Though a huge industry, this might seem simple, and on such a huge scale it is - fossil fuels cause climate change, we need to tackle climate change, so we need to break the world's addiction to fossil fuels. This involves a lot of changes - political, social, industrial - but one that should be easy in principle is to stop looking for more oil, especially in increasingly marginal and risky areas such as the deep oceans and tar sands deposits.
However, its not only the planet-wide scale of climate change that's being affected - there are real, immediate and huge impacts occurring all the time due to the greed and short-sightedness of oilmen and the politicans that allow them to continue their risky operations. It seems that almost every day, there's another news item about an oil spill, some oil company's underhand tactics or political weakness in the face of industry lobbying. Here's just a small selection of recent events:
- Shell's two North Sea oil spills and its lack of transparency about what happened. More here. Oh, and don't forget their pitifully inadequate web chat.
- And then there's Cairn. Apart from being unable to find oil (maybe they should shift to renewables - even they could find the wind), instead of taking a responsible attitude to their business and providing their oil-spill response plan, they not only refused to provide, but they took legal action via a gagging order to prevent us telling anyone what was going on. However, it was a waste of time because the government of Greenland published it anyway following lots of emails from concerned individuals (thank you) - ha ha ha! It's rather lengthy but there to be downloaded and scrutinised. Unsurprisingly, it appears to be pretty poor - much mention of response procedures not working if there's any ice - in the Arctic - maybe their plan is to accelerate climate change so the ice melts and everything's suddenly safer in case of an accident...
- And it's not just around Britain and in the Arctic (or indeed the Gulf of Mexico - that hasn't been forgotten, BP) - similar moves are afoot in deep water off New Zealand - again somewhere which would be devastating should there be a spill.
- And lastly (for now), the RSPB have just made public their concerns about oil exploration near seabird colonies i.e. it's unacceptably dangerous. It's in the papers and online in places like this.
I could go on... The upshot is that even in the short term, our addiction to oil is damaging - in the longer term, it can only get worse. So, we need to campaign for alternatives, improved efficiency, and for moves away from oil, including ceasing the sorts of dodgy exploration highlighted here. And what can you do? Well...
- Check out our Go Beyond Oil campaign and keep up to date with our campaigns.
- Join your local group - you can find it here.
- Donate! We're campaigning against huge vested interests and it's not easy as we don't take any money from companies or political parties. However, if you do donate, we will use it wisely and you'll get a lot of campaigning for your money. Various ways to donate can be found here.
In the end, just about everything we do relies on volunteers, so please do get involved in our campaigns - online and/or in person with a local group. Hope to see you soon.
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