May 2011

We've now been suspended beneath the Cairn oil rig in our Arctic survival pod for over 48 hours.

After leaving the Esperanza at 3am to scale the rig and then a hard day rigging up the pod and setting up camp we were pretty exhausted. But last night we managed to sleep almost 12 hours in our little pod, with a few wake up calls on the radio to update us.

UPDATE: The Danish Navy has arrested our activists and seized the Pod after nearly 100 hours stopping Arctic drilling

This morning we started taking direct action against the world's most controversial oil rig: Cairn Energy's Arctic driller, the 53,000 tonne Leiv Eiriksson, which was hours away from its drill site in Iceberg Alley off Greenland.

There’s a dangerous storm brewing in the North Sea. But this is no natural disaster - it’s been whipped up by oil and gas companies lobbying for a major tax cut.

In the Budget, the Chancellor, George Osborne, announced a fuel duty stabiliser. When oil prices were high – over $75 a barrel to be precise – he’d cut taxes on motoring, and tax oil companies instead. When oil prices dropped below $75 a barrel, he’d whack a tax on fuel, but give oil companies a break. 

We took Paula Bear down to Cairn Energy's HQ yesterday to block their entrance and demand their oil spill response plan.

We learned this week from confidential government documents that an oil spill in the Arctic would be all but impossible to clear up. Yet Cairn say they've got a spill response plan for the Arctic environment. Only thing is, they won't let anyone see it.

Last week, three African fishermen - Karim of Senegal, Celestino of Cape Verde and Issa of Mauritania - were in the UK for the African Voices tour to deliver an urgent message: that EU fleets must stop stealing fish from African Waters.

I'm writing this from the lounge of the Esperanza, and as I look to my right out of a porthole I can see the coast of Greenland. It's 15 miles away but the mountains are so huge it feels like you could reach out and touch them. They are wholly white with snow, and just beyond them is one single huge block of ice as big as America – the Greenland ice-sheet.

Martin Hojsik, leader of the Toxics Water Pollution Project at Greenpeace International, writes on the concealed costs of pollution - on people, planet and profits.   

This morning Paula Bear swung into action as a Greenpeace activist. While our ships are confronting Cairn Energy's oil rig in the Arctic, she’s blocking the entrance to the wildcat drillers' headquarters in Edinburgh.

Horrified that Cairn Energy are drilling for oil in the Arctic, Paula’s rage was tipped over the edge when she learned that Cairn won’t even make their oil spill response plan public.