Gulliver

Royal Dutch Shell is a fossil fuel exploration company. In the Niger River Delta, the company was responsible for an average of 2,976 spills a week between 1976 to 1991, on the land of the Ogoni people. The Ogoni say that Shell was behind the hanging of nine Ogoni activists fighting Shell, including poet Ken Saro-Wiwa. In Durban, South Africa, Shell is a part-owner of the South Africa Petroleum Refinery, where rates of leukemia are 24 times higher than the national average and children suffer 4 times the respiratory problems. Shell also operates a chemical plant and a refinery in Norco, Louisiana, in a predominately African-American community known as “Cancer Alley.” Seven workers were killed in a 1988 explosion at the refinery. The flares from the refinery burned so bright after Hurricane Ida in 2021 that they could be seen 25 miles away.

Shin-Etsu is a chemical maker based in Tokyo, Japan, that was founded in 1926 in Nagano prefecture to make nitrogen fertilizer. Later it expanded into other products like polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and semiconductor silicon. Shintech, a wholly owned subsidiary of Shin-Etsu, opened a PVC factory in Freeport, Texas, in 1974 and proposed a new plant in Convent, Louisiana, but was defeated in 1998 by environmental justice activists after a massive fight over projected dioxin, ethylene dichloride and vinyl chloride pollution – all of which are known carcinogens. However, Shintech ultimately won approval of two other plants nearby – in Addis and Plaquemine that were constructed in 2000 and 2008 respectively and then expanded several times.

In 2008, Shintech was ordered to pay total penalties of over $12 million for air pollution in Freeport, and in December 2020, the company was ordered to pay $356,000 for incidents involving thousands of pounds of chemical releases and worker injuries over a dozen years at the Louisiana plants. Eight weeks after the Louisiana settlement, the state approved a $1.3 billion expansion of the company’s facilities in Plaquemine, but environmental justice activists have started to organize to try to stop it. Unfortunately local politicians in Iberville parish have not merely agreed to the Plaquemine expansion but approved a $110 million tax break for the company.

Siemens Energy, a former subsidiary of engineering giant Siemens, makes products like compressors, generators and turbines for the power industry. The Association of Ethical Shareholders Germany estimates that the products sold by Siemens Energy during the 2022 fiscal year will release a total of 1.3 billion tons of greenhouse gases, almost twice Germany’s annual emissions. For example, Siemens Energy is supplying turbines to Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction for a planned coal-fired power plant on the island of Java, Indonesia.

One of Siemens Energy's biggest subsidiaries is Siemens Gamesa, a major wind turbine maker that it took over in 2023. Siemens Gamesa has several contracts to supply onshore wind farms in the desert of Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony that was illegally annexed by Morocco in 1975. It is also a major supplier of turbines for the dozens of big wind farms in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, such as the 70 megawatt Bii Nee Stipa II that was built in 2012, which have been criticized for their impact on (Zapotecs) and the Ikoojt (Huave) Indigenous communities who say that the wind farms have cut off access to their farmlands, sacred shrines, and medicinal herbs and plants.
 

Wind turbine manufacturer Siemens Gamesa was created in April 2017 by the merger of Gamesa in Spain with Siemens Wind Power in Denmark. It owes its success to the generous subsidies for wind power provided by states like Denmark and Germany, over the last four decades. (However, after it made record losses, Siemens Gamesa was bought up by Siemens Energy in 2023.)

Gamesa opened a factory in Pennsylvania to win U.S. government support such as loan guarantees to export $159 million worth of wind turbines to the Honduras for the 102 megawatt Cerro de Hula Wind Farm in 2010. Yet the Lenca people of Rio Blanco, led by the Consejo Cívico de Organizaciones Populares e Indígenas de Honduras (COPINH), say that the operators of the Cerro de Hula Wind Farm simply took over their lands and destroyed their rural livelihoods.