Gulliver
Exposing corporate wrongdoing
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NextEra Energy
NextEra Energy, formerly Florida Power and Light, is a Florida-based utility company with operations in Canada and the U.S. Despite being sometimes described as the “greenest energy giant” in the U.S., it generates almost three quarters of its power from natural gas and nuclear. It has used dirty tricks to stop Florida residents from installing rooftop solar in order to preserve its monopoly on electricity in the state. The tricks included coordinating “ghost” candidates during elections, spying on a journalist and taking over a local newspaper, according to leaked documents obtained by Floodlight and the Orlando Sentinel in 2022.
NextEra is also one of the owners of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a 300 mile (483 kilometer) natural gas pipeline that stretches from northwestern West Virginia to southern Virginia. The pipeline would cut through the homes of low-income, Black, and Indigenous people, turning their land into a “sacrifice zone”, which is why they have strongly resisted the project. Construction on the pipeline began in 2018 but has faced legal hurdles due to its environmental impacts, including facing over 450 water-quality-related violations in Virginia and West Virginia.
Occidental Petroleum Corporation
Occidental Petroleum is a fossil fuel company headquartered in Houston, Texas, although it was based in Los Angeles for most of its history. It incorporates the assets of Andarko Petroleum from Texas and Kerr-McGee from Oklahoma, both of which were major fossil companies in their time. In Colombia, the U’wa Indigenous peoples successfully campaigned to force Occidental from drilling on their lands and to sell its concession to Ecopetrol. Occidental continues to operate the 780 kilometer long Caño Limón pipeline in Colombia to the port of Coveñas which has contaminated the Arauca, Capanaparo and Cinaruco rivers. It has been sued for providing military equipment to Colombian army used to massacre union members along the pipeline route. In Peru, Occidental has agreed to a confidential settlement in 2013 with the Achuar Indigenous community for 30 years of contaminating the Corrientes River basin.
Olin Corporation
Olin makes ammunition and chemicals. Founded in 1892, it is now headquartered in Clayton, Missouri. It is the largest supplier of small caliber ammunition to the U.S. military and one of the world’s largest manufacturers of chlorine, used in disinfection and a key ingredient in plastics like polyvinyl chloride or PVC. Historically chlorine was produced using mercury membrane technology at chlor-alkali plants which resulted in highly toxic mercury waste that manufacturers dumped into local environment. For example, Olin bought the Mathieson Alkali Works, which was responsible for dumping 100 pounds of toxic methylmercury daily into the Holston River in Virginia in the first half of the 20th century. Olin has two major chemical manufacturing facilities in Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley’ – a major industrial zone where crude oil is turned into fuel, plastics and other petrochemicals. Olin’s chlor-alkali plant in Plaquemine, Lousiana, has had several major leaks of toxic chlorine notably in 2016 and 2022, which have forced local residents to seek medical assistance. Similar pollution charges have been made against the companies chlor-alkali plants in Alabama and Nevada.
Orange
Orange, formerly known as France Telecom, was a state-owned telecommunications company from its founding in 1889 until it was privatized in 1998. In the decade after privatization, company management embarked on a campaign to reduce labor costs that courts later described as a system of “moral harassment” of staff. Some 22,000 staff quit or were laid off and an estimated 19-60 killed themselves. In 2019, Didier Lombard, the former CEO, was found guilty and sentenced to prison, while the company was ordered to pay €3.5 million to former employees and their families in compensation.