climate change

Greenpeace has been campaigning for more than 20 years to stop oil exploration and drilling in the Beaufort Sea, and our particular focus over the past four years has been BP's Northstar project. Greenpeace has reviewed thousands of documents and permits on the project, and has provided oral and written comment at every stage of the permitting process.

Ever since the discovery of the massive Prudhoe Bay oil field on Alaska's North Slope in 1968, the oil industry has longed to search for and develop offshore. Extreme Arctic conditions and the immensely powerful and shifting Arctic ice pack meant that exploration, and particularly production, would be extremely expensive and risky. Flying in the face of it's 'green' rhetoric and pronouncements on the dangers of climate change, BP Amoco is now trying to move offshore, to develop new oil which will inevitably add to the burden of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Climate protection and the carbon logic

The 1997-1998 El Nino event with its fires, floods and outbreaks of disease and pestilence, offers a glimpse of the future in a 'warmed' world and illustrates vividly the disastrous consequences that even minor fluctuations in the climate system can bring.

Scientists warn that the rates of climate change are likely to exceed any in the last 10,000 years, making it impossible for many ecosystems to adapt and survive.