San Francisco - Global Exchange is excited to announce the launch of its new Chevron Program with an Op Ed (below) in today's San Francisco Chronicle by Program Director, Antonia Juhasz. Ms. Juhasz is the lead author and editor of The True Cost of Chevron: An Alternative Annual Report released by Global Exchange and several other organizations in May 2009 at Chevron's annual shareholder meeting in San Ramon, California.

Global Exchange has launched the new Chevron Program in recognition of both the growing power and influence of Chevron as it rises from the sixth to the fifth largest corporation in the world and the budding new movement of Chevron-affected communities combining their efforts in resistance to Chevron's harms.

Global Exchange is an activist human rights organization. It is a multiracial, multicultural non-profit research, education and action center dedicated to advocating and working for political, economic and social justice globally.

Antonia Juhasz is an energy and corporate policy analyst. Her most recent book is The Tyranny of Oil: the World's Most Powerful Industry—And What We Must Do To Stop It (HarperCollins, 2008). Her articles and opinion pieces have run in many outlets, including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, International Herald Tribune and Los Angeles Times. A frequent media commentator, Juhasz was featured in the CNBC documentary, "The Hunt for Black Gold," and has appeared on programs including, CNBC's Kudlow & Company and Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Juhasz will maintain her current affiliations with the Institute for Policy Studies, Oil Change International, and Foreign Policy in Focus.

Chevron owes more to Richmond and California

Antonia Juhasz

Friday, July 17, 2009

This week, Fortune magazine released its list of the 500 largest corporations in the world. With a nearly 25 percent increase in its revenues from 2007, Chevron Corp. moved from the sixth to the fifth largest corporation in the world. Only 36 countries on the planet had GDPs larger than Chevron's $263 billion in 2008 revenues.

By revenue, Chevron is the largest corporation in California, the second-largest U.S. oil corporation and the third-largest corporation in the nation. Chevron's nearly $24 billion in profits for 2008 were its largest on record and the fourth-highest profits of any corporation in the world. Chevron's profits have increased every year since 2002, increasing by an astounding 2,100 percent.

Those who have not benefited are the Richmond community, the site of Chevron's oldest refinery, and the state of California.

In November, Richmond voters passed Measure T. At the current price of oil, it would provide the city with an additional $16 million annually from Chevron (adding 11 percent to the city's tax revenues). Chevron sued, challenging the new tax.

Chevron has also repeatedly blocked state initiatives to impose a severance tax on oil extracted in the state. California is the only major oil producing state in the nation without such a tax. It is estimated that imposition of a severance tax could bring in over $1 billion a year to the California state budget.

Moreover, the Los Angeles Times reports Chevron's role in lobbying to keep initiatives to increase corporate taxation more broadly off the table in the state's budget negotiations.

The Chevron Richmond refinery is already the largest industrial polluter in the Bay Area. The Environmental Protection Agency reported nearly 100,000 pounds of toxic waste from the site in 2007, including more than 4,000 pounds of benzene, a known human carcinogen. The refinery is now, and has been, listed as in "high priority violation" of air compliance standards, among other violations, by the EPA every year since at least 2006.

Chevron now wants to retool the refinery to burn heavier crude that can be much more polluting than lighter grades. The senior scientist at Richmond's Communities for a Better Environment has found no technological fix available to ensure that a refinery can mitigate this type of pollution. CBE joined other community health and environmental groups to block the retooling, and the court ruled in their favor. The groups are now asking the city to better regulate the refinery by specifically capping the type of crude it can refine to ban the heavier more polluting grades. Chevron has said it plans to appeal the ruling. (It will also give Richmond community programs $565,000 in grants connected to the project.)

Unfortunately, Chevron had already begun construction at the refinery and subsequently laid off 1,100 workers. Community groups have asked Chevron to instead work on necessary upgrades they have been demanding for years to make the refinery cleaner and safer - work that would create many jobs.

More beneficial to the long-term health of all who live in the city - including refinery workers - is not only a cleaner and safer refinery, but a company willing to give back to the communities within which it operates and the state it calls home.

Antonia Juhasz is the director of the Chevron program at Global Exchange in San Francisco. www.GlobalExchange.org.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/17/ED1B18NQA9.DTL

This article appeared on page A - 15 of the San Francisco Chronicle