Melinda Janki is a Guyanese lawyer. She was instrumental in writing into Guyana's 1995 constitution the Environmental Protection Act giving its citizens among the strongest protections of any nation, including "the right to an environment that is not harmful to his or her health or well-being." [1]
Janki studied law at Oxford University and University College London and spent part of her early career with British Petroleum. [1] She returned to Guyana in the 1990s to participate in its new democracy and was successful at helping to make its new constitution identify environmental concerns, including a stable climate, as human rights for Guyanese citizens. [1] Later, she served as cochair of the IUCN Commission on Environment and Law, Special Indigenous Peoples Group, [2] where she wrote or cowrote works on topics such as rights-based approaches to using justice systems for environmental conservation and about Guyanese peoples, such as the WaiWai's successful use of Guyana's legal systems to gain fuller ownership of their lands from the government. [3]
In 2021, Janki launched the first of multiple suits against the Guyanese government for making an offshore oil-drilling partnership with ExxonMobil not in accordance with Guyana's strong environmental laws. [1] The project is expected to eventually bring in 750,000 to more than one million barrels of oil a day, making Guyana one of the world's top-twenty oil producers and Exxon's single most voluminous source of oil. [1] [4]
Upon discovering oil in 2015, Exxon made a nonpublic deal with Guyanese president David A. Granger for a series of 23-year permits. [1] These contracts were revealed to the public in 2017. According to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, by the end of 2021, Exxon and its partners had made $3.6 billion, compared to Guyana’s $607 million and, by 2027, Guyana will owe more than $34 billion to Exxon and its partners. [1]
The suits, however, are plaintiffed by citizens who, for one reason or another, may be negatively affected the drilling or, more generally, climate change as caused by fossil fuels. [5] The third lawsuit states, "The earth’s atmosphere and oceans have been and continue to be polluted by the release and accumulation of greenhouse gases [from] the production, transportation, refining and use of fossil fuels" thus violating Guyana's citizens right to a healthful and sustainable environment. [1] According to Guyanese law, all permits require each involved company to form an environmental impact report and to accept all liability for human and environmental impact. [6]
Exxon has joined the suits as a codefendant, suggesting it feels its business model is potentially threatened by these suits. [1] The suits, if successful, may provide a template for other country's suffering the most immediate risks of climate change to challenge the oil industry's role in effecting the damage. [1]
Janki's first victory was cutting the length of Exxon's contracts from 23 years to five years. [7]
The Sakhalin-I project, a sister project to Sakhalin-II, is a consortium for production of oil and gas on Sakhalin Island and immediately offshore. It operates three fields in the Okhotsk Sea: Chayvo, Odoptu and Arkutun-Dagi.
Environmental justice or eco-justice, is a social movement to address environmental injustice, which occurs when poor or marginalized communities are harmed by hazardous waste, resource extraction, and other land uses from which they do not benefit. The movement has generated hundreds of studies showing that exposure to environmental harm is inequitably distributed.
Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) is an environmental advocacy organization based in New England. Since 1966, CLF's mission has been to advocate for New England's environment and its communities. CLF's advocacy work takes place across five integrated program areas: Clean Energy & Climate Change, Clean Air & Water, Healthy Oceans, People & Justice, and Healthy Communities. CLF uses the law, science, and the market to create solutions that preserve natural resources, build healthy communities, and sustain a vibrant economy. CLF works to promote renewable energy and fight air and water pollution; build sustainable fishing communities and protect marine habitat; promote public transit and defend public health; achieve environmental justice; and sustain a vibrant, equitable economy.
Exploration for petroleum in the Arctic is expensive and challenging both technically and logistically. In the offshore, sea ice can be a major factor. There have been many discoveries of oil and gas in the several Arctic basins that have seen extensive exploration over past decades but distance from existing infrastructure has often deterred development. Development and production operations in the Arctic offshore as a result of exploration have been limited, with the exception of the Barents and Norwegian seas. In Alaska, exploration subsequent to the discovery of the Prudhoe Bay oilfield has focussed on the onshore and shallow coastal waters.
Bowoto v. Chevron Corp. was a lawsuit against Chevron Nigeria Ltd., a subsidiary of Chevron USA, which went to trial in 2008 in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. The plaintiffs, Nigerian citizens who had been injured during or who had survived human rights violations perpetrated by Nigerian military personnel, alleged that the Chevron subsidiary backed the military action and that the parent company thus should bear liability in US courts for the resultant fallout. The suit was decided on December 1, 2008, when nine jurors unanimously agreed Chevron was not liable for any of the numerous allegations. Judgment was entered the next day, officially exonerating Chevron.
Human rights violations in Aceh, Indonesia occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s when ExxonMobil hired Indonesian military units to guard their Arun gas field, and these military units raided and razed local villages. Government inquiries have extensively documented these abuses. Victims allege that ExxonMobil knew about the atrocities, which include assault, torture, and murder, and should be liable for them. The company denies these accusations; its primary defense is that the human rights violations which were occurring were not a result of specific intention of the organization and therefore it cannot be held liable.
Bilateral relations have been established between the Co-operative Republic of Guyana and the United States of America.
Kivalina v. ExxonMobil Corp., No. 4:08-cv-01138, is a lawsuit filed on February 26, 2008, in a United States district court. The suit, based on the common law theory of nuisance, claims monetary damages from the energy industry for the destruction of Kivalina, Alaska by flooding caused by climate change. The damage estimates made by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Government Accountability Office are placed between $95 million and $400 million. This lawsuit is an example of greenhouse gas emission liability.
Guyana is one of the newest petroleum producing regions in the world, making the first commercial grade crude oil draw in December 2019. Crude oil is sent abroad for refining.
ExxonMobil Corporation is an American multinational oil and gas corporation and the largest direct descendant of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil. The company, which took its present name in 1999 per the merger of Exxon and Mobil, is vertically integrated across the entire oil and gas industry, and within it is also a chemicals division which produces plastic, synthetic rubber, and other chemical products. ExxonMobil is headquartered in the Houston suburb of Spring, Texas, though officially incorporated in the U.S. state of New Jersey.
Stuart H. Smith was a controversial practicing plaintiff attorney licensed in Louisiana. Smith practiced law for more than 25 years, litigating against oil companies and other energy-related corporations for damages associated with radioactive oilfield waste. Smith was one of the lead legal strategists in on-going national litigation regarding the nation's drug-industry manufactured opioid crisis, having led the nation-wide effort to have the crisis’ impact on opioid-dependent born children recognized as a special class deserving of dedicated, long-term response from those who caused the epidemic in the United States.
American Electric Power Company v. Connecticut, 564 U.S. 410 (2011), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court, in an 8–0 decision, held that corporations cannot be sued for greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) under federal common law, primarily because the Clean Air Act (CAA) delegates the management of carbon dioxide and other GHG emissions to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Brought to court in July 2004 in the Southern District of New York, this was the first global warming case based on a public nuisance claim.
The 2013 Mayflower oil spill occurred on March 29, 2013, when the Pegasus Pipeline, owned by ExxonMobil and carrying Canadian Wabasca heavy crude from the Athabasca oil sands, ruptured in Mayflower, Arkansas, about 25 miles (40 km) northwest of Little Rock releasing about 3,190 barrels of oil. Approximately 3,190 barrels of oil and water mix was recovered. Twenty-two homes were evacuated. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) classified the leak as a major spill.
As the world's largest majority investor-owned oil and gas corporation, ExxonMobil has received significant amounts of controversy and criticism, mostly due to its activities which increase the speed of climate change and its denial of global warming.
Since the 1970s, American fossil fuel and energy corporation ExxonMobil has engaged in climate research focussing on global warming. It later began lobbying, advertising, and grant making, some of which were conducted with the purpose of delaying widespread acceptance and action on global warming.
Climate change litigation, also known as climate litigation, is an emerging body of environmental law using legal practice to set case law precedent to further climate change mitigation efforts from public institutions, such as governments and companies. In the face of slow politics of climate change delaying climate change mitigation, activists and lawyers have increased efforts to use national and international judiciary systems to advance the effort. Climate litigation typically engages in one of five types of legal claims: Constitutional law, administrative law, private law (challenging corporations or other organizations for negligence, nuisance, etc., fraud or consumer protection, or human rights.
Lisa Song is an American journalist and author. She won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, with David Hasemyer and Elizabeth McGowan, for their report on the Kalamazoo River oil spill. She works for ProPublica, reporting on the environment, energy and climate change.
ExxonMobil, an American multinational oil and gas corporation presently based out of Texas, has had one of the longest histories of any company in its industry. A direct descendant of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, the company traces its roots as far back as 1886 to the founding of the Vacuum Oil Company, which would become part of ExxonMobil through its own merger with Mobil during the 1930s. The present name of the company comes from a 1999 merger of Standard Oil's New Jersey and New York successors, which adopted the names Exxon and Mobil respectively throughout the middle of the 20th century. Because of Standard Oil of New Jersey's ownership over all Standard Oil assets at the time of the 1911 breakup, ExxonMobil is seen by some as the definitive continuation of Standard Oil today.
District of Columbia v. Exxon Mobil Corp. is an ongoing lawsuit filed against Exxon Mobil Corporation and ExxonMobil Oil Corporation by the District of Columbia (D.C.). This case is one of a long list of lawsuits filed against ExxonMobil including environmental and ethical wrongdoings.
