ANCHORAGE, Alaska – A coalition of Alaska Natives has combined forces with some of the heaviest hitters in the environmental community to challenge a plan by Shell to drill for oil off northwest Alaska.
The legal challenge to Shell’s approved drilling plan for the Chukchi Sea was filed Wednesday in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The groups say the plan approved by the Minerals Management Service does not comply with federal environmental laws. And they say the plan was approved without evaluating the potential impact of a major oil spill in the Chukchi Sea.
The MMS has approved a Shell drilling plan for up to three exploratory wells in the Chukchi next summer.
Several environmental groups are threatening to sue coal producer Massey Energy Co. for what they claim are more than 12,000 violations of pollution laws.
The Sierra Club and several West Virginia groups said Monday they’ve given Massey a notice that gives the company 60 days to reach a settlement or face a lawsuit.
The groups claim Massey has continued with the same pattern of violations covered by a $20 million settlement with the Environmental Protection Agency two years ago.
Videos posted online by US oil company Chevron purporting to show rampant corruption among Ecuadoran officials are actually a set-up meant to taint an ongoing trial against the energy giant, an attorney in the case alleged.
“By releasing the videos, in my opinion Chevron is trying to taint a trial process that they knew they were going to lose, with the hope that the case would be dismissed in Ecuador,” Steven Donziger, an attorney for Ecuadoran Amazon communities who are suing the oil giant told reporters.
Chevron at the end of August released several grainy videos purporting to show “a three-million-dollar bribery scheme implicating the judge presiding over the environmental lawsuit” against the US oil major.
The Ecuadorans allege that Chevron dumped billions of gallons of toxic waste into the Amazon.
But a report released Thursday by the Amazon Defense Coalition found that one of the individuals said to have produced the videos was a convicted felon with “a habit of breaking the law” and with longstanding ties to the oil company.
State regulators violated the Alaska Constitution when they approved exploration permits for the proposed Pebble copper and gold mine without allowing the public to weigh in first, according to a civil lawsuit filed Wednesday.
The suit was filed in Anchorage Superior Court by a coalition of eight Bristol Bay Native village corporations, former Alaska first lady Bella Hammond, state constitutional convention delegate Victor Fischer and several residents of Southwest Alaska villages.
The plaintiffs say a judge should throw out the exploration and temporary water-use permits for Pebble, a massive and controversial prospect in Southwest Alaska. They also want the judge to invalidate the state’s permitting system for hard-rock mining exploration and block state regulators from issuing new permits for Pebble until the Legislature adopts a new permit system for mineral exploration.
