLY CLEAR at this stage of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy that we are witnessing the failure of an entire system, rather than of one operator. Systemic solutions are therefore required. One obvious first step is a permanent moratorium on all offshore drilling—a model of energy extraction which the industry is unable to safely perform and the government is unable to adequately regulate.

In the last five years alone, there have been, just in the Gulf of Mexico, 400 offshore safety and environmental incidents, including blowouts and other major accidents, according to a Houston Chronicle analysis. BP is the leader with forty-seven violations, Chevron is second at forty-six, and Shell is third at twenty-two.

Among the unifying features of these incidents is the failure of the U.S. Minerals Management Service to act. The MMS failed to travel to one-third of the accident scenes, collected only sixteen fines out of 400 incidents, and did not investigate every blowout, as their own rules require.

Transocean, the company that owned and operated the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, is another common thread. Transocean is the largest deep-water driller in the Gulf of Mexico, operating nearly half of all the rigs in the Gulf that work in more than 3,000 feet of water. It is the company of choice for industry leaders, including Chevron and Exxon, even though, according to a recent Wall Street Journal analysis, nearly three of every four incidents that triggered federal investigations into safety and other problems on deepwater drilling rigs in the Gulf since 2008 have been on rigs operated by Transocean.

The companies also all use the same grossly negligent subcontractor, the Response Group, to write their disaster “preparedness” plans for their Gulf operations. On June 15, Congressman Ed Markey, chair of the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, revealed that all five of the major oil producers in the Gulf of Mexico—BP, Chevron, Exxon, ConocoPhillips, and Shell—used the virtually identical, tragically inadequate disaster plan on how they would handle a spill at their Gulf operations.

The plan, required by the MMS prior to approval for drilling, includes glaring errors and omissions that “vastly understate the dangers posed by an uncontrolled leak and vastly overstate the company’s preparedness to deal with one,” reports AP.

Three of the companies’ 2009 plans, including BP’s, listed as a consultant biologist Peter Lutz, who died in February 2005. Four ensured that their plans addressed the need to protect walruses, sea lions, and seals, although none of these live in the Gulf, revealing that the reports were not only cut and pasted between the companies, but also likely originally written for Arctic operations. Most importantly, the plans absolutely do not work, as BP’s response to the Deepwater Horizon explosion has made horrifically clear. Nonetheless, each and every plan received the government’s approval.

Perhaps more disturbing, however, is Markey’s response: token recommendations for lifting the liability cap on oil spills, requiring that oil companies pay more in royalties, implementing new safety reforms, and developing new technologies for capping wells.

In 1981, a federal moratorium on all new offshore drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and parts of Alaska was implemented. It was a direct response to the 1969 Unocal offshore oil rig blowout that released three million gallons of oil into the Santa Barbara Channel of California.

BP’s Deepwater Horizon tragedy is far worse, and far from an isolated incident. All around the world, every day, offshore rigs leak and spill. They far too often kill workers, release deadly toxins, produce methane, pollute the air and water, and destroy fisheries and livelihoods.

The oil industry has chosen to blatantly and disdainfully thumb its nose at the government’s regulatory authority, while the government has chosen to be an all-too-willing rubber stamp, demonstrating that it has neither the capability nor the will to regulate this industry. As it was in 1981, a moratorium is the only logical response.

Another key moment in U.S. oil history offers further solutions: the 1911 breakup of Standard Oil. The oil giant became too large for the government to regulate. In response to a massive people’s movement that built from the most local levels and reached the Supreme Court, Standard was broken into thirty-four separate corporate parts. Ultimately, the final step will come when we have retired the oil industry altogether once and for all.

Antonia Juhasz, author of “The Tyranny of Oil: The World’s Most Powerful Industry—and What We Must Do to Stop It” (HarperCollins 2008), is working on a book on the BP disaster. She is a director at Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based human rights organi- zation (www.TyrannyofOil.org,www.GlobalExchange. org/chevron).

(This article was originally posted on Huffington Post.)

I am traveling the Gulf Coast writing a new book on the Gulf oil disaster.

The good news is that the cap is holding. The bad news is that, with the well no longer gushing, the oil is out of sight and out of mind and BP is pulling up boom and pulling back workers, skimmers, cleaners, and the rest of the clean-up apparatus all across the Gulf. Even without new oil, the 40,000 barrels a day that spewed from the Macondo well for nearly 100 days continue to wash up on shores, including ones which no one is protecting or cleaning.

There is no shortage of people desperate to do this work. On Wednesday, July 28, Mayor Ron Davis of Prichard, Alabama took me to visit a packed Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response (HAZWOPER) training class required for anyone involved in BP clean-up efforts. The city offers these classes for free. With unemployment at over 14% and poverty reaching 40%, the students who filled this, the tenth class, were effusive with gratitude. Although there is a waiting list over two months long to get in, as the the cleanup jobs shrivel away, this is the last class the city will offer.

The next night I attended a BP community forum in St. Mary’s Parish, Louisiana with representatives from BP, the U.S. Coast Guard, and other agencies available to talk to the public.

Here I met fishermen desperate to be put to work as part of BP’s Vessels Of Opportunity (VOO) program, using their boats to fish for oil instead of seafood by laying boom and absorbents and skimming. When the Parish President announced that St. Mary’s Parish did not, does not, and would not have oil, he was immediately surrounded by local fishermen, one of whom said loudly, “then why does Kermit have oil in his bag right now?” At which point the President turned off the mike and, in Kermit’s words, “all hell broke lose.”

Kermit Duck’s (yes, that’s his real name) grandfather, great grandfather, and so on, have been fishers in St. Mary’s Parish since Morgan City was founded. Kermit had spent that day looking for oil. He found a lot of it and brought some to the meeting in a ziplock bag to prove that it is out there. He is not a part of the VOO program, although he has spent two months on a waiting list trying to get hired. Instead, thanks to BP, he is four months unemployed and desperate to see a real clean-up effort take place so that one day he might be able to fish again.

On Friday Kermit took me out on a boat to show me the oil.

We spent five hours on the water traveling between Oyster Bayou and Taylor’s Bayou. We saw a lot of oil. With the exception of a small amount of boom outside of the Mouth of East Bay Junop, we saw no boom, skimmers, absorbents, or clean-up crews. The Juno boom was coated with oil, as was the area behind it.

We saw plenty of freshly oil-soaked grass and beach. The strong harsh smell of crude filled the air as we neared. The oil had washed up in waves, covering a large patch of grass here, leaving a clean patch beside it there. Fields of oil glistened as the sun picked up the oil’s sheen.
We walked along a shell beach on the south end of Oyster Bayou speckled throughout with fresh tar balls that reached from the reeds to inside the water’s edge. Kermit’s friend Buddy used an oar to dig below the beach surface, revealing more oil beneath.

Over the last months I have traveled the coasts of every state affected by the spill. Until this trip, every time I walked an area with oil, clean-up crews were never far behind. The oil would wash up, the crews would clean it, and the oil would wash up again. It was a sad dance to watch.

This is far more disturbing. BP’s oil continues to coat the Gulf Coast. The oil I saw yesterday was washing up into Louisiana’s vital wetlands, the last barrier of protection from hurricanes. If the grass remains unprotected and unclean, the oil can enter the root system, killing the grass forever. The oil was also at the mouth of Oyster Bayou, at the heart of St. Mary’s Parish’s way of life.

Before I left, Kermit assured me that his Parish President would now act and hold BP accountable to clean up the oil. Hopefully, he will not be alone in his efforts.

+++
For an interactive reportback from the Gulf Coast, join Antonia Juhasz and Kevin Danaher as they host a webinar conversation and Q&A about the impacts of the BP Oil Spill and what it means for the Green Economy. August 26th, 12pm PST.

(Do not use pictures without attaching tag line and photo credit)

Oil in grass between Oyster Bayou and Taylor's Bayou, St. Mary's Parish, Louisiana, July 30, 2010, Photo Credit: Antonia Juhasz.

Oil in grass between Oyster Bayou and Taylor's Bayou, St. Mary's Parish, Louisiana, July 30, 2010, Photo Credit: Antonia Juhasz.

Oil in grass between Oyster Bayou and Taylor's Bayou, St. Mary's Parish, Louisiana, July 30, 2010, Photo Credit: Antonia Juhasz.

Oil onshore and in waters' edge at South end of Oyster Bayou, St. Mary's Parish, Louisiana, July 30, 2010, Photo Credit: Antonia Juhasz.

Oil onshore at South end of Oyster Bayou, St. Mary's Parish, Louisiana, July 30, 2010, Photo Credit: Antonia Juhasz.

Oil South end of Oyster Bayou, St. Mary's Parish, Louisiana, July 30, 2010, Photo Credit: Antonia Juhasz.

Oil from reeds onshore between Oyster Bayou and Taylor's Bayou, St. Mary's Parish, Louisiana, July 30, 2010, Photo Credit: Antonia Juhasz.

Kermit Duck, St. Mary's Parish, Louisiana, July 30, 2010, Photo Credit: Antonia Juhasz

BP Community Forum, St. Mary's Parish, Louisiana, July 29, 2010, Photo credit: Antonia Juhasz

Prichard, Alabama, HAZWOPER Training Class, July 28, 2010, Photo credit: Antonia Juhasz.

After nearly two years of work and consistent opposition from big oil, substantive provisions of legislation initially introduced by Senators Lugar (R-IN) and Cardin (D-MD) as the Energy Security Through Transparency Act (ESTT), were signed into law by President Obama as Section 1504 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act on Wednesday.   Offered by Senator Leahy (D-VT), the provision will require both US and internationally-based companies registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to publish what they pay to governments for the commercial development of oil, gas, and minerals, while creating a new international standard for transparency in the extractive industry.

The provision, which will apply to 90 percent of the largest internationally operating oil and gas companies, made the cut during an all-night House-Senate conference committee meeting over the Wall Street reform bill.  

The bill will have significant impacts in countries like Burma, where a lack of transparency has contributed to corruption, authoritarianism, and gross human rights violations, directly linked to the natural gas industry. According to EarthRights International’s new report, “Energy Insecurity: How Total, Chevron, and PTTEP Contribute to Human Rights Violations, Financial Secrecy, and Nuclear Proliferation in Burma (Myanmar), the lack of publicly available information on revenues received by the military junta in Burma has facilitated the misuse of these funds, including massive diversion of resource-related public monies.

In fact, data from a leaked IMF report indicates 70 percent of Burma’s foreign exchange reserves are from gas exports and that gas-related payments from corporations, amounting to billions of dollars, contributed only one percent of total budget revenue.  That means that less than one percent of the largest source of income for the Burmese state actually enters the state budget. Had these revenues entered the state budget, they would have accounted for 57 percent of the total 2007/2008 budget.  The majority of the gas revenues are believed to be held in offshore banks, with reports indicating that hundreds of millions are channeled into the personal bank accounts of individuals closely associated with the ruling military junta in two offshore banks in Singapore.

When this new transparency bill takes effect — likely in 2012 — companies including Chevron, Total, the Chinese National Petroleum Corporation, the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation, and others will be forced to disclose how much they pay the regime in Burma, something they have been resisting for years. For communities and civil society inside and outside of Burma, this information can be used in attempts to hold the authorities in Burma accountable for how these monies are spent.

The reach of this bill is truly global. Communities in Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Algeria, Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, Russia, Columbia, Thailand, and around the world will know how much their governments receive from corporations including Shell, BP, Chevron, Exxon, Newmont Mining, and most of the other energy and mining majors operating in their countries.

EarthRights International was active throughout the legislative process, lobbying the U.S. Congress directly while providing public education, letter writing, advocacy, and training to other organizations in support of the transparency provision as a member of Publish What You Pay United States, a coalition of 32 nongovernmental organizations that advocated for the legislation. 

This bill takes aim squarely at the “resource curse,” the documented pattern in countries rich in natural resources where this wealth leads to negative development outcomes. Senator Lugar (R-IN), one of the main supporters of the transparency provision summarized the importance of this measure quite well, saying: “History shows that oil, gas reserves, and minerals can frequently be a bane, not a blessing, for poor countries leading to corruption, wasteful spending, military adventurism, and instability, and too often oil money intended for a nation’s poor ends up lining the pockets of the rich, or is squandered on showcase projects instead of productive investments.” 

While a major victory for communities in resource-rich countries, there are still several stages before the legislation is implemented and companies begin to report their payments. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) must issue proposed rules that provide detailed guidance for companies covered by the bill. This process will take up to one year to complete. Groups like EarthRights International and our Publish What You Pay US colleagues will play an active role in this rule-making process, ensuring that critical information on payments is available in an effective, timely, and complete manner. Once the final rules are issued, companies will be required to disclose payments in their annual filings to the SEC going forward.

We expect that Big Oil will continue to resist these efforts as they did with the legislation. The American Petroleum Institute (API), a national trade association representing about 400 corporate members, including major oil and gas companies, made several misleading claims in a letter to members of the Senate in 2010, stating:  “API feels that requiring only U.S-listed extractive companies to disclose revenues creates a competitive disadvantage for these companies in the global energy marketplace.” Members of the US Senate were not persuaded by this specious claim, with Senator Cardin calling API’s claims, “a red herring.”

This bill may be the beginning of the end for the cloud of secrecy and corruption associated with resource extraction around the globe. With other countries like the UK considering similar measures, there is a great hope that revenue transparency becomes a norm for the industry, and we can begin to see the responsible use of these critical revenues for the benefit of local and national communities.

For more information on the transparency bill, visit www.earthrights.org

On June 1, our national debt topped $13 trillion- nearly 90% of the United States’ GDP.  The IMF projects that by 2012, our national debt will overtake it.  While the bulk of this debt can be attributed to our unregulated financial system, it is clear that our military budget comprises a significant percentage of it.

The deeper we dig ourselves into this hole the more difficult it will be to get out of it as our public officials raise interest rates to compensate for our lendors’ increasing loss of confidence.  Unemployment will increase and social safety nets will begin to fray as our foreign financial obligations place stress on the system.  Just as the 18^th century British empire expected of the thirteen colonies, foreign powers will exact political concessions in our foreign and domestic affairs in exchange for continued financial patronage.

Looking past our immediate situation, it is important to ask how we got here in order to find a way out.  The short answer is that we have chosen dependence on a system we no longer have control of.  Just as we’ve become dependent on a financial empire that our elected representatives decided was too big to fail, we have allowed these same officials to cede our power to an empire of oil.

Our insatiable, unthinking consumption has over the last century spurred the industry’s expansion into markets around the world in collaboration with U.S. government officials and foreign elites, many of whom are fundamentally opposed to such ideas as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and no taxation without representation. These negotiations have sown the seeds of political strife, instability and transnational terrorism as the United States has become increasingly complicit in the human rights violations of autocratic governments.

To continue along the path of dependency on these regimes is to invite continued conflict and the ever-expanding national security state that inevitably comes with it. Viewed from this perspective, we see that there is a clear link between our national security, our civil liberties and our energy policy.

Today the United States is dependent on foreign sources to meet more than 55% of its total oil demand because of decades of expedient but short-sighted policy decisions. It is clear that we must build support across the political spectrum for a change of course.

Whether one believes that government should have an active role in the economy or that its role is simply to safeguard our nation from threats to our security, its support for domestic renewable energy is vital.  This support could come in the form of subsidy cuts to an oil industry that long ago reached maturity and internalization of environmental costs it has long externalized.  Though the American public might be led to believe otherwise, an industry that vastly outspends its renewable competitors in lobbying can surely afford to operate without such government support.

One could argue further that government should have a limited role in actively supporting nascent industries critical to our nation’s security. Alexander Hamilton went so far as to argue that government support for manufactures was a matter of national security in that it would reduce America’s dependency on the British empire, which like all empires attached political and economic strings to its support. Dependence on the prevailing market forces of the time would have left the United States militarily vulnerable- a primary exporter of agricultural products with no industrial base with which to produce armaments to fend off the foreign powers of the day.

Today we find ourselves dependent on an unstable global energy market for the transport of our most basic and vital commodities, including the food that sustains our cities.  It is slowly but surely becoming clear to more and more Americans that our military is engaged around the world in support of an irresponsible energy security policy that has cost many lives to sustain and that we can do better if we build the political will.

The 4^th of July is a day to remember that despite the places in history where we have fallen short as a nation, the ideals on which our country was founded endure.   It is our responsibility as citizens to understand our past and safeguard our future by challenging what we take for granted about the way we live.  By declaring our independence from oil we prepare ourselves for the difficult but necessary policy battles that will shape our future as a proud, free and principled nation.

T.J. Buonomo is a Chevron Program Associate with Global Exchange and founder and editor of Citizens for a Sovereign and Democratic Iraq.  He is a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy and former Military Intelligence Officer, U.S. Army.

For Further Reading:

Bacevich, Andrew.  The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced By War. Oxford University Press; 2005.

“China Cuts Holdings of U.S. Treasuries.” Associated Press; 16 February 2010.

EIA’s Energy in Brief: How Dependent Are We on Foreign Oil?  Accessed
28 June 2010: http://www.eia.doe.gov/energy_in_brief/foreign_oil_dependence.cfm

Hamilton, Alexander.  Alexander Hamilton: Writings.  Library of America, 2001.

Juhasz, Antonia.  The Tyranny of Oil: The World’s Most Powerful Industry- And What We Must Do To Stop It. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008.

Kinzer, Stephen.  All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror.  Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2008.

Klare, Michael T.  Blood and Oil.  New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004.

Kleveman, Lutz.  The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia.  Grove Press; 2004.

Knoller, Mark.  “National Debt Tops $13 Trillion For First Time.” CBS News, 2 June 2010.

Lawrence, Bruce.  Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden.  Verso, 2005.

Mulrine, Anna.  “Will Cost of Afghanistan War Become a 2010 Campaign Issue?” U.S. News & World Report; 11 June 2010.

Reynolds, Garfield & Goodman, Wes.  “U.S.’s $13 Trillion Debt Poised to Overtake GDP.” Bloomberg; 4 June 2010.

Sampson, Anthony.  The Seven Sisters: The Great Oil Companies & the World They Shaped.  New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1975.

Shwadran, Benjamin.  The Middle East, Oil and the Great Powers.  New York: Halstead Press, 1973.

Stocking, George W.  Middle East Oil: A Study in Political and Economic Controversy. Vanderbilt University Press, 1970.

Tiron, Roxana.  “U.S. Spending $3.6 Billion a Month in Afghanistan According to CRS Report.” The Hill; 14 October 2009.

Weiner, Tim.  Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA.  Anchor Books, 2008.

Photo Credit: Rainforest Action Network

As a student, former Military Intelligence Officer, and veteran, I’ve spent the last six years studying political violence and its causes.

Simply put, when the process of dialogue between disputing parties breaks down and the aggrieved party is denied recourse through the political and legal systems, its members take the next logical step, which military theorist Carl von Clausewitz describes as the “continuation of politics by other means.”

This can be observed in places such as Iraq and Nigeria, developing nations which have three things in common: oil, governments that rely more on fear than representation to maintain power, and foreign investors who collude with these governments in order to gain access that resource.

In the case of Iraq this has led to sectarian conflict and attacks on U.S. troops, who are in the position of having to preserve a fragile security situation while Chevron and other companies attempt to quietly exploit their window of opportunity to re-enter the country.

Nigeria, in comparison, has lost up to 25% of its oil production capacity due to insurgent attacks in the Niger Delta, where Chevron contaminates the air and water with impunity and has directly supported the Nigerian military in its brutal operations against peaceful demonstrators. Faced with the devastation of their food and water supply and the failure of their governments to hold these companies accountable, it is not difficult to understand why citizens of these countries turned to armed conflict in order to change the companies’ cost-benefit analysis.

On May 26 at Chevron’s annual shareholder meeting, I witnessed Chevron refused entry to proxy shareholders from Ecuador, Burma, Nigeria, Colombia, and numerous other places around the world which have been severely harmed by the company. I cannot help but wonder what these individuals’ communities will think after they return from thousands of miles of travel without having been afforded the opportunity to make a simple statement before Chevron’s new CEO and Board of Directors: treat us like human beings.

The air was thick with contempt in front of Chevron’s Houston headquarters as these individuals were escorted out by smirking security officials after being informed that their papers did not meet the company’s qualifications for entry. My thought, watching these community leaders exit the building in compliance, was that Chevron had just made a major strategic miscalculation.

We in the U.S. are fortunate enough to still have a political system which, however frustrating it can often be, still makes it possible to effect change through peaceful political and legal means. Chevron is an American company. Therefore we have a responsibility to hold it accountable for its human rights violations around the world and to impose political and financial costs on it for these violations.

Through a series of long term regulatory and policy battles we will make it increasingly costly for companies such as Chevron to operate with impunity and simultaneously make renewable alternatives more attractive to investors, the ultimate objective being to bring the power of energy production back into the hands of the people. The technology to accomplish this exists today. Our challenge is to win over or oust those politicians who stand in our way through the electoral process.

Our security, our democracy, and our moral authority in the world are at stake in what we will look back on as one of the great political battles of the 21st century.

T.J. Buonomo is a Chevron Program Associate with Global Exchange and founder and editor of Citizens for a Sovereign and Democratic Iraq.  He is a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy and former Military Intelligence Officer, U.S. Army.