I’ve recently returned from a visit to my friend and mentor, Suzi Gablik, in Virginia, USA. She has been an inspiration to so many over the past 33 years since the publication of ‘Has Modernism Failed’, and later her book ‘Conversations Before The End of Time‘. Her work harnessed an ecological sensibility in the…
Notes after a conversation with Doreen Massey, which took place ten days before the one-year anniversary of Syriza’s landslide victory of 25th January 2015. We were reflecting on the past year. What an extraordinary set of events has unfolded in those twelve months – the Syriza election, The Green Surge of last Winter, the transformational…
During my leave over the summer I was really glad to catch the performance Arctic Requiem outside the Shell Centre in August. Here’s a piece I wrote about it, prior to Shell’s decision to cease drilling in the Arctic Ocean. The rain lashes down. A strong south westerly drives it along the Thames, across Jubilee…
Seven years, $7 billion, and hundreds of protests was what it took. Shell is leaving the Alaskan Arctic. This morning we were outside Shell’s HQ on London’s South Bank to celebrate. I ended up sharing the stage with Aurora – Greenpeace’s spectacular bus-sized polar bear puppet – and Emma Thompson. But I really wish I…
We are in the dim light and red velvet of the Circustheatre in Den Haag for the Shell AGM. Up on the podium are the assembled bishops of the company. Eight in the back row all non-executives. Five in the front row: the Chief Financial Officer, the Chief Executive, the Chairman and two non-excutives. Behind…
As the London Stock Exchange opened at 09.00 on Tuesday, 16th December, BP’s shareprice was down to 365 pence. It was the bottom of a long slide from 448 pence on the 21st November and investors in the company looked concerned that BP was failing badly. Shares in BP have lost 25% of their value…
350.org’s Bill McKibben just gave a keynote address at Chatham House’s annual conference on climate change. Bill didn’t know it when he agreed to talk at the conference, but its headline sponsor is Shell. Here is what Bill said to a room full of “senior officials from businesses, government, NGO’s and academic institutions”: Shell is…
Last week I headed home from the Netherlands, crossing the North Sea from the delta of the Rhine to the delta of the Thames, after having attended the Shell AGM in Den Haag with friends and allies from Greenpeace, ShareAction, Observatorio Petrolero Sur, Milieudefensie and Global Witness. This year’s Shell AGM was a quieter affair…
A tricky, or should I even say embarrassing, moment in Shell’s history: on 31 October 2013 the company announced that they would be returning to drill in the Arctic in 2014, after all the mishaps and near-disasters of 2012. Three months later, they had to announce they wouldn’t be drilling in 2014 after all.…
Royal Dutch Shell stands at a strategic crossroads. Its response to the reserves scandal in 2004 has been a global reserves replacement hunt through a programme of relentless capital expenditure, including an investment in US Arctic Ocean leases in the mid-2000s that dwarfed other companies’ spending. Shell’s US offshore Arctic plans have been a failure…