Posted by jamie — 1 October 2009 at 11:10am
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Yesterday's fantastic direct action at Suncor's tar sands complex in Alberta is over. Two giant conveyor belts were blockaded for 10 hours and a giant banner was floated on the nearby Athabasca river. You can still catch some of the footage from the live video feeds and there are some great images in the slideshow above.
Check this out. The video above is a live feed from a tar sands facility in Canada, where Greenpeace teams are shutting down a conveyor belt and blocking a bridge. It just started in the last half hour so details on this side of the Atlantic are scant, but keep an eye on the live feeds from the two locations (location one here, location two here) and keep up with the #stoptarsands tag on Twitter, helpfully Scribbled below.
New report increases pressure on BP and Shell as oil majors prepare to post disappointing quarterly results
27 July, 2009
A new analysis of oil demand forecasts from the world's leading energy agencies
has uncovered a significant emerging risk for international oil companies
investing in Canada's environmentally destructive tar sands. The report,
entitled Shifting Sands, calls into question the long term profitability of
unconventional oil assets due to major downward revisions of growth in global
oil demand over the next decade.
Posted by jamie — 9 June 2009 at 2:46pm
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Shell has ducked
out of the major international trial it faced over human
rights abuses in Nigeria, and last night opened its wallet to fork out
$15.5m (£9.6m) in a last minute settlement. After 13 years of bringing this
case to court, it's a relief for the relatives of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight
others executed for campaigning against Shell's human rights abuse and
environmental crimes in the Niger Delta.
Posted by jossc — 22 December 2008 at 10:23am
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The tension built as the judges deliberated. Then at last the results were were all in and - ta-da! It was time to announce the winner of the first annual Greenpeace 'Emerald Paintbrush' award for greenwashing above and beyond the call of duty. Cue a quick roll on the drums, and step forward into the spotlight - BP!
The energy corporation with an income larger than most of the world's nation states has spent a lot of time and money restyling itself as being 'Beyond Petroleum' in recent years, but a trawl through their accounts quickly reveals just how empty that assertion really is - 'Back to Petroleum', more like it.
Posted by bex — 4 August 2008 at 10:59am
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Here's the latest in the Deep Green column from Rex Weyler -author, journalist, ecologist and long-time Greenpeace trouble-maker. The opinions here are his own.
As the era of cheap liquid fuels draws to an end, everything about modern consumer society will change. Likewise, developing societies pursuing the benefits of globalization will struggle to grow economies in an era of scarce liquid fuels. The most localized, self-reliant communities will experience the least disruption.
Oil is a fixed asset of the planet, representing stored sunlight accumulated over a billion years as early marine algae, and other marine organisms (not dinosaurs) captured solar energy, formed carbon bonds, gathered nutrients, died, sank to the ocean floors, and lay buried under eons of sediment. Like any fixed non-renewable resource, oil is limited, and its consumption will rise, peak, and decline.
Canada's Tar Sands project has been suffering from a bit of a PR problem, what with it being one of the most ludicrous and environmentally catastrophic schemes ever to have occurred to humankind and all.
(If you haven't heard of it yet, the plan is to extract crude oil from bituminous sand and clay in Northern Alberta. To produce one barrel of oil, up to four tonnes of rock and soil - plus the pristine boreal forest on top of it - need to be removed and four barrels of surface and ground water need to be used. The process is so energy intensive that tar sands produce up to five times more greenhouse gases than conventional oil.)
