Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The attendees of the World Energy Congress were there to make deals, and the oil
companiesweretheretostrikenewfinancearrangementsandnegotiateconcessionswith
governments to open up some of the new fields then becoming “hot,” like West Africa
and parts of Latin America. It was an infamous, rare gathering of oil executives, pipeline
proponents, andcoal chiefs toplot with politicians andbureaucrats ofvarious kinds. Our
organization, Project Underground, and the Rainforest Action Network were there to re-
lease
Drilling to the Ends of the Earth,
a report we'd been working on for a year, on the
ecological, social, and climate imperative for ending new petroleum exploration.
“The energy industry needs to supply energy—not oil,” one of my colleagues said in
the report's news release. “If oil companies invested serious capital in developing sus-
tainable alternatives to fossil fuels, the quality of life on this planet would increase for
everyone.”
My friend Oronto Douglas was in town. He'd been a lawyer for the great, nonviolent
Nigerian organizer Ken Saro-Wiwa, whose cause of ending oil exploitation in his native
Ogoni land I'd supported as an activist in Australia. In 1995 Ken was tried for a murder
he couldn't have committed and was convicted in a Nigerian kangaroo court and then
executed—all at the behest of Big Oil by his country's dictatorship, an act for which the
country was suspended from the Commonwealth.
Oronto had watched while Ken was hanged. Ken's family sued Shell for ordering his
death, and in 2009 Shell settled out of court for $15 million. So for us in Houston, try-
ing to tell the world the terrible things that happen in the places our oil comes from,
Oronto was a first-person witness to the calamities brought to indigenous people around
the world at the cutting edge of oil and gas industry development.
The whole country has been affected by the wars for control of oil in the Niger Delta,
even though the people there have been polluted and poisoned by it since it was first dis-
covered by Shell in the 1950s. To this day Oronto struggles with the consequences of
oil in his homeland and seeks justice for the victims. He's now a special adviser to the
democratically elected president, Goodluck Jonathan.
Back then in Houston, Oronto endorsed what we said to the media, with firsthand
knowledgeoftheresourcecurseNigeriaandmanyotherplacessufferbecauseofoil.Our
statements back then—and I think that they stand today—came down to this: when the
climate is in danger of global meltdown, and when irreplaceable natural areas are being
destroyed, and the indigenous people who live there are being displaced, it makes abso-
lutely no sense to continue exploring for more oil. The carbon logic was clear: burning
the coal, oil, and gas reserves we already knew we had in 1998 would risk runaway cli-
mate change. Looking for more petroleum, and spending precious time and money on
the pursuit, was a waste, and we wanted the world to know.
