While our campaign to save the Arctic
from risky oil drilling has been playing out in Greenlandic
waters and Dutch
courtrooms over the past few weeks, the UK
government has stayed fairly quiet on the question of deepwater oil
drilling in the Arctic.
Until this week. On Monday, a
UK Minister waded into the row on Arctic drilling - and came
out in support of Big Oil.
Energy Minister Charles Hendry told an
energy conference that Arctic drilling is "entirely legitimate"
and that, "given the ability to carry out this work safely, this
should be part of the work of the industry".
The problem is that "the ability
to carry out this work safely" in the Arctic is not a given. In fact, safe deepwater drilling in the Arctic can't be done; experts
say that the freezing temperatures and remote location mean a deep
water blow-out in the Arctic would be an irreversible disaster, and UK government officials have
themselves admitted in private that a spill in the Arctic would be
"near
impossible" to clear up.
This, we suspect, is why Cairn Energy -
the company leading the race to exploit the Arctic - still refuses to
publish its Oil Spill Response Plan. Despite requests
by almost 50,000 people, an
extraordinary chastisement
by a judge in Amsterdam last week, and the boarding
of Cairn's controversial Arctic Rig by 18 Greenpeace activists trying to find the elusive plan, the
world is none the wiser about how Cairn plans to handle the real risk
of an oil spill in the beautiful and fragile environment of the
Arctic.
With our 18
activists in
prison
in Nuuk and Cairn
wielding a legal hammer in
Amsterdam to stop us exposing the huge risks it's taking with the
Arctic wilderness, the UK Energy Minister has come out in support of
Big Oil's ambitions to drill in the Arctic.
Big Oil, in this
case, means the many companies hoping to follow Cairn into the
Arctic, including BP who, last week (a year after five million tonnes
of oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico) restated the company's Arctic
ambitions.
Back in 2006, after returning from his
trip to the Norwegian Arctic to pose with huskies, Cameron told
us: "Climate change is one of the biggest
threats facing the world and we must have a much greater sense of
urgency about tackling it."
Now, with a second energy minister
capitulating to Big Oil (the first being Chris Huhne, who has
personally
backed BP’s Arctic venture in Russia), David
Cameron needs to step up and tell us where the priorities of "the
greenest government ever" lie: with Big
Oil, or with the fragile wildernesses of the Arctic?