Climate Change

Ten days after the leak began, Total is still struggling to contain the gas pouring from its North Sea Elgin platform, citing bad weather as the cause of the delays. Yet, in just 100 days’ time, Shell wants to start drilling for oil in the remote and extreme Arctic environment – claiming it has the technology and the tools to deal with any spill.

Here are six reasons why an oil spill in the Arctic would be so much harder to deal with than a gas leak in the North Sea, and so much more catastrophic:

In early March, our colleagues in Russia visited Noyabrsk, in the middle of the West Siberian oil fields, to bear witness to a long-lasting battle between local indigenous communities and oil companies, and to document the widespread pollution caused by oil exploration.