Royal Dutch Shell Plc  .com Rotating Header Image

Shell’s withdrawal from Arctic energizes activists

Screen Shot 2015-10-09 at 04.45.27

Screen Shot 2015-10-09 at 04.46.41

Screen Shot 2015-10-05 at 14.03.31Activists plan broader green campaign

By Jennifer A. Dlouhy, Hearst Washington Bureau: Oct  8, 2015

WASHINGTON — Environmentalists who battled Arctic oil drilling by paddling kayaks, dangling from bridges and climbing onto rigs at sea have claimed a high-profile success against Shell and aim to funnel the resulting enthusiasm into other fights against fossil fuels.

Shell is abandoning its long crusade to find crude in the waters north of Alaska after disappointing results at a critical test well in the Chukchi Sea. While the company cited financial reasons for the pullout, the move nonetheless represents a tangible victory for environmental activists.

“This is a victory that becomes a springboard for a lot of potential change,” said Franz Matzner, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Beyond Oil Initiative. “It is an encouraging sign to everyone who is concerned about the drilling, transporting and burning of fossil fuels that are putting our communities and climate at risk.”

Asked if the protests factored into its thinking, Royal Dutch Shell, which has its North American operations based in Houston, referred to a statement last week that cited the well results, high costs and challenging regulations. There was no mention of environmentalists.

“The activists are congratulating themselves for a decision that was more driven by economics of the oil market than political pressure,” said Robert Brulle, a professor of sociology and environmental science at Drexel University.

But those who fought against Arctic drilling for years say the spirited protests against Shell’s work were inevitably part of the company’s calculus in deciding to leave the region after spending $7 billion searching for crude.

The activism, both on the ground and in the courts, slowed Shell’s Arctic campaign, sometimes sidelining it for years at a time, and hiked costs as the company paid for rigs, staff and other assets that couldn’t always be deployed. Conservation groups and Alaska natives led legal challenges to the 2008 government auction of Chukchi Sea drilling rights to Shell and other companies, prompting a judge to twice invalidate the sale.

They pushed the Obama administration to hold firm on walrus protections that required a 15-mile buffer between simultaneous drilling in the Arctic, thwarting Shell’s plans to use two rigs to bore wells 9 miles apart this summer.

And environmentalists lobbied political leaders to make bold statements against Arctic drilling. Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton announced her opposition in an Aug. 18 tweet.

“Shell’s decision has energized the environmental community and provided a real-world example of a major oil company in retreat,” said Niel Lawrence, Alaska director of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

A similar crusade against TransCanada Corp.’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline has yielded years of uncertainty about the project but no final Obama administration decision on whether to permit it.

“Things like the Clean Power Plan are obviously really important, but they are incremental and subject to lobbying and court challenges,” said Travis Nichols, a Greenpeace spokesman from the group’s Arctic campaign. “By stopping Shell cold, the climate movement has helped take Arctic drilling efforts off the table for a decade. We’re already on borrowed time, but it gives a little breathing room for the incontrovertible evidence of climate change to fully sink in.”

For environmentalists, Shell’s Arctic quest served as a potent rallying cry, Brulle said. It was easy to understand and highly visible, conjuring images of walruses and polar bears in the oft-frozen north. With the biggest Arctic drilling fight over, or at least indefinitely paused, the growing climate movement will use other symbols “to galvanize opposition to offshore drilling.”

Critics’ main Arctic aim now is persuading the Obama administration to call off scheduled sales of Arctic drilling leases in 2016 and 2017, and similar auctions tentatively planned for 2020 and 2022.

The Sierra Club described a continued Arctic threat in a fundraising pitch within hours of Shell’s announcement. Shell’s move is “huge, huge, huge news,” it said, but stressed that Houston-based oil company Hilcorp has submitted a plan produce oil from an older lease in the Beaufort Sea using a man-made gravel island. “We absolutely cannot sit back and let another reckless oil company put the entire Arctic at risk.”

Activists also will push a broader green agenda. “Most of the activism on climate change for the last couple of decades has been on the demand side — to make cars more fuel efficient or clean up smokestacks from power plants,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. “This is part of a new wave of activism that focuses on supply.”

Energy industry leaders say the campaign is misguided, because new sources of oil and gas will be needed for decades to come.

“Their approach is anti-poverty, anti-consumer, and it ignores the facts,” said Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute. “When consumers stop and ponder what no fossil fuel means in their lives … it will be abundantly clear that this vision of no fossil fuels is not only harmful to America but irresponsible as a policy.”

But Brulle said the campaign against fossil fuels is here to stay, as a way to prevent climate change.

SOURCE

This website and sisters royaldutchshellgroup.com, shellnazihistory.com, royaldutchshell.website, johndonovan.website, and shellnews.net, are owned by John Donovan. There is also a Wikipedia segment.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Comment Rules

  • Please show respect to the opinions of others no matter how seemingly far-fetched.
  • Abusive, foul language, and/or divisive comments may be deleted without notice.
  • Each blog member is allowed limited comments, as displayed above the comment box.
  • Comments must be limited to the number of words displayed above the comment box.
  • Please limit one comment after any comment posted per post.