Excerpt: "Shell has created a 'safety zone' to
keep protesters out of its drilling sites, but its unblinking, destructive
quest for profit must be addressed by Obama to curb the very real threat
climate change."
Activists protest against the Shell drilling rig Polar Pioneer in Seattle, Washington, on 16 May 2015. (photo: Jason Redmond/Reuters)
Shell's Arctic Drilling Is the Real Threat to the
World, Not Kayaktivists
By
Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein and Annie Leonard, Guardian UK
09 June 15
Oil firm has created a ‘safety zone’ to
keep protesters out of its drilling sites but its unblinking, destructive quest
for profit must be addressed by Obama and others
Shell has one or two rivals for the title of Planet’s
Most Irresponsible Company, but it’s definitely the most ironic.
The grand irony, of course, is that, having watched
the Arctic melt as global temperatures rose, Shell was first in line to drill
the newly melted waters for yet more oil which would raise the temperature some
more.
But lately, the planetary-scale irony was compounded
by one of a more local variety, contained in the phrase safety zone.
Here’s the backstory: In May, Shell convinced a
federal judge in Alaska to enjoin Greenpeace from protesting
too closely to Shell’s Arctic drilling vessels. This restricted
area, or safety zone, was set at 500 yards (457 metres) while these vessels
transit in Seattle’s Puget Sound. Then, last month, 500 kayaks congregated
around one of Shell’s giant Arctic drilling rigs as it sat in Puget Sound, a David-and-Goliath
picture that flew across the web. And a couple of brave souls peacefully
suspended themselves from another one of its drilling vessels, as others had
done a month earlier.
No one was hurt. But Shell didn’t like any of this, so
the company, in a not-so-subtle attempt to intimidate opposing voices, decided
to send out a copy of the Greenpeace injunction to 350.org and others who oppose its Arctic drilling
plans.
Of course no court as yet has drawn a safety zone
around the Arctic, even though a January study published in the
journal Nature made it clear that if we open up the stores of gas
and oil in the far north we won’t be able to protect the climate from dramatic
change. Instead, Barack Obama invited Shell to drill.
The president argued on Twitter last week that he
couldn’t stop all drilling the Arctic, but that’s way too easy. True, he can’t
keep the Russians and Canadians from drilling in their territory, but in the US
the decision was entirely up to him. He didn’t have to give the people who
chanted “drill baby drill” at the GOP convention in 2008 what they wanted.
And there is something else too. The need for
coordinated international action to stop climate change is exactly we have been
having United Nations summits on the topic every year since 1990 – with a very
important agreement set to be signed in Paris this December. Obama could be
pushing right now to get a ban on Arctic drilling locked into that agreement –
but draft texts make no mention of such a sensible plan.
In the meantime, there is no safety zone for wildlife
and indigenous people when something goes wrong (and something will go wrong –
if a pipeline can break under the beach in benign Santa Barbara, it’s only a
matter of time before the Chukchi Sea wreaks some kind of havoc on Shell’s
platforms). But even if Shell never spilled a drop, all the carbon it’s
bringing up will eventually be spilled into the atmosphere – an atmosphere
that’s already way past its safety zone, as CO2 emissions have spiked from 280
parts per million in the Holocene to more than 400 ppm today. You can see the
effects already, even from Seattle: Washington is suffering through what the
governor called an unprecedented drought, and last summer battled to contain
the biggest wildfire in its history.
Shell has a long history of this kind of
irresponsibility— this is the same company who worked hand in glove with the
Nigerian military dictatorship that killed Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other
leaders for daring to stand up to Shell; there are drinking water wells in the
Niger Delta where chemicals like benzene can be found at 900 times their safe
levels. It is a company that announced in 2009 it would no longer invest in
solar or wind power because it thought it could make more money from oil. It
is, in the words of the former chief climate envoy for the UK, John Ashton, a
“narcissistic, paranoid, and psychopathic” organisation.
In fact, in a world serious about protecting its
people and its climate, there would be a safety zone several miles outside the
edge of Earth’s atmosphere where Shell was not allowed, and a sign directing it
to wreck Venus instead.
But, as usual, the rich and powerful are using the
legal system to further exploit the planet. The language in the injunction is
richly ironic: Shell was able to obtain “relief” because the threat it faced
was “actual and imminent, not conjectural or theoretical.”
In Shell’s view, this apparently describes the peril
posed by Americans in kayaks. By any honest reading, though, it’s an indictment
of this multinational, one that is utterly undeterred by science in its ceaseless,
unblinking quest for profit.
© 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment