“Lago Agrio is a forsaken little town where something rather large is going down.”

Lago Agrio, Ecuador, in English “sour lake”, is a former site of 20 years’ worth of oil extraction by Chevron (formerly Texaco), now witness to one of the world’s largest environmental lawsuits, potentially worth $6 billion.

The lawsuit first came to my attention at Live Earth, when Sting left the stage after immediately turning over his press time to his wife, who deferred to a U.S. advocate and the two lead Ecuadorean lawyers, all of whom plead their case (translators on-hand) before the dwindling number of press representatives (preparing for Sting’s stage performance).

In case you missed it (because I did), May’s Vanity Fair featured one of the lead lawyers, Pablo Fajardo, in a good-sized article on the case.

Vanity Fair traces the historical context of the oil extraction, the social and environmental devastation, including off-the-charts contamination levels, and, most poignantly, Fajardo’s personal battle leading up to his involvement with the case.

That said, I’d like to echo Fajardo’s final words of wisdom from the article:

One of the problems with modern society is that it places more importance on things that have a price than on things that have a value. Breathing clean air, for instance, or having clean water in the rivers, or having legal rights–these are things that don’t have a price but have a huge value. Oil does have a price, but its value is much less. And sometimes we make the mistake.

I was seduced back in May by GM’s seeming sincerity in developing a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, the Chevy Volt. We must always remember, however, GM is a master greenwasher.

An article in Edmunds, “Chevrolet Volt Goes to Washington To Underline GM’s Anti-CAFE-Increase Argument,” suggests GM is using the Volt the same way it used fuel cell cars to kill the electric car in California (as the movie explains):

General Motors’ North American operations chief, Troy Clarke, is meeting with legislators on Capitol Hill today, and he’s bringing along the Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid prototype. GM hopes the Volt will help convince lawmakers that electric and alternative-fuel vehicles are the route to energy independence. The Big Three have strenuously opposed a proposed increase in CAFE standards, saying the cost of meeting higher mpg averages would take away resources that could be put toward development of alternative-energy vehicles.

Sad. If the Volt is mostly or even partly a head fake, then Toyota will win surely win the race for the car of the future.

At the same time, the automakers may be winning the fight against the Senate CAFE bill, according to the Wall Street Journal (subs. req’d) and E&E News (subs. req’d), excerpted below:

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Donald Kennedy, Editor-in-Chief of Science has a good op-ed:

With respect to climate change, we have abruptly passed the tipping point in what until recently has been a tense political controversy. Why? Industry leaders, nongovernmental organizations, Al Gore, and public attention have all played a role. At the core, however, it’s about the relentless progress of science. As data accumulate, denialists retreat to the safety of the Wall Street Journal op-ed page or seek social relaxation with old pals from the tobacco lobby from whom they first learned to “teach the controversy.” Meanwhile, political judgments are in, and the game is over. Indeed, on this page last week, a member of Parliament described how the European Union and his British colleagues are moving toward setting hard targets for greenhouse gas reductions.

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More from our top climate scientist (I told you it was a long email — we’re about half way through):

California had a regulation that would have required automobile manufacturers to produce a small percentage of cars without emissions by such-and-such date, and a larger percentage later. Automakers despised this rule, and decided that they had enough clout to ignore it, arguing that it was impractical. Environmentalists seemed to conclude that they were overmatched. Rather than go to the mat, they decided to play ball with the automakers, to try to work with them, accepting promises that the automakers would do everything that they could to improve vehicle efficiencies and reduce emissions.

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