The protest against Chevron in San Ramon in May 2012. Photo by Judith Scherr/ IPS.
On May 29, there will be a protest outside the Chevron corporate office in San Ramon, a suburb city of San Francisco, to coincide with their annual shareholders meeting. 350.org founder Bill McKibben writes, “Are there people here who will join us to march on Chevron’s San Ramon headquarters for their shareholder meeting? We’re going to need you!”
Chevron, the second largest US oil company and eleventh largest global corporation, saw about $19 billion in profits in 2010.
Among the many bad things it does, Chevron:– owns a 50 per cent stake in the Pacific Trails pipeline, which is to be built to transport fracked natural gas from north-eastern British Columbia to a proposed LNG terminal in Kitimat for export;
– supports the Trans Mountain pipeline and wants ‘priority destination designation’ so that its Burnaby refinery can receive more tar sands bitumen through that pipeline;
– intends to extract oil from the Hebron oilfield beneath the Atlantic Ocean southeast of Newfoundland, despite the ‘notoriously hostile’ conditions of the North Atlantic;
– has exploration rights for 205,000 hectares of seabed off Yukon’s north coast in the Arctic, about 100 kilometres north of Herschel Island;
– is being sued in Ontario court to pay for a judgment against it by a Ecuadoran court for environmental degradation there;
– worked with Canadian embassy staff in Washington to kill US global warming policies;
– received $865 million from the Harper government and the Alberta government for carbon capture and storage at its Shell Quest tar sands project (co-owned with Shell and Marathon Oil);
– and its former executive now heads the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board, and he just cancelled a planned public consultation on drilling at the Old Harry site off the southwest coast of Newfoundland.
You can learn more about the ‘Bike the Math’ protest on May 29 at http://www.350bayarea.org/bike_the_math.
For more on the concerns noted above, please read:
Burnaby City Council to Call for a Moratorium on Fracking
LETTER: Trans Mountain pipeline poses risk to Vedder Fan Aquifer area
NEWS: Oil companies to pursue massive oil project offshore of Newfoundland
NEWS: Chevron in the Arctic
NEWS: Case against Chevron polluting Ecuador’s water now in Ontario court
NEWS: Canadian diplomats in DC worked with corporations to kill US climate legislation
Shell Quest gets $865 million for carbon capture
NEWS: Board terminates public consultation on Gulf of St. Lawrence oil drilling
