Friends of the Earth Scotland protested today at Cairn Energy’s Wild West intentions to extend oil exploration and extraction in the Arctic. Due to unprecedented ice-cap loss due to global warming, new areas of the Arctic are now being seen as viable sites to drill for oil that was previously unattainable. As well as the contribution this new source of fossil fuel would have to our greenhouse gas emissions, there are serious concerns about the safety and reliability of the drilling operations themselves in such extreme conditions. Friends of the Earth activists recorded a Spaghetti Western video, with a surprising twist, to highlight the recklessness and ridiculousness of Cairn’s ambitions to drill for oil with a completely inadequate plan for dealing with spills.
Paul Daly, corporate accountability campaigner at Friends of the Earth Scotland, said: “Cairn needs to pull back from its Arctic commitments. We urgently need to wean ourselves off our addiction to fossil fuels, not take advantage of the effects of climate change to find oil in newly exposed areas. Cairn’s oil spill response plan was literally laughable. These ‘cowboys’ have some daft ideas about how they would clean up after a spill that demonstrated quite how little regard they have for the Arctic. Cairn should retreat before we have an Arctic calamity.”
Professor Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University’s Polar Ocean Physics Group earlier this year gave evidence to the UK government’s ‘Protecting the Arctic’ enquiry. Professor Wadhams labelled Cairn Energy a “cowboy operation”, and its work as slapdash and dangerous – particularly given the sensitive, unique and unforgiving Arctic territory. The government enquiry concluded that Arctic drilling should be forbidden until there are much more stringent safety measures in place.
Friends of the Earth Scotland campaigns against fossil fuel use that leads to climate change, as well as fossil fuel extraction which endangers the local environment, people and biodiversity, and has called on supporters to tell Cairn to get out of the Arctic.
