Holding Shell to account at the AGM

Just returning from the Shell AGM in Den Haag, Holland feeling inspired and energised by the passion and courage of all those that worked to hold the board of the company to account – both in the Dutch meeting and in the parallel event (linked by video) in the Barbican in London. Outside the conference...
Get The Shell Out! Friday 18 May @ 7.30pm

Get The Shell Out! Friday 18 May @ 7.30pm

UK Tar Sands Network, Indigenous Environmental Network, Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation (ACFN), Platform, Rising Tide UK, FairPensions, Greenpeace, Shell to Sea and Art Not Oil present: Get The Shell Out! 18th May 2012, Toynbee Hall, 7.30pm Toynbee Hall, 28 Commercial Street, Greater London E1 6LS You are warmly invited to a public meeting in advance of...
Care about the climate? Move Your Money out of RBS/Natwest

Care about the climate? Move Your Money out of RBS/Natwest

Pinch and a punch, first day of the Move Your Money month! All over the country, people are cutting up their cash cards from the main big banks and shifting their cash to ethical banks, credit unions and building societies, as part of Move Your Money’s sustained campaign to get people to stop providing banks...
Legal Oil, Ethical Oil and Profiteering in the Niger Delta and the Canadian North

Legal Oil, Ethical Oil and Profiteering in the Niger Delta and the Canadian North

In this guest blog post, Professor Anna Zalik of York University Canada explores how governments and multinationals criminalise protest and gloss over the environmental injustices of oil extraction. Q: What does the Canadian Government’s fury at opponents of the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline have to do with the Nigerian ‘legaloil’ campaign? A: Both positions are...
Getting to Market - new report by Platform, Oil Change Int. and Greenpeace UK highlights investor risks in the tar sands

Getting to Market – new report by Platform, Oil Change Int. and Greenpeace UK highlights investor risks in the tar sands

The global oil price wavers around $100 a barrel as traders are split over whether Brent Crude is about to plummet due to the Eurozone disaster getting worse, or about the spike due to a renewed Middle East crisis. It is snowing in Fort McKay, in Nothern Alberta, and the temperature of -6 feels like...
Canada's Dirty and Dangerous Tar Sands

Canada’s Dirty and Dangerous Tar Sands

When the pro-tar sands lobby group pounced on Platform’s new research on Nigeria to justify Canada’s “blood oil”, we were disgusted. Here is my blog response in The Huffington Post Canada. (Note they changed the title from ‘tar sands’ to the more innocuous ‘oil sands’). Canada’s Dirty and Dangerous Oil Sands EthicalOil.org has a reputation...

New PLATFORM report reveals RBS is UK bank most involved in financing loans to tar sands companies

Tar sands extraction in Canada is devastating Indigenous communities, wildlife and vast areas of boreal forests, as well as being many times more carbon-intensive to produce than ‘conventional’ oil. “We are seeing a terrifyingly high rate of cancer in Fort Chipewyan where I live. We are convinced that these cancers are linked to the Tar...

Stealing the “S” from Shell – tar sands activists hit London

Most of my news from this year’s Camp for Climate Action arrived by twitter: “climatecamp: Balcony of Shell building occupied, big ‘Shell’ sign now reads ‘hell’…” “climatecamp: Tarsands activists are now giving speeches at bp headqrtrs having stopped by at national portrait gallery in Trafalgar square” “climatecamp: Bp is one of the biggest players in the extracion...

Peak Oil”: Demand or Supply?

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...