Corporations make oil a dirty business

Russia and Norway have signed a deal carving up the Arctic Ocean bed, opening the way for a new oil boom. All of this will is certain to lead to more spills, pollution and the further destruction of marine and coastal environments.

The United States Geological Survey last year estimated there could be 90 billion barrels of oil and 50 trillion cubic metres of gas across the Arctic and the oil corporations are itching to get their hands on it.

Companies like Exxon, Chevron and Shell, are queuing up for permission from Greenland – part of Denmark – to begin drilling in some of the most precious eco-systems on the planet. Gas is already being tapped there.

New North Sea fields, west of the Shetland Islands, are also set to be drilled. One of the firms involved is BP and MPs listened open-mouthed as outgoing CEO Tony Hayward told them not to worry – his firm is safe. The Energy and Climate Change Select Committee were questioning him not only about the Gulf Oil spill, but also about the fact that BP’s Magnus North Sea oil platform has failed three oil spill preparedness inspections since 2006.

Even small fields that in the past would not be worth drilling are now yielding profits. Some unique environments are under threat as a result. The Australian company ADX is drilling in the strait between Sicily and Tunisia. They got the go-ahead even though the area is a priority conservation area, with tuna, swordfish, sharks and turtles breeding, and coral gardens with thousands of species.

The island of Panteleria, soon to be declared a marine reserve, is just 13 miles from the rig and would be engulfed with oil in case of a big spill. But the Italian government is keen to expand oil production in their part of the Mediterranean.

In reality, spills are not occasional accidents, but part and parcel of the oil production process. Safety and environmental concerns are never allowed to interfere with the bottom line.

While 10 million litres of oil as day was pouring in the Gulf of Mexico from Deepwater Horizon, monitors discovered there were also continuous leaks from old abandoned wells nearby.

In Venezuela, oil is spreading across Lake Maracaibo, polluting wetlands and mangroves. Fishermen say their nets are coated, and that wildlife is dying.

In the Niger Delta, there are an average 1,598 breaks or leaks in the pipelines each year. Oil has saturated the world’s third-largest wetland, destroying farmland and fishing. But Shell has abandoned Ogoniland to its fate – they are off to the Arctic to get their hands on more easy money.

The side effects of cleaning up spills can be equally as dangerous, with little investment in research and no clear idea of the long-term effects of spraying millions of gallons of dispersants into the sea.

The last major advance in safety was after the fire on the Piper Alpha platform in 1988. But it emerged recently that lies were told about what happened to toxic chemicals stored on the rig for use in the production process. At the time it was claimed these had gone up in smoke – but now it is clear that they went into the water and have destroyed a wide area of marine life.

Humanity needs oil – it is crucial for our survival – but the reckless extraction of oil for burning must be halted. It must husbanded for essential uses. And you could say it is almost a sacred duty to extract it with extreme care and to the highest standards, when it is found in such precious places. There will be times when it should just be left where it is. The first step to achieving this approach is to remove the whole process from the control of corporations who place profit above all other considerations, as the calamity in the Gulf shows.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

The strange case of the Irish mercenary in Santa Cruz

Tensions in Bolivia are reaching a high point. Unrest has shut down the city of Potosi in the south-east while president Evo Morales has used a press conference to denounce the United States for fostering tensions in the region with bases in Colombia.

At the weekend, Morales announced that the Bolivian army would offer free military training to civilians. Unfortunately for the president, his own party members are amongst the 30 hunger strikers who are supporting a general strike and road-blocking protests which have been going on for over 10 days in Potosi. Governor Felix Gonzales, who is amongst the strikers, is a member of the ruling Movement towards Socialism (MAS) party. They want Morales to travel to the city to negotiate a solution.

The Potosi Civic Committee are angry about boundary disputes with a neighbouring province. They want infrastructure projects and the preservation of the iconic Cerro Rico mountain, which is in danger of collapse. The siege has cut off rail and air links and cut the city off from the rest of the world.

It focuses attention on the difficulties facing one of Latin America’s poorest countries, which has a population of only nine million. In 2002 Bolivia ranked 104th out of a total of 174 countries in human development according a UN report. Since his re-election last December with an increased majority Morales has been treading a precarious balancing act.

His MAS party has continued to mobilise the poor indigenous people of Bolivia who form 80% of the population. The World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth held in the Bolivian town of Cochabamba last April encouraged a mass, democratic approach to ecological and social problems. MAS has also sought to develop a “just state” in which, as vice president Alvaro Garcia Linera put it, “indigenous communities and mestizos are included in a unified way”.

In seeking to develop Bolivia’s rich mining resources, including the world’s largest deposit of lithium under the Uyuni salt flats which are in the Potosi region, the government decreed in 2008 that the state would take full control of lithium exploitation.

Since taking office in 2006, the MAS government has nationalised the country’s power industries, including gas and electricity. Naturally this has brought Bolivia into conflict with those defending the interests of the global power corporations and those who defend the old status quo.

The strange case of an Irish mercenary, Michael O’Dwyer, reveals that there are indeed sinister machinations going on. O’Dwyer and two other men were killed last April during a shoot out with Bolivian police in Santa Cruz. Bolivian authorities claimed that O’Dwyer and two other men were involved in a plot to kill President Morales during 2009.

An investigation by journalists working for Irish television company RTE indicated that O’Dwyer was recruited by a right-wing Hungarian terrorist who wanted to overturn the Morales government. Paul Murphy and Oonagh Smyth’s report said that O’Dwyer’s paymaster was the Irish security company IRMS.

Other reports suggest that Dwyer was among seven men who had travelled from Ireland to Bolivia, supposedly for a bodyguard course. At least six and possibly all seven of these men had worked for IRMS, the company that provides security for Shell's controversial pipeline in Erris in Ireland. Up to the point of the announcement of Dwyer's death the IRMS website advertised its "special services" as including "international armed and unarmed security."

Shell to Sea, whose campaigners have been nearly killed by IRMS security thugs, is opposing oil giant Shell’s pipeline through Ireland. Fishermen and environmental campaigners say that IRMS was financed “to the tune of millions of dollars beyond the capacity of local business interests to raise alone” and traced the money back to oil and gas companies.

Opposing the interests of the power corporations is a dangerous business. But in the battle of David versus Goliath, there is no doubt where our sympathies lie.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win Secretary

Shell's 'blood money' pay-out

Relatives of writer and campaigner Ken Saro-Wiwa have welcomed the outcome of the 14-year legal battle against Shell which has been pillaging the Niger delta since it began drilling there in 1958. But has real justice has been achieved in the landmark £9.5 million settlement?

Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni leaders were executed by the Nigerian military dictatorship of General Sani Abacha in November 1995 and the oil corporation was implicated in the judicial murders. Documents proving that Shell demanded and received support from Nigerian government security forces in the period leading up to the execution of the nine Ogoni leaders were shown on Channel Four this week.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs also proved that army forces sent in against Ogoni demonstrators when 300,000 Ogoni demonstrators marched against the dictatorship, arrived in helicopters and transport vehicles belonging to Shell. Sir Philip Watts, the company’s Nigerian managers met with Abacha government officials at the time when the Ogoni leaders were arrested.

Now Shell has been forced to pay £9.5 million in an out-of-court settlement, some of which will go into a trust to benefit local communities in Ogoniland, where Shell continues to operate, albeit under a new guise. Despite this, Shell brazenly denies culpability and claims that it is paying the money simply in recognition of the suffering of the Ogoni people. It is an almost derisory amount for a company that made £13.9 billion in 2007 alone – equivalent to more than £1.5m an hour.

Journalist Ben Amunwa of Platform/Remember Saro-Wiwa says that the out-of-court settlement is a back door admission of guilt by Shell, since the company would never have paid up had it not been exposed during the case. But the agreement to allow Shell to settle out of court means that evidence which came to light during the trial showing direct complicity between the company and the military dictators who executed the nine Ogoni leaders could be buried again.

As the Guardian’s environment correspondent John Vidal writes: “Shell said it had agreed to settle out of humanitarian interests, but everyone on the delta knows that real justice has not been done, and that the environmental abuses continue. The company continues to needlessly burn off vast amounts of gas. The air is still poisoned, children are still sick, there are few jobs, the creeks are polluted and the poverty is intense…The whole region is awash with guns and the delta is one of the most dangerous places on earth. In the last few months the Nigerian military have raided dozens of communities they believe are threatening the state and thousands of people have fled their villages. The kind of peaceful protest that the Ogoni led in the 1990s now seems quaint. Anyone who stands up for environmental justice or who challenges the oil companies, which provide the Nigerian state with 90% of their foreign earnings, is now in mortal danger.”

Victoria, wife of murdered Ogoni leader Kobani, has said: “We are still aggrieved with Shell. Paying compensation for the blood of these innocent people will not bring Shell back again to any part of Ogoniland for oil exploitation.” The Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP), a group led by the late Saro-Wiwa, welcomed the settlement, but vowed to resist any attempt by Shell to return to Ogoniland.

The outcome of this battle demonstrates that legal battles alone can never make global corporations like Shell accountable or lead to a just settlement for indigenous peoples. The oil resources of Africa, like all the world’s natural resources, remain in the hands of the global corporations who exploit them for profit, regardless of the cost to the environment and to local people. Until that is changed in favour of co-operative, common ownership and management there can be no justice for the Ogonis or other victims of corporate greed.


Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Pouring oil on troubled waters

The start of a four-day strike by hundreds of oil tanker drivers brings a new angle to the energy crisis which is convulsing countries around the world. The drivers are employed by contractors Hoyer and Suckling, two haulage companies delivering Shell fuel products to one tenth of UK garages.

The drivers’ union Unite says that Shell tanker drivers today earn a basic wage of just under £32,000 per year for a 48-hour working week. In 1992, a typical tanker driver directly employed by Shell earned approximately the same £32,000 per year for a 37-hour week. This is a truly catastrophic 16-year decline in the value of weekly income combined with an almost 30% increase in hours.

It is stark evidence of the typical, brutal increase in the rate of exploitation by global corporations and the less-than-worthless state of trade union leadership. Desperate to avoid a confrontation, Unite assistant general secretary Len McCluskey has been begging Shell to intervene – to no avail.

Now rocketing worldwide inflation – ironically driven by the commodity the drivers deliver - has triggered a social movement that is spreading like last summer’s wildfires. In Asia this week there have been strikes and demonstrations in South Korea, Hong Kong, India and Malaysia, where the government has raised prices by 41% for petrol and 63% for diesel.

In Europe, action by truck drivers in Spain led to 40% of petrol stations in Catalonia running dry, and stocks of fresh food running low in the markets and shops. Drivers in Portugal joined in the strikes and there have been protests in France. Spanish fishermen, driven to desperation by fuel costs, have been on strike since May 30.
One trucker died this week in Spain and another in Portugal. In both cases they were run over while manning picket lines.

The chief executive of Russia's Gazprom this week warned that crude oil might go as high as $250 a barrel next year, far in excess of the record $139 a barrel reached last week. Meanwhile BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy attributes the spiralling price to a continuing increase in the demand for oil whilst global production has been falling. In Russia, BP is in conflict with the four billionaire shareholders in TNK-BP, the largest foreign venture in Russia by a single company. TNK-BP made $5.3 billion net profit in 2007 and produces a quarter of BP's global oil output.

The oil price and supply crisis is fuelling tensions globally. In the Middle East, tensions are rising as Israel and the US are colluding to increase the threat to bomb Iran, with Barack Obama promising to use whatever means are necessary to destroy the country’s nuclear fuel capacity.

Dealing with this festering stew of inter-related crises means taking the energy industries into social ownership and eliminating for-profit production. Only democratic stewardship of limited resources can protect the world’s population from the twin threats of depletion and climate change. Transition Initiatives must take these questions on board if action on energy reduction is to have any but a symbolic significance.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor