Greenpeace USA | What we do | Contact us | Donate
THE WITNESS
Ben is the senior polar campaign director for Greenpeace International. 
Shell's Kulluk Drill Rig Runs Aground in Alaska
While the thought of official councils — with their high-level policy workshops and multilateral task forces — is enough to send most sensible people into fits of abysmal loathing, there is one such council that anyone passionate about the high north should care about: the Arctic Council. Continue reading
In another example of why drilling for oil in the Arctic is such a monumentally bad idea, Shell’s drilling rig, the Kulluk, has run aground off the island of Sitkalidak, near Kodiak in Alaska. Continue reading
There has been a flurry of recent news stories picking up on new scientific data showing increased sea ice at the South Pole. This is because the sea ice circling Antarctica reached a record high level late last month, extending 7.51 million square miles, the most ever recorded by satellite. Continue reading
Greenpeace protests oil drilling in the Arctic
“Oil on Greenland would be a disaster.”
“Energy companies should not drill for crude in Arctic waters.”
“The risk of an oil spill in such an environmentally sensitive area is simply too high.”
Sounds familiar? Today, it’s not Greenpeace saying this – it’s a major oil company.
Total has warned today in a Financial Times article against drilling for oil in the Arctic. The dangers of Arctic oil are nothing new – that’s exactly what we’ve been saying for a long time now – but this is the first time a major oil company says the same.
When an oil baron warns against Arctic drilling the world should sit up and take notice. Total admitting that an oil spill in the ice would be devastating flies in the face of the bland reassurances from the likes of Shell and Gazprom that they can operate safely in the most extreme environment on Earth.
Some cynical people might say that Total should know what kind of effect a major oil spill has on your company’s reputation – they were handed a massive fine just yesterday by a French court for the Erika oil disaster. However, this is simply a case of a company coming to its senses, and realizing some risks are not worth taking.
Almost 2 million people have said no to Arctic drilling already. A major oil company might be a strange bedfellow – but this is simply common sense.
Greenpeace activists shut down a Shell petrol station in Amsterdam.
Last Friday, activists from Greenpeace Netherlands showed up in Shell gas stations in their country and blocked the petrol pumps. They were protesting against Shell’s reckless Arctic drilling plans – which has since then been suspended for this year. Continue reading
One more polar bear spared for another year
You did it.
For over six months, huge numbers of us have been pressuring Shell to stay out of the Arctic. Well this morning, company bosses announced they were scrapping their oil drilling programme for this year. It’s a huge victory for people power. Continue reading
Intrepid polar bears from Greenpeace visited Gazprom’s Moscow headquarters.
Early this morning, a team of intrepid polar bears from Greenpeace visited Gazprom’s flashy headquarters in Moscow. At the same time, activists from Greenpeace in Germany set up a leaking oil derrick outside the Gazprom offices in Berlin. Continue reading
Last night, Hannah and Luke, our two brave climbers, were removed from the Arctic survival pod that had been suspended from the underside of the 53,000 tonne Leiv Eiriksson oil rig, here off the coast of Greenland, for the last 100-odd hours.
By hanging near the “moon pool” where the rig’s drill-bit would normally be sunk, they stopped it drilling for over four days.
The two were arrested and taken to the Greenland capital of Nuuk, where they remain in custody, but are safe and well. The Greenpeace ship Esperanza, where I am sitting now, remains just outside the 500m exclusion zone, imposed by a Danish navy warship, around the Atammik drill site in these chilly, fog-bound seas.
You would have thought that getting the armed might of the Danish navy involved to remove to peaceful protestors and stop us shining a light on dangerous deep water drilling in the Arctic would be enough for most companies.
Not Cairn Energy (LON:CNE), the rig operator.
It has gone a step further, lodging legal papers threatening us with massive fines of 2 million Euros for every day we are here stopping the rig drilling.
The claim will be heard in Amsterdam on Monday, but what’s more, in these legal papers Cairn says that the delays we have caused its drilling are costing it $4m a day.
Now, earlier today the company claimed to media, including the BBC, that the four-day occupation has had “no impact on its schedule.” Yet in the court documents Cairn estimates that “the damage resulting from delay to those drilling activities at least USD 4 million per day. The urgent character of the plaintiffs’ demand thus speaks for itself.”
What to believe? Personally, I think we all know the word to use when one person is telling two different things to two different people, knowing full well that only one of them happens to be correct, but our lawyers have just reminded me that they’ve yet to meet a poor libel lawyer. Suffice to say that were Bill Gammell ever caught making such outlandish claims in public his nose would grow to such a length that he could quite easily use it to drill a deep water well of his very own.
Since we started our occupation Cairn has hid behind the Greenland government and the Danish Navy, and now it’s trying to use the Dutch courts to stop us exposing the huge risks it’s taking with this beautiful and fragile environment, or cover up the threat to the economy of Greenland, which is so reliant on fishing.
It can hire all the lawyers it likes, but they won’t shut down our campaign to kick the oil companies out of the Arctic. We’ll challenge Cairn and its expensively suited lawyers every step of way.