Greenpeace International Executive Director, Kumi Naidoo is risking jail time in his effort to stop drilling for oil in the Arctic. Earlier this month Greenpeace was in court in Holland where Cairns Energy was seeking an injunction against them. Cairns Energy sought to prevent Greenpeace volunteers from entering and interfering with the exploratory drilling in the ocean between Greenland and Canada. The Dutch judge eventually granted Cairns Energy the injunction but not until he put some hard questions to the lawyers for the energy company about their elusive emergency plans.
Naidoo managed to elude the Danish navy vessels patrolling the area around the Leiv Eirksson drilling platform to reach an access ladder. This was accomplished by a using a fast inflatable launched from the Esperanza, a Greenpeace vessel. He planned to present a petition carrying 50 000 signatures from people who are demanding a copy of Cairns Energy’s oil spill response plan. In retrospect, the plans that BP had last summer with their catastrophic oil blowout in the Gulf of Mexico proved woefully inadequate.
Greenpeace maintains that Cairns won’t release its plans for a clean up because no clean up could be done. If a release of oil occurred late in the short Arctic summer, there would be no time to mop up and remediate before the hard freeze of winter. An oil blowout in late summer would have to be left to pollute the ocean under the ice throughout the winter.
The oil spill in the Gulf is continuing to have harmful effects to both people and the environment a year later, and the long term results of the pollution and dispersants are not yet known. In cold climates, the effects last much longer. For example, the Exxon Valdes disaster in Prince William Sound, Alaska, still shows globs of oil on the beaches 20 years later. Even a small release of oil in the high Arctic would be catastrophic to the fragile ecosystem there.
“The Arctic oil rush is such a serious threat to the climate and to this beautiful fragile environment that I felt Greenpeace had no choice but to return, so I volunteered to do it myself. Cairn has something to hide, it won’t publish its 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.”Kumi Naidoo
More info on the Dutch court hearings:
http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/9363792-injunction-will-not-stop-arctic-oil-campaign
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