Greenpeace volunteers will be staging a protest outside the Shell garage on the junction of Glasgow Road and Meadow Place Road this coming Saturday (21 July).
They will be asking motorists to support their campaign to stop Shell from drilling in the Arctic this summer.
Protesters will be joined by Professor Pongoo, a noted local politician who has joined the campaign to support the natives of the Arctic region in an act of inter-polar solidarity.
Professor Pongoo is delighted that his home, the Antarctic, is a safe, oil free environment and he is campaigning so his antipodean brothers and sisters can enjoy freedom from the fear of their demise at the hands of oil companies such as Shell.
Campaigners will be arriving outside the station at 11am.
They’re hoping to speak to hundreds of drivers at the Shell garage and hand out leaflets to them, passers by and the station staff. The leaflets say: ‘You could help us stop Shell from destroying the Arctic’ and warn that ‘drilling in the Arctic risks a spill that the extreme conditions would make near impossible to clean up’ and a ‘spill in this region would devastate both its unique wildlife and the lives of the people that live there’.
Imogen Michel, a spokesperson from Greenpeace in Edinburgh said “We’re protesting at the Shell garage to tell them to stop drilling in the Arctic this summer, and we’re hoping that lots of people from Edinburgh will be interested and join our campaign.
“The Arctic is a beautiful and fragile place. An oil spill there would be catastrophic. We really hope that folks from Edinburgh will help to save the Arctic.”
Shell is the first major oil company to make exploitation of the Arctic a serious corporate focus.
The Arctic region’s extreme weather and short summer season means Shell has a very small window for drilling its exploratory wells before the return of the winter sea ice. The freezing temperatures, the unpredictable weather, and the remoteness of the drill sites all pose unprecedented operational challenges and would make an Arctic oil spill impossible to contain and clean up.
Perhaps most shocking fact of all is that best estimates suggest that by drilling in Arctic we only stand to gain enough oil to last three years at current usage.
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