Oil company Chevron was fined $19 billion by a court in Ecuador last year….based on ‘evidence’ brought by environmentalists.
The BBC did report this in 2012:
However things have moved on…..
One of the financiers of an environmental lawsuit that led to a $19 billion verdict against Chevron Corp. in Ecuador told a judge that he came to regret funding the case once after learning that it may be a fraud.
Burford Capital LLC Chief Executive Officer Christopher Bogart told a Manhattan federal judge yesterday that his firm, which he described as the world’s largest dedicated litigation financing provider, supplied $4 million to the Ecuadorean plaintiffs and later sold the share when it became “deeply concerned about the mounting evidence of fraud and misconduct.”
You would have thought that this would have been a big story for the BBC environmental reporters….what is alleged to be a massive con gouging an oil company for $19 billion using methods that are indeed reminiscent of the Mafia.
Apparently not….a week since the story resurfaced…but no signs of it on the BBC…..they know about it because they link to the above report from ‘Bloomberg’ but seem uninterested themselves in disclosing the fraud and criminal actions of their environmental ‘friends’ as AGW alarmist John Ashton might call them.
Of course the BBC’s Harrabin sent out a memo to his fellow reporters ‘guiding’ them on the preferred way to report the court’s findings that Al Gore’s little propaganda film was bunk, downplaying the fact that it was found to be peddling lies….
‘In any future reporting of Gore we should be careful not to suggest that the High Court says Gore was wrong on climate……We might say something like: “Al Gore whose film was judged by the High Court to have used some debatable science” or “Al Gore whose film was judged in the High Court to be controversial in parts”. The key is to avoid suggesting that the judge disagreed with the main climate change thesis. ‘
And Harrabin confirms he’s not exactly neutral when it comes to climate change…not ‘reporting’ but ‘warning’ of climate change:
I have spent much of the last two decades of my journalistic life warning about the potential dangers of climate change, but when I first watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth I felt a flutter of unease.
Harrabin’s not shy, once again, when it comes to tryng to blacken the name of anyone opposed to his campaign to warn us of the dangers of climate change:
The man who brought the complaint, Stuart Dimmock, expressed his delight that this “shockumentary” had been exposed.
Mr Dimmock is a member of the “New Party”, apparently funded by a businessman with a strong dislike of environmentalists and drink-drive laws.
When asked on the BBC’s World Tonight programme who had under-written his court costs, he paused long and loud before saying that “someone on the internet” had offered him support.
Here Harrabin admits the film was political but such an approach was ‘forced’ upon Gore as:
The sceptics knew that they did not need to win the battle of climate facts, they just needed to keep doubt alive.
An Inconvenient Truth is a response to that often cynical campaign, attempting to put climate change beyond doubt and remove ambiguity from presentation of the scientific facts.
The film was made as a polemic, not an educational tool for children. The government would have been on safer ground if it had chosen Sir David Attenborough’s climate change programme which passed the BBC’s own anguished impartiality test.
In the event, ministers seized on the slick, powerful and informative Gore movie as a tool to persuade children, and presumably by extension their parents, to worry about the climate.
And this points to the essentially political nature of the film, and the decision to show it in schools.
So there you have Harrabin making excuses for the lies of Al Gore…..and blaming it all on those awful, ignorant, unscientific Sceptics.
Perhaps that’s why they’re slow out of the traps reporting this:
From the New York Post via Bishop Hill:
Chevron’s landmark lawsuit exposes ‘greenmail’
In a Manhattan courtroom Tuesday, one of the highest-profile environmental campaigns of recent decades is about to be exposed as nothing more than a fraud and extortion racket — “greenmail.”
Chevron is suing lawyer Steven Donziger and a number of activist environmental groups in a civil-racketeering suit, claiming that his landmark $19 billion award against the oil company in an Ecuadorean court was the product of a criminal conspiracy.
Ironically, much of the company’s evidence comes from footage shot for “Crude,” an award-winning pro-Donziger documentary that premiered with much publicity at the Sundance Film Festival.
In an eight-year suit in Ecuador, Donziger and his environmentalist allies argued that the oil company had wantonly polluted the pristine Ecuadorean rainforest, creating vast areas of poisoned land and causing huge spikes in cancer and other diseases.
Chevron got a court order for more than 500 hours of footage from “Crude” that never made it into the documentary.
They show Donziger full of contempt for the country he says he cares about, openly boasting about how corrupt Ecuador’s judicial system is and planning to intimidate the judge because “the only language . . . this judge is going to understand is one of pressure, intimidation and humiliation.”
The filmmaker even recorded the lawyers lamenting that no pollution had spread from the original drilling sites and “right now all the reports are saying . . . nothing has spread anywhere at all” and how this lack of pollution was a serious problem.
But the footage also shows Donziger figuring he can brazen it out: “If we take our existing evidence on groundwater contamination, extrapolate based on nothing other than our . . . theory . . . then we can do it. And we can get money for it.”
Chevron will produce evidence that Donziger forged the signature of American experts on reports claiming widespread pollution — when these same experts had actually filed reports finding no such thing.
And that Donziger and his associates paid the Ecuadorean court’s “independent” expert more than a quarter of a million dollars so they could ghost-write his findings — the report that recommended the massive damages.
Chevron even promises to show that Donziger offered a judge on the case a $500,000 bribe to swing the judgment.
Chevron is arguing that Donziger and his environmental allies are no better than the mafia extorting money out of the company based on threats and fraud.
Disgraceful behaviour by the Pro-AGW brigade but then what else do you really expect from a bunch of fanatics.
Also interesting to listen to a programme on R4 called Feedback?, which had some rather one sided opinions stating that it was a travesty that people who are not Pro-AGW were allowed a voice on the Beeb!, the BBC also allowed the discredited Prof Jones airtime to explain why AGW doubters should not be heard..
laughably .
“science based on consensus”, …
what the hell type of bloody “scientist” is he
“no matter what the evidence, deniers won t admit they re wrong” … well yes … evidence? …
“based on the evidence, the facts” … ah yes evidence/the facts?
those “facts” are patently incorrect … evidence? well ….
there isn t any, and the deeply flawed projections show this.
Those “deniers” are so bat shit crazy, it should be just so easy for Harribin and Co to actually have a fair debate with them, with the powerpoints all at hand …
and explain away their craziness, all on the BBC wouldn t it, be interesting viewing.
Only …. they won t?, because the truth hurts … A LOT.
so all you get, is this sniveling, mean spirited, character assassination instead of hard debate, and harder facts.
yep! the facts … remember them?
Damn! I knew Harrabin was a two-bit purveyor of subtruth and sleaze but I had no idea he was quite so shameless and obnoxious about it.
Look to your sins, Roger, you lying scumbag. You and the rest of the anti-scientists in the fourth estate shall have your own gallows at Climate Nuremberg.
It is ‘their’ way. The green mafia much like watermelons and lefties in general are not too concerned about facts they don’t like, especially ones that prove them wrong.
BBC need to be held to account for this Winter’s slaughter of the elderly unable to comply with the Green Tax Genocide. I’d like to see Harrabin in the dock, along with all the directors of Greenpeace . Any lawyers out there want to redeem their profession from ‘uman Rights and ambulance chasing – you know what to do.
AGW was just one more quack doom hypothesis floated around by a bunch of third rate bean counters. What changed was that corporate financial bodies and governments, came to realize that it had the potential to be the greatest instrument for additional taxation as well as control of the body politic, while making them appear as shining knights who were sallying forth to rescue the planet ( good vote catcher).
The fact remains, AGW aka Climate Change, is backed by Western governments, the financial world, including the World Bank, all out to siphon billions out of the pockets of ordinary people.
We must not forget the EU, which intends to grab a slice of
this windfall. Then there is the UN, which will also get a slice of the bonanza. Its way too good a scam to be lightly thrown away.
The AGW scam, aka known as ACC, had been perpetrated by private individuals, it would be quite rightly treated as a criminal offence, and the perpetrators sent to jail- specially when the scam caused deaths.
It is quite likely that there will an increase in the number of deaths of the elderly in the coming years – a direct effect of this scam. If this happens, it must be treated as sabotage of the nation and criminal incompetence, leading to deaths, and prosecuted as such.
An Inconvenient Truth was nothing more than a ranting propaganda exercise invented by an egotistical and deluded loser who was throwing an hysterical tantrum because the American Voters had dared to elect a Republican with a background in Oil, sorry the AGWs bogeyman, “BIG Oil”, instead of falling for the slimy Democratic Shoe In.
The simple truth is that Gore’s oversized ego could not tolerate the fact that he was beaten by Bush, not once but twice and set out to humble Bush in the hope he could turn public opinion against him and force him to slavishly submit to cutting America’s throat by signing up to the same lunatic measures adopted by the EUSSR.
Gore never intended the film to stick to any kind of facts, it was simply intended to fool the public into believing it’s propaganda much as the films of Leni Riefenstahl drove public opinion in Germany in the 1930s and 40s.
BishopHill:
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/10/18/worst-bbc-programme-of-all-time.html
As always, the comments too are a rich seam.
Given demands of debate demanded (albeit to a selective degree) by some here, this quoted section is a corker:
“”Should one be impartial when the facts are clear?” ‘There’s that famous BBC balance again. In the intro. Setting the scene without any ambiguity’
Looks like the Arctic sea ice is recovering nicely. Don’t tell Greenpeace. (Oh and they can stop whining about being arrested for boarding a Russian Ship – the Russians aren’t governed by the same softy-liberal elite as other countries. One would have thought they would have known that.)
Somebody else pointed out to us the other day in regard of “Feedback” .
For the Bookerites amongst us, it`s worth a listen…it`s on again tonight(8.00pm?)
If you want to know the bias and gathering storms from these Climate Change Nazis, you`ll hear fifteen minutes on why the likes of Booker, Lawson etc have to be silenced and denied any platform on the national broadcaster.
Apparently they`re not qualified to talk about such things…Steve Jones rather agrees…he did the BBC Trusts blowjobbie on its own science coverage(and they moan at the police judging themselves).
Jones is a geneticist.
Harrabin is…well you tell me( and not a journalist in any accepted sense of the word).
So I tune in to BH this morning…and Nick Stern(or Lord Stern of the Climate Change Report fame) is on . His credentials to pronounce on “climate change” are not to be gainsaid-he`s an economist, but hey..he`s on the BBCs side.
F***in hypocrites..top to tail.
Still-Booker and Lawson eh?…
Thank God for the likes of Booker and Lawson – and Delingpole, too.
They have the chutzpah to tell it like it is, no holds barred. It’s a shame there are not more like them, and that the MSM fails to give them a proper voice.