The main workhorse of Azeri oil production – the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli field – will peak in 2010, due to BP and consortium members driving an aggressively fast extraction programme. As the revenues poured in over the last eight years, the state budget soared, covering military expansion, President Aliev’s opulent lifestyle and doubtful infrastructure projects including a…

AlJazeera International (in English) recently broadcast several investigative programmes on popular movements opposing destructive fossil fuel projects, as part of its People & Power series. The shows cover local resistance to Barrick Gold in Argentina/Chile, Talisman’s oil operations in the Peruvian Amazon and mountain removal coal mining in the Appalachians. What the film-makers didn’t realise…

Activists in Mayo, Ireland have been resisting Shell’s efforts to lay an illegal onshore pipeline in their community. The courage of these activists, who have risked jail sentences and put their lives on the line, has succeeded in delaying the construction of the pipeline frustrating Shell’s plan to access Ireland’s gas fields. Shell-to-Sea is  an…

Maura Harrington – imprisoned for her opposition to Shell: “We all have successes and failures. I was a teacher, my failures work inside the gates at Glengad and Bellanaboy, my successes are outside the gates”. Second email from George, supporting the community resistance against Shell’s gas plans in Rossport, Ireland: I drove over to Rossport with Paul…

remember saro-wiwa commissioned leading performance poet Zena Edwards to write and perform a new work, reflecting upon the role of oil companies in the deteriorating human rights situation in the Niger Delta. We have reproduced her poem and a photo by renowned photographer Ed Kashi, which inspired the commission, and included a video of Zena…

During the Q&A session following the presentation of BP’s 2009 Statistical Review of World Energy, Tony Hayward was asked whether the volatility seen in the oil market in 2008 was a signal of the much-anticipated peak in global oil supply. His answer was probably not what the questioner was expecting to hear:”BP is unlikely to…

Travelling by train across Europe & Turkey was a beautiful and exciting way to get to Syria. Without the teleport effect of airplanes, mountain ranges are more than bumps on a flat surface and the Danube remains a mighty river rather than just yet another waterway. How did I get to Syria: Thursday 16 July…

After a cushy night on the Ankara – Adana Mavi Cukurova night train, we jumped straight into a coach headed east to Antakya. Once the grand city of Antioch benefiting from trade routes running between Europe & South Asia, medium-sized Antakya is the last Turkish town before Syria, and the source of an ongoing border dispute…

We wake up to a view of corn and sunflower fields fast giving way to rows upon rows of apartment blocks in Istanbul’s outlying suburbs. Unlike the crumbling towers of Eastern Europe, many of these are new and shiny, as Istanbul spreads into the agricultural land to the west. Our Belgrade-Istanbul sleeper curves down to…