On the day the world finally enacted Kyoto, the oil industry tried to hold a huge party to say, 'we don't care, it's business as usual'. We hope for at least one evening they've been forced to face the reality of what they're doing.
Greenpeace volunteers disrupted the oil industry's most prestigious annual gathering in a Park Lane hotel. The activists blockaded the £250-a-plate dinner as Middle-East energy ministers and the heads of some of the world's most powerful companies arrived.
They gathered to listen to the world's no. 1 climate criminal - Esso boss Lee Raymond - the man who led efforts to wreck Kyoto.
But dozens of Greenpeace volunteers locked themselves together to block the entrances to the Great Hall, where the dinner - intended as the centrepiece of the 91st International Petroleum Week - was due to begin at 7.30pm.
A group of activists also gained entrance to the Great Hall and disrupted the defiant celebration by pouring wine over the tables. Another two activists camouflaged in their finest evening wear were later able to distrupt Esso boss Lee Raymond's speech.
Greenpeace climate campaigner Emily Armistead said from the scene: "According to the UN, climate change is already killing 150,000 people a year, yet Raymond and Esso have waged a ten-year campaign against efforts to tackle the threat. The men and women who feed the world's oil addiction came to London to hear him speak in a show of defiance against Kyoto. Instead we told them to consider the terrible damage they're wreaking on our planet."
Earlier in the day 35 Greenpeace activists stopped trading on the global oil market by occupying the International Petroleum Exchange which trades all the world's Brent crude each afternoon. One thousand billion dollars of business is done each year on this trading floor as if the lives of millions and the future of whole species mean nothing.
