Tag: Oil

Ecuador’s top court rules for stronger land rights for Indigenous communities

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Indigenous leader and CONAIE President Leonidas Iza and other Indigenous leaders hold a press conference outside the Constitutional Court before filing their lawsuit against Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso, October 18th 2021. Photo Mitch Anderson / Amazon Frontlines
Indigenous leader and CONAIE President Leonidas Iza and other Indigenous leaders hold a press conference outside the Constitutional Court before filing their lawsuit against Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso, October 18th 2021. Photo Mitch Anderson / Amazon Frontlines

By Kimberley Brown, Mongabay (CC BY-ND 4.0).

QUITO, Ecuador — Indigenous communities across Ecuador celebrated over the weekend after a historic ruling by the country’s highest court declaring that Indigenous communities have more autonomy over their territory and a much stronger say over extractive projects affecting their lands.

“This has been a very big news, very important for the community, for all of us who have been on this path,” said Nixon Andy, from the Indigenous Kofan community of Sinangoe in Ecuador’s northern Amazon rainforest.

Ecuador’s Constitutional Court, the country’s highest court, made the ruling on Feb. 4 after reviewing Sinangoe’s 2018 lawsuit, in which the community sued three government ministries for selling mining concessions on their territory without consultation. Provincial judges at the time ruled in favor of the community and the rights of nature, overturning 52 mining concessions.

But last week, the Constitutional Court took this ruling one step further. After reviewing the evidence and traveling to Sinangoe to hold a historic hearing in Indigenous territory last November, the judges found there was a violation of a number of the community’s rights. This includes their right to be consulted before extractive projects are developed on their land.

As a result, the court ruled that the state has an obligation to ensure that communities undergo a consultation process before any extractive activity is planned on or near their territory. This process must also be “clear and accessible” for the whole community, and be carried out with the purpose of “obtaining consent or reaching an agreement with” the communities, according to the 39-page ruling.

Lina Maria Espinosa, a senior attorney with Amazon Frontlines, the environmental NGO that has been supporting Sinangoe, said the ruling will have an immediate impact on any oil or mining activity in any Indigenous territory in the country, as they must now undergo a consultation process with communities and obtain the community’s consent.  

“The sentence seems to be an advance in the recognition of the rights of Indigenous peoples to consent [to projects affecting their land], which is the ultimate purpose of the consultation,” Espinosa wrote to Mongabay in a text message.

“This goal must be pursued by the state ALWAYS,” she wrote.

Absent and faulty consultation process

According to Ecuador’s Constitution, Indigenous communities must be consulted before any oil, mining or other extractive projects begin on or near their territory. This is upheld internationally, under Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization, which guarantees Indigenous communities access to free, prior and informed consent (FPIC).

Despite these legal mechanisms, prior consultation has been a major point of conflict in the small South American nation. Many Indigenous communities say they were either never consulted before oil or mining projects were developed on their land, such as the community of Sinangoe, or that the process was faulty.

In 2019, Ecuador’s Waorani sued the state for conducting a flawed consultation process with the community in 2012, which they said was based on lies, misinformation, and a lack of translation necessary for elders who don’t speak Spanish. The court ruled in favor of the community, calling the process fraudulent. This ruling put into doubt all other consultations the government had conducted with communities across the Amazon in 2012, a process that led to the division of the rainforest into oil blocks to be sold to international investors. 

The A’i Kofan guardia of Sinangoe finds heavy gold-mining machinery along the Aguarico river in their lands, January 2018, Ecuadorian Amazon. Photo Jerónimo Zúñiga / Amazon Frontlines
The A’i Kofan guardia of Sinangoe finds heavy gold-mining machinery along the Aguarico river in their lands, January 2018, Ecuadorian Amazon. Photo Jerónimo Zúñiga / Amazon Frontlines

Andres Tapia, communications director with Ecuador’s Amazon Indigenous federation, CONFENIAE, said the consultation process had been reduced to an “administrative process.”

“They complied with the requirement to say that [communities] had been consulted, when in reality there was no real relevant consultation process,” Tapia told Mongabay.

The Constitutional Court’s ruling is “historic,” Tapia said, as it “provides a guideline for the right to consent, whereby the community has the final decision on whether or not to allow any extractive activity,” he added.

President Guillermo Lasso has not yet commented on the ruling, as he is currently in China trying to renegotiate his country’s massive debt with Beijing. The ruling could hamper his administration’s plans to double both oil and mining across the country, in order to address Ecuador’s economic crisis that has seen unemployment and poverty spike during the COVID-19 pandemic. Oil and mining account for a combined more than 8% of Ecuador’s GDP.

The Constitutional Court ruling leaves the door open for the government to advance with certain extractive projects without consent from the community in “exceptional circumstances.” But, it stipulates, these initiatives can never “generate disproportionate sacrifice to the collective rights of communities and nature.”

Waorani women in their ancestral territory, Pastaza, Ecuadorian Amazon. Photo Mitch Anderson / Amazon Frontlines
Waorani women in their ancestral territory, Pastaza, Ecuadorian Amazon. Photo Mitch Anderson / Amazon Frontlines

There are 14 Indigenous nations in Ecuador, many of them living in areas rich in oil and mineral deposits. This is particularly true in the Ecuadoran Amazon, where the vast majority of the country’s crude oil reserves are located. At the same time, 70% of the region is also designated Indigenous territory, CONFENIAE said. Scientists also say that an intact Amazon is essential to tackling climate change.

Of the nine Constitutional Court judges hearing the recent case, five ruled in favor of this final ruling, three ruled against, and one abstained.

“The Constitutional Court ratified that the state has to listen to us, so this sets a very important precedent for us, and for the whole Indigenous world, because our voices are not always listened to,” Andy told Mongabay.

‘Trying to Have It Both Ways’: Investigation Reveals BP and Shell Still Back Anti-Climate Lobby Groups, Despite Pledges

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The Unearthed and HuffPost report reveals the companies failed to disclose membership in at least eight Big Oil lobbies in their transparency reports. 

Oil Refinery
Image by Thomas H. from Pixabay

By Brett Wilkins, staff writer, Common Dreams (CC BY-ND 3.0).

Fossil fuel giants Royal Dutch Shell and BP remain active members of numerous Big Oil lobby groups fighting against climate legislation and regulation—without disclosing this in their transparency reports—an Unearthed and HuffPost investigation revealed Monday. 

According to the report, Shell and BP—the world’s second- and fourth-largest oil companies by revenue last year—are members of at least eight industry trade organizations lobbying against climate measures in the United States and Australia.

Both companies support the “astroturf” group Alliance of Western Energy Consumers, which boasted that it had “defeated carbon pricing bills” in Oregon, and the Texas Oil & Gas Association, which is fighting regulation of the super-heating greenhouse gas methane in the nation’s largest oil-producing state. 

Shell and BP also both back the Business Council of Australia and the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association, both of which are working to undercut the country’s compliance with the Paris climate agreement. Shell also remains a member of the Queensland Resources Council, which is backing construction of the world’s largest coal mine in the northeastern state. 

[Shell and BP are] trying to have it both ways, being socially responsible without changing their actual positions.”

—Robert Brulle, climate denial researcher and professor at Brown University’s Institute at Brown for Environment and Society.

The companies, which are quoted in the report, say they are trying to reform the lobby groups from the inside, and that they would review their membership in the future.

“If we reach an impasse, we will be transparent in publicly stating our differences,” BP said. “And on major issues, if our views and those of an association cannot be reconciled then we will be prepared to leave.” 

Earlier this year, both Shell and BP announced in almost identical language their “ambition” to be net-zero emissions businesses by 2050. In recent years they have also very publicly quit numerous industry trade groups that fund denial of anthropogenic climate change or that fight legislation or regulation of greenhouse gas emissions, while pledging to be more transparent about their associations with lobby groups.

While some observers have praised Shell and BP for finally taking some meaningful action to combat climate change caused by carbon emissions—which Shell’s own scientists warned about nearly 40 years ago—many climate activists say the companies’ efforts are misleading, and aren’t nearly enough to avert the worst effects of catastrophic global heating.

Last week, a report from Oil Change International stated that none of the plans or pledges from eight leading oil companies including Shell and BP even come close to aligning with the 2015 Paris agreement’s goal of limiting global warming this century to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Kelly Trout, a senior research analyst at OCI, likened oil companies to “an arsonist pledging to light a few less fires.” 

Robert Brulle, a climate denial researcher and professor at Brown University’s Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, accused Shell and BP of “trying to have it both ways.” 

“This is a standard business practice,” Brulle told HuffPost and Unearthed—which is Greenpeace U.K.’s investigative journalism platform. “They’re trying to have it both ways, being socially responsible without changing their actual positions.”  

Keystone Pipeline Spills Close To 400,000 Gallons Of Oil On North Dakota

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The Keystone Pipeline (not to be confused with the pending Keystone XL Pipeline) has spilled close to 400,000 gallons of oil on North Dakota soil this week. The company that runs the pipeline, Transcanada, has yet to determine the cause of the spill, but this shows how dangerous these pipelines can be. This isn’t the first Keystone spill, and it certainly won’t be the last. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.