Agitpod is a solar-powered cinema system mounted on a quadricycle. It was designed by students at Southwark College in a mobile eco-design project led by PLATFORM. Agitpod is designed to show agitational propaganda and is being cycled from Tower Bridge in London to Arnolfini Centre for Contemporary Arts, Bristol – for C Words, a season…

New oil finds off the coast of West Africa raise fears of oil corporations causing increased militarization in a region not yet touched by the crude resource curse. In mid-September US corp Anadarko and Irish/British company Tullow announced a major oil-discovery off the coast of Sierra Leone. The FT’s map below shows how this find…

“Where are they now?” is one of the questions PLATFORM likes to ask about former BP & Shell corporate executives.Brian Anderson, head of Shell Nigeria in 1995 when Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed, is now CEO of Addax Petroleum operating in the Niger Delta, Cameroon and Gabon. Meanwhile John Manzoni, Head of BP Refining at the…

Today was the first day of the Eid holiday (Eid As-Seghir or Eid Al-Fitr) bringing an end to a month of righteousness. By noon the streets of Yarmouk were witnessing epic gun battles between rival gangs from different sides of the refugee camp. Sharp-shooters hid behind every car and doorway, trying to get a clear…

While BP cuts investment into wind and solar, the company is pumping billions into controversial biofuels. The company is apparently planning to invest €4 billion euros into sugar cane ethanol production in Brazil. The company’s first ethanol refinery started production last year and a second is planned. Rainforest Rescue in Germany have criticised the plan for…

BP reveal their true colours and move even further from “Beyond Petroleum” as they sell off wind in India, as reported in today’s FT: “BP has sold its Indian wind business for about $95m (£57.6m), confirming its decision to focus its wind power operations on the US .[…] BP has long made it clear that it…

For the past few months, the Nigerian military has waged war on the Niger Delta in a desperate attempt to restore Nigeria’s faltering oil production, which has almost halved due to security concerns. Tuesday 15th September is due to be the last day of the ceasefire observed by MEND, the main group of insurgents in…

We moved to Yarmouk Camp the other week. The first month in Damascus, I lived in an ancient house in the middle of the Old City in Damascus, half a block from the enormous Omayed Mosque. Sitting on our roof terrace at dusk, I blogged while watching the bats swoop and dive around the Bride’s…

Another reason why CDM and carbon offsets is not the way (or even an efficient way) to deal with climate change. Flaring gas from oil projects in Nigeria (and elsewhere) is a crazy practice and a human rights abuse, causing acid rain, sickness and heavy local pollution, as well as enormous carbon emissions. There are proposals that oil…