Thanks to all those who attended Shell’s web chat yesterday.
We were there too and thought the chat did little to dispel the company’s growing reputation as a walking PR disaster. Whilst Shell boasted of having responded to over 80 questions, unfortunately their answers bore little relation to the questions being asked.
This was an hour long master class in obfuscation and evasion.
Between them, a team of over eight Shell execs were unable to muster convincing answers to the simplest of questions. Had their plans ever been tested in winter? (No.) Had they ever capped a well in ice? (No.) Would they be able to marshall anywhere near the 6500 vessels that BP managed in order to deal with the Gulf of Mexico-spill? (They wouldn’t need to as a spill of this size would never happen.)
Any questions about whether the ongoing North Sea leak meant that Shell couldn’t be trusted to drill in the even more treacherous waters of the Arctic were avoided by reminding people that this was a web chat about the Arctic, not the North Sea. NEXT QUESTION PLEASE.
And only two weeks after admitting liability for devastating local communities in Nigeria, the irony that “Shell is committed to being a good neighbor wherever we operate” was lost on them.
Finally, regardless of Shell’s feeble attempts to defend their astonishingly poor track record, they said absolutely nothing to change the fact that an oil spill in the Arctic would be near-impossible to clean up.
