Whatever The Cause, Follow The Money

Yesterday the U.K. Daily Mail reported that Kerry Kennedy stands to make $40 million dollars from her support of the Ecuadorian rain forests.

The article reports:

Local courts recently ordered Chevron to pay $18 billion in damages-which the company is now appealing- and if the decision is upheld, $40 million of that money could go straight to Ms Kennedy.  

The New York Post reports that Ms Kennedy, 52, was hired to put a well-known face on the issue, and she has publicly campaigned for the cause by appearing on CNN and writing an op-ed piece for The Huffington Post.

In the 2009 Huffington Post piece, Ms Kennedy told of her trip to the northern area of the country where Texaco- an oil company later bought and now represented by Chevron- drilled about 350 oil wells throughout the rain forest.

I don’t know if Chevron did $18 billion in damages to the Ecuadorian rain forest. I have no idea how you measure that sort of thing. But I do know that paying Kerry Kennedy $40 million dollars is not going to help the Ecuadorian rain forests in any way. How much of the $18 billion sought in the lawsuit will go to the people impacted by whatever damage was done to the rain forest? Who actually pays the $18 billion if the people asking for it win the case? Who actually benefits from this whole legal exercise? This is the sort of thing that makes me question the motives of many of the people who claim to be out to save the planet.

 

 

 

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