Photo: Nick Cobbing

News Shorts And Other Business

It’s A Shell Out

Squall 10, Summer 1995, pg. 4.

In May, protesters picketed the Shell AGM at Queen Elizabeth II Conference Hall, London; climbing onto the roof and burning the oil conglomerate’s flag.

Shell have decimated the lands of the Ogoni tribe in Nigeria, in a relentless drive to extract oil, even seeking the cooperation of the Nigerian Government militia in quelling objections from the Ogoni people.

During the course of the protest action, a live mobile phone-link was established with Greenpeace activists squatting Shell’s Brent Spar oil platform in the North Sea. Shell, with the consent of the British Government, plan to sink Brent Spar as a financially expedient way of decommissioning the structure. Greenpeace argue that the presence of 130 tonnes of radioactive sludge on the platform is likely to cause intolerable pollution and that Shell should fork out the extra £34 million necessary to tow it to land for dismantling.

John Gummer defended the British Government’s decision to give Shell the go-ahead saying that the pollution would be insignificant and that the UK was “the clean man of Europe”. The decision has been criticised by the European Union Environment Commissioner, Ritt Bjerregaard, as well as by North Sea European states including Germany, Denmark, Belgium and Iceland.