Chevron Prosecutor: Oil’s Price isn’t High Enough

The economy’s on the dive and many blame record high oil prices. Gas is now over $4 a gallon and consumers are feeling more than a pinch. But Dan Stormer says that when the blood that’s spilled in oil production is tallied up, oil’s price may be far too low. For our oil, Nigerians, for example, are paying a deadly price.

Ten years ago last month, Nigerian security forces opened fire on peaceful demonstrators in the Niger Delta, killing two and injuring others. The people shot were protesting, says Stormer, for nothing more than what they’d been promised: jobs, schools, water they could drink, economic development. Now four Nigerian plaintiffs are suing Chevron in US federal court. Nigerian soldiers were paid by a subsidiary of Chevron, they say, and the company bears responsibility for the murders. Trial dates are set for September. In the meantime, Dan Stormer, lead counsel in one of the cases (Bowoto v. Chevron) is calling on all of us to reflect: our pain at the pump is nothing by comparison to what the Nigerians are enduring for oil. "Going to Nigeria entirely changed my way of thinking about environmentalism," Stormer told GRITtv. Should poor workers here be happy to pay more? Not exactly, but oil company execs should be forced to fork over a larger share of their profits. And may I add (not Stormer here, but Flanders) Condoleezza Rice, who served ten-years on the Chevron Board and for whom the company named a tanker, had blood on her hands long before she got in up to her neck in Iraq. No one with a soul would want their name on a vessel that represented this much devastation. The entire conversation certainly shifts your attitude to all those headlines about "painful prices at the gas pump."