In a potentially ground-breaking development, The Guardian reported today that Shell has accepted liability for two massive oil spills which devastated farmland in Bodo, Ogoniland in 2008. Shell faces a bill of hundreds of millions of dollars after accepting full liability for two massive oil spills that devastated a Nigerian community of 69,000 people and may…

Big Canadian tar sands company’s downfall shows that RBS’ tar sands finance is risky and reckless. OPTI Canada Inc. is in the process of being acquired by Chinese oil and gas exploration and production company CNOOC Ltd. CNOOC will pay US$2.1m for the Alberta-based company focused on developing major oil sands projects in Canada. OPTI Canada has…

During the second half of 2009, Iraq held two auctions of its largest oilfields, awarding them to multinational companies such as BP, Shell and ExxonMobil to operate under 20-year contracts. Between them the oilfields account for over 60% of Iraq’s reserves. The contracts were service contracts rather than the companies’ preferred production sharing agreements, which…

In the week Rupert Murdoch’s media empire came close to collapse, the broadsheet branch of News International, The Times, ran a three part series on Shell in Nigeria. If you aren’t a subscriber, you can read the articles here and here. The paper dedicated plenty of column inches, time and resources to its  “official tour”…

Earlier this year, working alongside Liberate Tate and Art Not Oil, we made a call out to commission a sound artist to create an ‘alternate Tate audio tour’ – a work of site-specific sound art that would be themed around the issue of BP sponsorship of Tate. We were overwhelmed with almost 40 responses, and in the final shortlist, the…

It’s 22nd July 2011, and another arts, fossil fuel sponsorship, censorship story breaks. There’s a furore over a newly commissioned public sculpture at the University of Wyoming. Wyoming is a US state which mines more coal than any other in the union. The piece, called Carbon Sink, What Goes Around Comes Around by British artist…

“The mind should not be kept continuously at the same pitch of concentration, but given amusing diversions… Our minds must relax: they will rise better and keener after a rest. Just as you must not force fertile farmlands, so uninterrupted productivity will soon exhaust it, so constant effort will sap our mental vigour, while a…