ChevronTexaco shareholders at their annual meeting Wednesday rejected two proposals questioning the company’s treatment of the environment, before the session ended in a verbal clash between an activist and the firm’s top executive.
Shareholders turned down a measure asking the oil giant to study how drilling could damage fragile ecosystems, including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. They also voted against spending more to clean up a stretch of the Amazon rain forest where Texaco once worked before its 2001 merger with Chevron.
Both measures failed by roughly the same margin, with 91 percent of shareholders voting against them in preliminary results. Last year, a similar motion on Ecuador also garnered 9 percent of the vote.
“By nature, heavy industry will pollute the environment,” said Ralph Hoffmann, 62, of Danville, a shareholder and former Chevron employee who voted against both measures. “ChevronTexaco does a highly commendable job of minimizing its impact on the environment. It’s probably one of the best.”
Activist shareholders pitched the two proposals, arguing that ChevronTexaco had contaminated pristine wilderness lands before and could do so again.
“When the company makes a mistake in these places, it will not only damage the environment, the company will have to pay big time,” said Sierra Club President Larry Fahn, whose group owns 108 ChevronTexaco shares and filed the motion related to Arctic drilling.
David O’Reilly, the company’s chief executive officer, said oil drilling wouldn’t ruin wildlands.
“It’s not ‘either/or.’ It’s ‘and,’ ” he said. “You can explore and produce in sensitive areas.”
O’Reilly also insisted that Texaco had fulfilled its responsibility to clean up pollution in the Ecuadoran Amazon, near oil wells still being operated by a local oil firm. Although his company has been sued in Ecuador, he said tests conducted for the suit “reveal no harmful levels of oil-related contaminants, either in soil or drinking-water samples.”
Those tests have become a subject of bitter disagreement between environmentalists and the company, and the dispute over them helped end Wednesday’s meeting.
During a question-and-answer session with the audience, O’Reilly took several questions related to Ecuador, then said he wouldn’t field any more, saying Ecuador had crowded out other topics. When a member of the San Francisco nonprofit Amazon Watch tried to read a letter critical of ChevronTexaco’s comments about soil and water tests, O’Reilly first had her microphone cut off, then abruptly closed the meeting.
One representative of Ecuador’s indigenous people who had flown to the United States for the meeting was able to address the shareholders before the meeting ended. Another was not.
E-mail David R. Baker at dbaker@sfchronicle.com
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