Our International Executive Director Kumi Naidoo is right now braving freezing seas to scale an Arctic oil rig. He's taking direct action to demand an end to Arctic drilling.
UPDATE: Kumi has been arrested and is being taken to Greenland in a helicopter.Kumi spoke to the Guardian thsi morning just before leaving for the rig. You can listen to the interview here:
Kumi arrived at the base of the rig by an inflatable speedboat after evading a Danish navy warship that has been circling the rig for several weeks. He’s now climbing 30 metres up the outside of one of the platform's giant legs while being hosed down by water canons.
A
navy helicopter is about to take off from the warship protecting the rig. Radio
traffic has made it obvious that Kumi is soon going to be the subject of the
attentions of Danish navy forces.
Before leaving the Esperanza he told us why he was doing it:
After a freezing dash out from the coast of Greenland
in a small boat to meet the Esperanza, I'm now preparing to leave again at
first light to board the Cairn oil rig Leiv Eiriksson.
With one companion I'll follow in the footsteps of the twenty Greenpeace
activists who've gone
before me in the past two weeks. Together they prevented Cairn's reckless
deep sea oil drilling here in the Arctic for a
total of five days.
Most of them spent almost two weeks in jail and have been deported for their
trouble.
Cairn's response was an attempt to silence peaceful protest with a massive
lawsuit against Greenpeace International. In it they demanded we pay 2 million
euro for each day our action prevented their oil drilling operation. But,
despite a small army of expensive lawyers, it
didn't go Cairn's way in court. The judge awarded them far less than they
asked for and even questioned why Cairn didn't publish its oil spill response
plan as we asked.
What's a spill response plan? It's the document that an oil company has to draw
up explaining how it would clean up a spill. They are nearly always made
public, but Cairn is keeping its one secret. Why? Because you can't clean up an
Arctic oil spill, that's what the experts say, and publishing the plan would
show that Cairn hasn't got a viable plan.
We have made repeated requests for Cairn's oil spill plan, including phone
calls, faxes, emails, a visit to the company's UK headquarters and finally our
delegation of 18 boarding the rig. Cairn claims the Greenland
authorities won't allow it to publish the spill plan, but Greenpeace has legal
advice making it clear that Cairn could easily publish the plan if it wanted
to. It's standard industry practice.
Cairn is keeping the plan secret because it knows it is not worth the paper it
is written on. Cairn is hiding it from the people of Greenland
whose real economy depends on fisheries and a clean environment. It is hiding
it from Greenpeace because it knows it cannot clean up a spill. It is hiding it
from its investors who, if they knew the full extent of the risks, would think
twice about investing.
In the final hearing the court did stipulate that Greenpeace is liable for
50,000 euro for each further day we interfere with Cairn's drilling. It's far
less than Cairn asked for, but still a significant sum.
I have with me the names of 50,000 people who emailed Cairn to demand they
publish their spill response plan. I am about to go aboard the rig to deliver
those 50,000 names with a personal call that Cairn leaves the Arctic.
For me this is one of the defining environmental battles of our age, it's a
fight for sanity against the madness of those who see the disappearance of the
Arctic sea ice as an opportunity to profit. As the ice retreats the oil
companies want to send the rigs in and drill for the fossil fuels that got us
into this mess in the first place.
Fossil fuel driven climate change is already making life hard for millions. I
have seen this first hand where I come from in Africa
and it will only get worse unless we can phase out our addiction to oil.
We have to draw a line somewhere and I say we draw that line here today. Join me by adding your name to our petition calling on Cairn to publish their oil spill response plan.
The Arctic oil rush is such a serious threat to the climate, to this beautiful
fragile place and to our hopes for a better future that I felt we had no
choice. So I volunteered to come to the rig and make a personal appeal backed
by Greenpeace supporters everywhere to call for an end to this dangerous arctic
oil drilling.
Cairn has something to hide, they won't dare publish their plan to clean up an
oil spill here in the Arctic, and that's
because it can't be done. I'm going onto that rig to give them the names of
fifty thousand people who've emailed them to demand they publish their plan,
and I won't leave until I have it in my hands.
