Last week, the oil industry was in London. The World National Oil Companies Congress - sponsored by the likes of Chevron, Total and Statoil and addressed by BP's Bob Dudley - "brings together the most senior executives from NOCs [National Oil Companies]" to discuss, among other things, how to "overcome deepwater challenges" and "benefit from shale and unconventional opportunities".
To put it another way, they're lining up to squeeze the last barrels of oil out of the ground in the hardest to reach places and in the riskiest of ways.
So we decided to gently remind them that the world is watching. In particular, we are watching their peers at Cairn Energy, who are spearheading the new Arctic oil rush without a plan for what to do in the event of an oil spill.
As delegates arrived on Wednesday and fired up their laptops, instead of being greeted by the conference's own portal page, they were served a Greenpeace message telling them it's time for Cairn to make its Arctic spill response plan public:
We've been to Cairn's headquarters, we've been to their oil rigs, the global head of Greenpeace has even been to the Arctic (and prison) in an attempt to find the elusive plan. Tens of thousands of you have asked them to publish it. The silence from Cairn continues to deafen.
Why no spill response? Because Cairn knows that a BP-style oil spill in the Arctic would be an irreversible disaster. If Cairn published the plan, the real risk to the pristine wilderness of the Arctic - and the real risk of investing in such a reckless venture - would be plain to see.
If we want a healthy planet, we have to wean ourselves off oil, and we're going to keep putting pressure on industry and governments to go beyond oil.
