The Newspaper of the San Francisco Bay Chapter
May - June 2006
TABLE OF CONTENTS
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Club opposes Chevron pollution initiative
Chevron is the sponsor of an initiative to restrict awards of punitive damages against polluters. The Sierra Club opposes the so-called "Product Liability. Immunity from Punitive Damages" initiative, currently circulating petitions for the November ballot.
The initiative would protect defendants in product-liability suits from punitive damages when they have followed regulatory standards and obtained government approval for a product that later turns out to be defective and causes injury. Since the initiative would apply retroactively to existing litigation, Chevron is clearly trying to avoid punitive damages for its contamination of groundwater supplies with MTBE. The measure would also make it harder to deter future pollution and to get rid of toxins in consumer products and pesticides.
Though punitive damages are often not sought in cases involving environmental harm, they can act as an extremely effective deterrent to reprehensible corporate behavior. For example, in the Exxon Valdez oil spill the court awarded $5 billion in punitive damages to punish the corporation (and its drunkard captain) for the devastating effects on the Alaskan environment. (Although the award was 12 years ago, Exxon has not yet paid anything.) In product-liability cases, awards of punitive damages can encourage corporations to develop safer products.
It would be unwise to eliminate this tool from product-liability cases just because a governmental standard was followed. In many instances - asbestos is a good example - corporate polluters have kept government standards weak or non-existent while they continued to profit from practices that they knew were causing injury and death. Following a standard that companies may have spent millions of dollars lobbying to weaken should not justify the infliction of toxic contamination on our communities. Both California and federal courts already require careful scrutiny to prevent unreasonably large awards of punitive damages.
The Sierra Club urges you not to sign this destructive initiative.
© 2006 San Francisco Sierra Club Yodeler