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bhopal
Two Protesters Self-Immolate Over Bhopal Toxic Waste Plan in India
The plan to remove more than 370 tons of toxic waste from Bhopal and transport it to another city has been denounced as a "farce and greenwashing publicity stunt."
Jan 03, 2025
After more than 370 tons of hazardous waste from the deadliest industrial disaster in history arrived in the town of Pithampur in central India, two men were filmed in the city on Friday dousing themselves in liquid before they were set on fire in an apparent self-immolation protest.
The men poured the flammable liquid on themselves in a crowd of protesters and were then set on fire by another demonstrator.
They were taken to a hospital after the self-immolation and are "safe now," the administrative head of Dhar district, where Pithampur is located, told Agence France-Presse.
Note: The below video contains graphic images.
The protest took place 40 years and one month after a chemical disaster at a factory owned by the American company Union Carbide in Bhopal.
On December 2, 1984, a tank storing the toxic chemical methyl isocyanate, which Union Carbide used to produce pesticides, shattered from its concrete casing—allowing about 40 tons of the deadly gas to drift across the city of more than 2 million people.
The disaster killed roughly 3,500 people in the following days from direct exposure to the poisonous chemical, and 25,000 people are estimated to have died overall as the contamination has been linked to deadly illnesses including cancers, lung disease, and kidney disease.
Large numbers of babies have been born with severe disabilities, to parents affected by the gas leak, and a high rate of stillbirths in the area has been reported.
But Union Carbide—now owned by Dow Chemical—and the Indian government have never carried out an operation to remove all the contamination from Bhopal's groundwater, which has been found to contain levels of carcinogenic chemicals that were 50 times higher than what's accepted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Dow Chemical has denied liability for the accident, citing a 1989 settlement with the Indian government. The deal also gave about $500 to each person identified as a victim at the time—but nothing was set aside for most people who later developed health problems.
Last month, on the 40th anniversary of the disaster, the Madhya Pradesh high court ordered the government to begin removing the toxic waste and a plan was devised for the transport of more than 370 tons of sealed waste, which would be taken to a plant in Pithampur—150 miles away—and incinerated.
The plan has garnered condemnation from both Pithampur residents and people in Bhopal as well as campaigners who have demanded justice for Bhopal for decades.
The incineration is expected to take six months and to create nearly 1,000 tons of toxic residue, which will be buried in landfills—prompting fears that the damage and public health threats in Bhopal will spread to Pithampur.
The Hindu reported that police used water cannons and batons to disperse some protesters who tried to march toward the facility where the waste was delivered on Wednesday.
In Bhopal, Rachna Dhingra, a coordinator of the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, told The Guardian that the plan to move the contamination was a "farce and greenwashing publicity stunt to remove a tiny fraction of the least harmful waste," which had already been placed in containers and moved to a warehouse in 2005.
"There's still 1.2 million tons of poisonous waste leaching into the ground every day that they refuse to deal with," said Dhingra. "We can see for ourselves the birth defects and chronic health conditions. All this does is take the heat off the government and lets the U.S. corporations off the hook."
"It does nothing," said Dhingra, "to help the people in Bhopal who for decades have been seen as expendable."
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We All Live in Bhopal Now
The petrochemical industry has brought us together in a perverse solidarity, having chemically trespassed into places all over the world.
Dec 22, 2024
Forty years ago this month, a Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal, India sprung a toxic gas leak, exposing half a million people to toxic fumes. Thousands of people lost their lives in the immediate aftermath, with the death toll climbing to more than 20,000 over the next two decades. Countless others, including children of survivors, continue to endure chronic health issues.
In the United States, the events in Bhopal ignited a grassroots movement to expose and address the toxic chemicals in our water, air, and neighborhoods. In 1986, just two years after the disaster, this growing awareness led Congress to pass the first National Right to Know Act, which requires companies to publicly disclose their use of many toxic chemicals.
In India, Bhopal victims have had a long struggle for justice. In 1989, survivors flew to a Union Carbide shareholders meeting in Houston to protest the inadequate compensation for the trauma they’d suffered. The settlement awarded each Bhopal victim was a mere $500—which a spokesperson for Dow Chemical, Union Carbide’s parent company, called “plenty good for an Indian.”
We can take inspiration from the people of Bhopal, whose fierce commitment to health and justice sparked a global movement.
Union Carbide had the survivors arrested before they could enter the meeting. Meanwhile, their abandoned chemical factory was still leaking toxic chemicals into the surrounding neighborhoods and drinking water.
Nevertheless, Bhopal survivors never stopped fighting. They opened a free clinic to treat the intergenerational health effects caused by the disaster. They marched 500 miles between Bhopal and New Delhi. They staged hunger strikes. They created memorials to the disaster and established a museum to ensure that the horrors of their collective past are not forgotten.
The survivors even obtained an extradition order for Union Carbide’s former CEO, Warren Anderson, but the U.S. government never acted on that request. Forty years later, the factory in Bhopal has never been properly cleaned and is still leaking poison.
Unfortunately, the kinds of chemicals that flow through the veins of Bhopal survivors also flow through ours. The petrochemical industry has brought us together in a perverse solidarity, having chemically trespassed into places all over the world.
According to one figure, Americans are exposed to dangerous chemical fires, leaks, and explosions about once every two days. In one dramatic example in early 2023, a rail tanker filled with vinyl chloride derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, forcing the evacuation of 2,000 residents.
Nearly all Americans now carry toxic substances known as PFAS in our bodies. These have been linked to cancer, liver and kidney disease, and immune dysfunction. And the continued burning of fossil fuels is killing millions of people each year around the world through air pollution.
Petrochemical and fossil fuel companies know they can only survive if they avoid liability for the damage they are doing to our health and the planet’s ecosystems. That’s why they are heavily invested in lobbying to prevent any such accountability.
Polluting industries are certain to have strong allies in the coming Trump administration, which plans to open even more land to fossil fuel production and, under the blueprint for conservative governance known as Project 2025, to slash environmental and public health regulations. But we can take inspiration from the people of Bhopal, whose fierce commitment to health and justice sparked a global movement.
Earlier this month, on the 40th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, congressional allies of this movement including U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and U.S. Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), introduced a resolution designating December 3 as National Chemical Disaster Awareness Day.
“Chemical disasters are often the result of corporations cutting corners and prioritizing profits over safety,” said Merkley, who chairs the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works subcommittee. “These catastrophes cloud communities with toxic fumes, upending lives and threatening the health and property of those living and working close by.” He called for “stronger laws to prevent chemical disasters and keep our communities and workers safe.”
This growing global alliance, which has been called the largest movement for environmental health and justice in history, is fighting for a future in which everyone has the right to live in a healthy environment. It’s a movement that unites us all. Because in many ways, we all live in Bhopal now.
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40 Years of Suffering and Injustice Since Bhopal Disaster
We should never forget that Dow Chemical was behind the infamous 1984 chemical leak in India. Neither should we forget the courage of those who have never stopped fighting for justice on behalf of the victims.
Dec 02, 2024
Shortly before midnight on December 2, 1984, a terrible cloud, consisting of tons of the deadly gas methyl isocyanate (MIC), along with other chemicals, began to leak into the atmosphere from the storage tank of the U.S. multinational corporation Union Carbide Corporation (UCC)’s pesticide plant on the outskirts of Bhopal in central India.
The immediate consequences of the mass poisoning were catastrophic. As many as 10,000 people are believed to have died within three days of the leak.
As the world marks the 40th anniversary of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy, what lessons should we take from what happened on that awful night? I think perhaps there are at least three important ones. Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, is that a single tragic event can have consequences that last generations.
As well as those who succumbed to the gas in the first few hours, many thousands more people were exposed to it, and they continue to suffer from a range of chronic and debilitating illnesses. It is now estimated that more than 22,000 people have died as a direct result of exposure to the leak, while more than half a million people continue to suffer some degree of permanent injury.
Shockingly, it is not only people exposed to the gas directly who have been affected. Over the years that followed, a large number of children born to gas-exposed parents have been affected by growth retardation, birth defects and other medical conditions.
As well as those who succumbed to the gas in the first few hours, many thousands more people were exposed to it, and they continue to suffer from a range of chronic and debilitating illnesses.
Meanwhile, to this day, thousands of tons of toxic waste remain buried in and around the abandoned plant. This has contaminated residents’ water supplies and harmed their health, adding to the already dismal health status of gas-exposed residents.
As well as the health impacts, the tragedy has pushed already impoverished communities into further destitution. In many families, the main wage earner died or became too ill to work. Women and children suffered disproportionately.
An unfortunate second lesson of the Bhopal tragedy is how easy it has been for UCC to escape accountability. Pitted against the largely poor victims of the gas disaster was the hugely powerful and enormously rich multinational corporation, which escaped providing the survivors, their children and grandchildren with adequate compensation and medical care.
The catastrophic gas leak was the foreseeable result of innumerable operational failures at the plant, but from the start, UCC’s response to the disaster was inadequate and callous. For example, although thousands of people were dying from gas exposure, or suffering agonizing injuries, UCC withheld critical information regarding MIC’s toxicological properties, undermining the effectiveness of the medical response. To this day, UCC has failed to name any of the chemicals and reaction products that leaked along with MIC on that fateful night.
In 1989, without consulting Bhopal Gas Tragedy survivors, the Indian government and UCC reached an out-of-court compensation settlement for $470 million. This amount was less than 15 percent of the initial amount sought by the government, and far less than most estimates of the damage at the time. Thousands of claims were not registered at all, including those of gas-exposed children under the age of 18, and children born to gas-affected parents who, time later showed, were also severely affected.
There have been numerous attempts to hold UCC and individuals to account, either through criminal or civil claim proceedings launched in India and the U.S. But these have had no or very limited results.
One challenge has been created by the restructuring of the business entities involved in the tragedy. UCC sold off the India-registered subsidiary that operated the plant. It was then, in turn, bought by another giant U.S. corporation, the Dow Chemical Company (Dow). To this day, Dow shamefully claims it bears no responsibility since it “never owned or operated the plant” and that UCC only became a subsidiary of Dow 16 years after the accident.
In 2010, the Chief Judicial Magistrate’s Court in Bhopal found seven Indian nationals, as well as UCC’s India-based subsidiary guilty of causing death by negligence. By contrast, U.S. individuals and companies have escaped punishment, and there is significant evidence that the U.S. authorities have helped protect them.
Companies have a responsibility to respect human rights wherever they operate. Dow may not have caused the gas leak, but it became directly linked to the tragedy after it bought UCC. The company boasts of following the highest human rights standards, but its continued failure to respond to the urgent needs of the survivors is utterly disgraceful.
But there is a third lesson to draw from the Bhopal Gas Tragedy and its aftermath. It can be found in the inspiring story of the survivor groups and their supporters, who over 40 years have refused to give up their fight for justice. They have initiated or intervened in many legal actions; conducted scientific research into the contamination and health impacts; and they have launched practical initiatives in the absence of sufficient state and corporate support. For example, in 1994, survivor groups fundraised for the Sambhavna Trust Clinic and they later opened the Chingari Rehabilitation Centre. Thousands of gas- and contamination-affected adults and children have benefitted from the highly specialized and professional medical care and rehabilitation provided by these institutions – unparalleled by any of the government-run facilities.
Their campaigning has also meant that Dow has never been able to disassociate itself from the Bhopal disaster. Until it finally addresses the needs of the survivors, their campaign will continue.
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Arkema Was Not a Natural Disaster. It Was a Preventable Accident Waiting to Happen
Sep 06, 2017
Unlike hurricanes, tornadoes, and super storms, chemical accidents and explosions in refineries, storage facilities, fertilizer and chemical plants are not natural disasters. They are also not rare events. We have seen their deadly and costly consequences far too often. Advances in meteorology have greatly enhanced opportunities for natural disaster preparedness. Sandy and Katrina have clearly demonstrated the power and impact of such storms on our lives, homes, and infrastructure. And the recent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster was surely a wakeup call on the potential of hurricanes, floods, and tsunamis to compromise electrical power and greatly compound an impending disaster.
Natural events may not be preventable, but many of the consequences are. Housing can be constructed so that there is no structural collapse in the event of an earthquake. Vulnerable facilities can be hardened, located, or re-located away from populated areas, and away from fault lines, flood plains, and water ways that further heighten the risks of chemical accidents. But more fundamentally, inherently unsafe facilities and operations can be redesigned, retrofitted, and ultimately replaced by manufacturing and storage facility changes in inputs, final products, and processes that are inherently safer.
Inherent safety approaches differ from what is called secondary prevention which involves the strengthening of reaction vessels and pipes, the use of neutralizing baths, and the venting of toxic or explosive chemicals. Inherent safety approaches result in creating production and storage facilities with significantly smaller probabilities of having untoward human and commercial disasters. The European Union, but not the United States, in three successively more-demanding versions of its Seveso Directive (1982, 1996, 2012), adopted a hierarchy of prevention approaches favoring inherent safety approaches over secondary prevention for chemical accident prevention.
The Union Carbide Bhopal pesticide plant explosion in 1984 could have been wholly avoided by the construction of an inherently safer plant, which was then already used by DuPont to make the same pesticide at other locations. That notorious explosion hastened the 1990 passage of Section 112(r) of the Clean Air Act. In 1996, twelve years after the Bhopal explosion, EPA promulgated its first requirement that certain high-hazard industries issue a risk management plan (RMP) to prevent chemical accidents. This was one of two chemical safety interventions contemplated by the Clean Air Act. Although professional, environmental, community, and some industry advocates urged EPA to prioritize inherent safety approaches over secondary prevention -- as had the European Union four years earlier. EPA caved in to massive industry pressure and announced it had "decided not to mandate inherently safer technology analysis" (61 Fed. Reg. 31, 69). This analysis, which would have required the identification of alternative inherently safer inputs, final products, and processes would have established the basis for the ultimate adoption of inherently safer technology.
The second intervention created in the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act to encourage the reduction of chemical accidents was the creation of the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (otherwise known as the Chemical Safety Board or CSB). Despite CSB's checkered history of industry opposition and interference, funding and staffing problems, and leadership failures, many of its investigations and recommendations systematically improved chemical safety.
Prompted by the fertilizer explosion that consumed West, TX, on January 13, 2017, EPA published the Chemical Disaster Rule, a revised set of more stringent requirements than the 1996 RMP. This was the result of an agency analysis of 2,200 chemical accidents that occurred in the period 2004 to 2013, over 1500 of which caused harm. This included 58 deaths, more than 17,000 people injured, hospitalized, or forced to seek remedial care, as well as $2 billion in property damage. Once again, however, the EPA did not adopt inherent safety approaches as a preferred required practice, although the U.S. history of recent disasters should have mandated it in the interest of public and worker safety.
The revised rule would have enhanced protection for local first responders, community members, and employees from death or injury due to chemical facility accidents. It was due to have come into force, requiring covered facilities to comply at various future times. In June, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt ordered a 20-month year delay in implementation of the rule. The rule's more stringent provisions did not require inherent safety approaches, but did require designated operations to assess whether safety improvements were practicable. These improvements included storing fewer chemicals, using better tanks, improving backup power systems, i.e., feasible, effective, and immediately-needed improvements, even if they did not include inherently safer alternatives. The rule also had more stringent requirements for data accessibility and emergency planning.
We all know that changes in chemical production, manufacturing and storage cannot be done overnight, but one would think the government would want to hasten their adoption.
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Two Years After West, Texas Fertilizer Plant Explosion, Are Workers Any Safer? New Report Says No
On April 17, 2013, a massive fire and explosion tore through the West Fertilizer plant in West, Texas, killing 15 people--including 10 volunteer firefighters--and injuring more than 200. Fueled by the 30 or so tons of explosive ammonium nitrate on site, the blast ripped through the wooden building and its flammable contents, destroying three nearby schools, a nursing home and devastating 37 city blocks.
Apr 18, 2015
On April 17, 2013, a massive fire and explosion tore through the West Fertilizer plant in West, Texas, killing 15 people--including 10 volunteer firefighters--and injuring more than 200. Fueled by the 30 or so tons of explosive ammonium nitrate on site, the blast ripped through the wooden building and its flammable contents, destroying three nearby schools, a nursing home and devastating 37 city blocks. A federal government investigation into the disaster found enormous gaps in information made available to first responders and the community about the plant's highly hazardous materials - information that could have prevented or reduced the loss of life, injuries and damage.
Two years after this catastrophe, the Center for Effective Government has taken a look at the disclosure practices around such hazardous chemicals--and found what's required of these facilities to still be "inadequate and insufficient."
In a report released this week, the Center for Effective Government, a non-partisan government watchdog, examined emergency response planning and reporting on chemicals required of plants like West Fertilizer under the federal Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act of 1986 (EPCRA)--enacted in response to the 1984 release of deadly methylisocyanate gas from the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India that killed thousands and injured many more--and the Clean Air Act. Instead of comprehensive and coordinated reporting and planning that could help prevent the loss of life and injuries, CEG found "a patchwork of laws and regulations that cover chemicals and are supposed to be safeguarding the public," says CEG Open Government Policy program director Sean Moulton.
"There are gaps between these programs, and West Texas, really highlighted this," says Moulton. "It's very hard to know what information is where and how planning is rolled out. It's very clear that responders in West, Texas didn't know how to respond," he says.
Absent information about hazards at the plant, volunteer firefighters arriving on the scene were unaware of that ammonium nitrate might be in the process of exploding. There was--and still is--nothing that would have compelled anyone to alert community residents or local government that schools, healthcare facilities, homes or businesses were located near a plant housing massive quantities of explosive materials. And under current laws and regulations, nothing required the West Fertilizer company to report its use and storage of ammonium nitrate to the EPA or authorities with whom it might develop an emergency response plan.
What the laws do--and what they don't
Under EPCRA, facilities that use or store hazardous substances are supposed to provide information about what's on site to a state agency that shares this information with a State Emergency Response Commission, which then sends it to what's called a Local Emergency Planning Committee. It's up to the local committee to develop an emergency response plan that is coordinated with local first responders. Meanwhile, the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments require companies that use any of 140 extremely dangerous chemicals to report this information to the EPA and develop a "risk management plan" to be used in case of an emergency. This plan is also supposed to be shared with local first responders.
What CEG found, however, is that much of this information-sharing never happens. In all but five states, no full inventory of hazardous chemicals is publicly available. Two states did not make any such information available: Nevada, which declined to provide CEG with information, and Texas, which never shares this information with the public.
Additional gaps in these and other federal and local laws mean that thousands of facilities storing billions of pounds of highly hazardous chemicals all around the country lack emergency response plans that are actually communicated to or coordinated with local authorities and first responders. And where response plans do exist, there's no guarantee that these details are publicly accessible.
There is also nothing that requires a company like West Fertilizer that uses ammonium nitrate to report on the chemical or develop an emergency plan because ammonium nitrate is not included among the chemicals which the EPA requires reporting.
"The EPA still doesn't have risk management plans on-line," Moulton explains. "Many states also don't have these on-line. Many cite security reasons for this," he says. And says Moulton, "We can't really say what's going on with local emergency planning committees." There's no list of the committees, and the last time EPA surveyed them was in 2008, he explains.
The upshot are situations like West, Texas where first responders and plant neighbors have no advance information or plan in place in case of an emergency when a delay can make an already dangerous situation even more serious.
Whether it's in the community or on the shop floor, making certain there's a response system if something goes wrong is essential, says United Steelworkers assistant director for health and safety Jim Frederick. "Working without that is foolishness," he says.
Need for improvement but little progress to date
Recognizing the need for improvement in the wake of the disaster, President Obama issued an Executive Order directing federal agencies--including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)--to work together to improve the safety of facilities like the West Fertilizer plant where hazardous chemicals are used and stored. The EPA also issued what's called an advisory about ammonium nitrate and with OSHA has proposed measures to enhance its required risk management plans. According to an EPA spokesperson, the agency is now reviewing the nearly 100,000 public comments received on this proposal.
So has anything changed since the West, Texas disaster?
"Things have happened that have raised awareness of these important issues," says Frederick. "But the flip side is that nothing has really transpired yet from the perspective of the workplace or perspective of the worker," he says.
"It would be really important for EPA to finish their rule-making on both better reporting, more thoughtful disclosure and transparency and also efforts on taking steps to move toward inherently safer practices," says Charlotte Brody, the BlueGreen Alliance's vice president of health initiatives. "Good drafts have been written but there's no sign of them being done," says Brody. "We're concerned that proposed rules will never turn into regulations," she says.
Greenpeace's legislative director Rick Hind takes an even harsher view. "The EPA is bringing foot dragging to an art form," says Hind. He points out that the EPA's current schedule for finalizing improvements to risk management planning and what's called "process safety management" - what happens on a day-to-day basis on the shop floor to involve all employees in safe operating practices - risks running out the clock on the Obama administration.
"If you're dealing with an inherently dangerous technology you're susceptible," says Hind alluding to disasters like West, Texas.
As Brody explains, simply knowing what hazardous substances are on site, where and how they're being used--and recognizing the costs and time involved in making sure nothing dangerous happens--are the first steps toward considering moving to safer materials. But right now, as the Center for Effective Government report details, information on these hazards is poorly documented.
Labor unions and government watchdogs aren't the only ones dogging this issue. In December, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held a hearing to review progress made since President Obama's Executive Order. "In the 602 days since the West, Texas tragedy there have been 355 chemical accidents resulting in 79 deaths and 1500 hospitalizations," said Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) opening the hearing. "Essentially," said Boxer, since the West Fertilizer accident, there's been a U.S. incident involving hazardous chemicals every other day. "This," she said, "is absolutely outrageous."
So not only are catastrophic chemical accidents continuing to occur--and with disturbing frequency--but, according to the CEG report, facilities that use hazardous materials, communities and emergency personnel are lacking the information they need to respond.
It may sound like a pesky civic detail, but says Moulton, "It's very important, local response planning" and in the case of West, Texas, "they weren't prepared."
"I don't want to be talking to you when the next disaster hits and we're saying, 'I told you so.' I'm not interested in, 'I told you so,'" Brody says. "I want them to do it now."
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Obama, India's Modi Hail 'Breakthrough' Nuclear Deal that Limits US Corporate Liability
"We think we came to an understanding of the liability" issue, stated U.S. Ambassador Richard Verma.
Jan 25, 2015
President Barack Obama and India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday announced a "breakthrough" after reaching a deal on commerce that appears to shield U.S. companies from liability from nuclear accidents.
Obama is in India for a three-day visit.
A decade-old deal that would allow the U.S. to provide India with nuclear reactor components and fuel had met obstacles, one of which was about tracking where the material went. Siddharth Varadarajan, Senior Fellow at the Centre for Public Affairs and Critical Theory at Shiv Nadar University, explained the second at the Huffington Post:
Nuclear commerce is stuck because American companies like GE and Westinghouse -- which regard being sued for a nuclear accident as part of the risk of selling reactors inside the U.S. -- are unwilling to subject themselves to any claims for damages in the event of an accident in India. India's liability law is seen by them as an obstacle and the Obama administration has spent the past four years trying to get the Indian side to dilute its provisions.
Bloomberg News adds:
India is one of the few nations that do not exempt nuclear suppliers from accident liability. The reason can be found in the central Indian city of Bhopal, where more than 10,000 people were killed or injured in a 1984 chemical leak from a Union Carbide Corp. pesticide plant. The episode remains the world's worst industrial accident.
Public support for the liability legislation only hardened after the 2011 Fukushima meltdown in Japan...
Danny Roderick, CEO of Westinghouse, which has a tentative deal to build as many as eight reactors in Gujarat, has said that potential litigation stemming from a nuclear accident in the country would be costly. "The way the current law was written, every person in India can sue you" the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports Roderick as saying. "That's the bigger issue -- to withstand the legal costs of a billion people trying to sue you."
According to reporting on Sunday, the sticking point may have been resolved. Reuters reports that the deal reached "could open the door for U.S. companies to build nuclear reactors in India by promising insurance cover to U.S. companies that had shied away from an Indian law placing liability on suppliers in case of an accident."
The Guardian adds: "After pressure from US diplomats, the Indian government was thought to have agreed a state-backed insurance scheme that would cap the exposure of nuclear suppliers and open the door to billions of dollars of new contracts. India will also allow closer tracking of spent fuel to limit the risk of it falling into terrorist hands."
And from the Washington Post: "The White House said the agreement was reached through a combination of insurance pools and an assurance that reducing the liability would be within the framework of the 2010 agreement. It will now be up to companies to decide whether or not to go forward with doing business in India. Officials said that, despite the law, the change would not require additional legislation in India."
Full details on the implementation were not yet revealed, but U.S. Ambassador Richard Verma stated, "We think we came to an understanding of the liability" issue, and said the deal "now opens the door for U.S. and other companies to come forward and help India develop its nuclear, non-carbon-based energy production."
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And the Lifetime Award for Shameful Corporate Behavior Goes to... Chevron
As World Economic Forum gathers in Davos, satirical ceremony nearby recognizes corporate criminals
Jan 23, 2015
As global elites gather in Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum, the oil giant Chevron was singled out on Friday for a highly competitive--if unflattering--international distinction: the Public Eye Lifetime Award for its extraordinary corporate irresponsibility, which includes monumental environmental destruction in northern Ecuador.
Granted by grassroots organizations at a public ceremony at a hotel in Davos, the winner of the satirical prize was determined by tens of thousands of online voters. The race was close, with Glencore and Walmart coming in a close second, but voters ultimately determined that Chevron deserves the top distinction.
The oil giant, however, declined to attend the ceremony, so Greenpeace Switzerland accepted the award on Chevron's behalf.
"Chevron is uniquely deserving of a lifetime award for the lifetime of misery they have caused the Ecuadorian Amazon," Paul Paz y Mino, of the U.S.-based organization Amazon Watch, told Common Dreams over the phone from Davos. "This is not only because of their original pollution--dumping 18 billion gallons of toxic waste--but because they have ignored every judicial process to hold them to account, even though they were determined liable for $9.5 billion in court of their own choosing."
"Not only did they refuse to pay," Paz y Mino added, "but they pointed their finger at their own victims, accusing the people that they poisoned of a global conspiracy to commit fraud. It undermines the very fabric of our society because you can't simply evade justice because you have the wealth to litigate in perpetuity."
This is not the first time that Chevron won a Public Eye prize. In 2006, the oil giant won the Public Eye Award for "polluting large areas of pristine rain forest in northern Ecuador." However, the Lifetime Award is a higher distinction, and it marks an end to the Public Eye awards after 15 years.
The prizes have been aimed at casting "a critical and innovative eye on the World Economic Forum," according to a press statement. Numbered among participants and attendees were the famed Yes Men, a European parliamentarian, and even a representative from the WEF.
Past award recipients include Dow Chemical, awarded in 2005, for "using every loophole in the book to avoid its responsibility for the Bhopal disaster, the world's largest chemical catastrophe in human history." Last year, Gap and Gazprom were both winners of "Awards of Shame."
According to Paz y Mino, Chevron's Lifetime Achievement prize is "particularly important right now because part of Chevron's strategy is to claim they were victimized. International recognition from awards like this are clear demonstration to Chevron that the rest of world understands and acknowledges they are irresponsible."
Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men told Common Dreams that Chevron's bad behavior is distinguished but not unique. "All of the hundreds of companies ever nominated for Public Eye awards, and thousands of others as well, are almost as deserving of this award as Chevron is," said Bichlbaum.
The true winner of the Lifetime Award, he added, "is our insane system--that makes behavior like Chevron's rational. That's the system we've got to change, and luckily there's a movement afoot to do that."
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Groups Say It's 'High Time' For Fracking Industry to Fess Up on Toxins
'If oil and gas drilling and extraction is as safe as industry lobbyists say it is, they should be able to follow the same rules every other industry already does.'
Jan 08, 2015
A coalition of nine environmental and open-government groups sued the Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday for its decades-long failure to require the oil and gas extraction industry to disclose the toxic chemicals released by fracking, natural gas processing, and related operations.
The lawsuit (pdf) follows a petition that the groups filed in October 2012, requesting that EPA require the oil and gas industry to disclose such pollution to the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), a federal public pollution database established in 1986 to inform the public about the industrial release of carcinogenic chemicals (such as benzene) in the wake of the deadly 1984 Bhopal disaster in India, in which toxic gases from a chemical plant killed thousands of local residents. Entities such as oil refineries, petrochemical plants, power plants, and mining companies have had to comply with these 'right-to-know' rules for years--decades, in some cases.
"This is the last major sector that has not been included in the inventory," the lead attorney in the suit, Adam Korn of the Environmental Integrity Project, told the Houston Chronicle. "We're just saying to the EPA, look again. The industry is different now."
By EPA's own estimates, the oil and gas extraction industry emits at least 127,000 tons of hazardous air pollutants every year, all of which are TRI-listed chemicals.
As the lawsuit points out, the number of fracking and drilling operations in the U.S. has increased "dramatically" in the last decade. "Simultaneously, the volume and variety of toxic chemicals used by the industry has expanded significantly," it notes.
However, "[d]ue to EPA's long inaction, the oil and gas extraction industry remains exempt from the Toxics Release Inventory, one of our nation's most basic toxic reporting mechanisms," Kron said. "The Toxic Release Inventory requires just one thing: annual reporting to the public. This reporting is critical to health, community planning, and informed decision making. Whether to add the oil and gas extraction industry shouldn't even be a question at this point."
In January 2014 the Environmental Integrity Project collected air emissions data from six oil and gas "boom" states--Colorado, Louisiana, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wyoming--and found that nearly 400 large oil and gas extraction facilities are emitting a combined 8.5 million tons of TRI-listed toxic chemicals each year in those states.
"What we are asking for is actually very simple: treat fracking just like every other industrial operation that releases air and water pollution," said Zac Trahan, program director with Texas Campaign for the Environment, one of the groups involved in the suit. "This right-to-know loophole is a perfect example of how fracking is currently given special exceptions to get around our nation's most important environmental laws. If oil and gas drilling and extraction is as safe as industry lobbyists say it is, they should be able to follow the same rules every other industry already does."
Barbara Jarmoska, of the Pennsylvania-based Responsible Drilling Alliance, added:
Neither local residents nor elected officials were prepared for the sudden and dramatic industrial transformation of Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale region. The health and environmental costs of the industry have not been properly nor thoroughly evaluated, and the whole truth of the industry's toxic burden has been manipulated and undermined by an aggressive, industry-funded marketing campaign of disinformation. Because of this, the addition of the oil and gas extraction industry to the Toxics Release Inventory is paramount. Increased and regular reporting by facilities in the oil and gas industry will result in more precise information on the type and amount of toxic chemicals released to the air, water, and land.
Having received no formal response to their 2012 petition, the groups are asking the courts to order EPA to issue a final response within a court-imposed deadline of 60 days.
As Matthew McFeeley, staff attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said, "It's high time for EPA to stop giving the oil and gas industry special treatment."
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Bhopal 30 Years On: Lessons From a Toxic Tragedy
Dec 06, 2014
I was in Bhopal, India 10 years after the 1984 disaster in which a now infamous Union Carbide pesticide plant released 27 tons of a toxic chemical into a crowded sleeping city, killing 8,000 people immediately and over 20,000 to date. It's hard to believe that Wednesday was the 30th anniversary of that disaster. In spite of so much technological advancement in the three decades since Bhopal, here in the U.S. we haven't sufficiently heeded the warning that that disaster still clearly signals.
I have visited Bhopal several times since 1984 and listened to local peoples' stories of how that horrific night unfolded. At first some thought the pain in their eyes was due to neighbors burning chilies. Thousands panicked and began running. People were trampled, children lost, huge numbers injured and killed. The world's deadliest industrial accident has become known in India as the Hiroshima of the chemical industry.
Today the abandoned Union Carbide factory still sits there, leaking hazardous chemicals and waste left behind in the aftermath of the disaster, poisoning the next generation of Bhopalis with lead, mercury, chloroform and other toxic chemicals in their soil and drinking water. In 2001 Dow Chemical purchased Union Carbide and has consistently refused to accept any responsibility for Union Carbide's criminal or civil liabilities.
This week, as on every anniversary of the tragedy, its survivors held candle light vigils, marched and renewed their demands for full compensation, health care, clean water and justice. The survivors aren't just asking for environmental justice for their community but for every community. Their slogan -- No More Bhopals -- means no more Bhopals anywhere.
The survivors aren't just asking for environmental justice for their community but for every community.When Bhopal survivors Rashida Bee and Champa Shukla visited the U.S. in 2004 to receive the prestigious Goldman Prize for their activism, they took time out to join members of Congress in calling for new federal rules to require chemical plants to switch to safer available alternatives to prevent disasters. The U.S. also has dangerous chemical plants; some that could inflict as many casualties as in Bhopal.
According to U.S. chemical facility reports to the EPA there are approximately 470 chemical facilities in the U.S. that each put 100,000 or more people at risk of a disaster. Together these plants threaten more than 100 million Americans who work in or live near these facilities. Among the most common hazards in the U.S. is chlorine gas produced at plants like the Kuehne Chemical facility in South Kearny, N.J. across the river from Manhattan. The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory estimated that one rail car of chlorine gas could result in 100,000 casualties in 30 minutes.
The American public first learned of these dangers in 2001 due to a provision in the 1990 Clean Air Act known as the Bhopal Amendment. It provided first responders, plant workers and people living downwind from these plants with basic information about the magnitude of these inherent hazards. But a key portion of the Bhopal Amendment that allows the EPA to require chemical plants to switch to safer chemicals or processes was never activated. In 2002, following the 9/11 attacks, the EPA proposed using this authority but was overruled by the Bush White House.
Despite the fact that safer chemicals and processes are widely available and have eliminated the possibility of catastrophic hazards at many chemical plants, we still have hundreds more facilities that put millions of people at risk. A survey by the Center for American Progress of facilities that switched to safer processes found that 87 percent reported the cost of conversion at $1 million or less.
It pains me to think that the April 2013 fertilizer explosion in West Texas that killed 15 people and destroyed blocks of residential homes, schools and a nursing home, could have been avoided had the company been required to use a safer formulation of that fertilizer. President Obama's response to the explosion was to issue an executive order directing federal agencies to propose ways to modernize safety regulations for chemical facilities. Yet despite the President's order, the EPA's has only proposed series of voluntary measures, a decision on enforceable regulations has been put off until 2016. Meanwhile, accidents continue to happen including a November 15th gas leak that killed four workers at Dupont's Laporte, Texas plant.
President Obama has been a champion of genuine prevention requirements, saying in the Senate that requiring the use of safer alternatives, "reduces the danger that chemical plants pose to our communities and makes them less appealing targets for terrorists." Yet the slow pace of the EPA's progress is putting true disaster prevention in jeopardy. Nothing can bring back the lives lost in Bhopal or West, Texas but we can and must do everything possible to prevent these tragedies from happening again. President Obama can do that by directing the EPA to act now before his administration runs out of time to act.
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After Three Decades, Quest for Justice Remains Elusive in Bhopal
'My community is yet to be compensated for what it has suffered,' says one survivor of the deadly gas leak
Dec 03, 2014
Wednesday marks the 30-year anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, in which at least 30 tons of the toxic gas methyl isocyanate leaked from the Union Carbide India Limited pesticide manufacturing plant, killing at least 3,000 people immediately and leaving hundreds of thousands more to grapple with the aftermath: cancer, tuberculosis, birth defects, and myriad other health problems due to contaminated water and soil.
At a rally in the central Indian city Tuesday night, survivors, victims, and supporters demanded justice for those who continue to suffer three decades on.
"We are here to demand our rights from both the Indian government and Union Carbide," Kamla Bhai, 70, told Reuters as she marched down Bhopal's bustling streets to the abandoned factory site. "We lost our children, we lost our husbands, we lost our mothers, we lost our fathers, yet we have been ignored by the government and cheated by the corporate [system] for the last thirty years. Their treatment has been shameful."
Writing at Al Jazeera English, Indian activist and Bhopal survivor Sanjay Verma echoed that sentiment.
"My community is yet to be compensated for what it has suffered," he said. "We are sad that the CEO of Union Carbide, Warren Anderson, who was arrested by Indian authorities but fled to the US, died unpunished. He was one of the individuals responsible for the disaster, and the Indian and US governments (which did not deport him to India) were equally responsible for his escape from India."
"I do not think that there would ever be enough compensation for Bhopal victims, as money cannot bring back what they have lost and suffered since the disaster. But, in order to for them to have a life of dignity and good health, they need financial compensation."
According to Al Jazeera America:
Union Carbide Corp., now a wholly owned subsidiary of Dow Chemical Co., says it has provided sufficient compensation and relief to the victims and survivors of the gas leak. In 1985, a year after the disaster, Union Carbide identified 94 percent of the approximately 500,000 victims as "being temporarily injured" and gave them roughly $415 each.
Four years later, as part of a settlement, the company agreed to pay $470 million to the Indian government. Union Carbide has said that, under the terms of the settlement, the government assumed responsibility for distributing the money and providing medical coverage to Bhopal residents in the event of future illnesses. Protesters, meanwhile, say that money was insufficient--just 15 percent of what the government initially sought--and only half of what the Indian Council for Medical Research, a public-health organization, said is necessary to rehabilitate survivors.
In the wake of the leak, Union Carbide essentially abandoned the site, allowing toxins to leach into the local drinking water supply. According to EarthRights International, which is serving as co-counsel in a suit seeking redress for the pollution, "the corporation has steadfastly refused to act to prevent further contamination or to compensate those whose drinking water has been poisoned."
The entire episode illustrates the stranglehold that global biotechnology corporations have on governments, argued environmentalist Vandana Shiva.
The Bhopal tragedy "was a political, economic, legal watershed for India and the planet," she wrote. "It was a toxic tragedy at two levels: the leakage of a toxic gas from a plant producing toxic pesticides, the continued presence of 350 metric tonnes of hazardous toxic waste from the now-defunct Union Carbide India Ltd's plant in Bhopal, combined with a toxic influence of corporations on courts and successive governments. Legally, Union Carbide and the US courts escaped liability and responsibility for the damage, setting a precedent of governments shrugging their duty to protect their citizens, taking away citizens' rights and sovereignty in order to make settlements with corporations, letting them off lightly."
She continued: "This pattern of double standards, of privatizing profits and socializing disaster runs through the pattern of corporate rule being institutionalized since the Bhopal tragedy."
The disaster is the subject of a film released last month, Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain, featuring Martin Sheen as Warren Anderson, then-CEO of Union Carbide, who victims claim died without being held responsible for his crime.
In fact, holding any entity accountable for the 1984 incident has proved difficult.
On November 12, Dow Chemical refused to comply with an Indian court summons to explain why its subsidiary, Union Carbide, did not submit itself to court of law for trial in the disaster. The summons was re-issued and the hearing has been rescheduled for March 2015.
According to a new poll carried out by YouGov for Amnesty International, 82 percent of Indians surveyed want to see Union Carbide prosecuted in Indian courts for its role in the gas leak at the Bhopal plant. While fewer U.S. respondents expressed a view, of those who did, almost two-thirds agreed.
"This result should act as a wake-up call to the U.S. government, which has until now effectively provided a safe haven for Union Carbide," said Amnesty International's Secretary General Salil Shetty in response to the poll.
Or, as former Indian additional solicitor general Indira Jaising--who also represented victims of the gas leak in court--wrote at the Indian Express: "Perhaps one needs a permanent international tribunal to prosecute transnational corporate crime, so that no parent company can trade or do business in foreign countries without accepting liability for the consequences of their actions. The device of corporate personality through subsidiaries should not be allowed to cover up crime."
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