Greenpeace Activists Occupy Shell Drilling Platform

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Greenpeace Activists Occupy Shell Drilling Platform

It’s high time that they pay up for their crimes against humanity, and with their profits in 2022 alone expected to be $83 billion, they have plenty to pay up with.

Greenpeace Activists Occupy Shell Drilling Platform. Image of a large offshore oil rig on a clam sea at dusk.
Greenpeace Activists Occupy Shell Drilling Platform. Source: Unsplash

The oil and gas industry is the largest contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions in the world, and with profits expanding in recent years, it appears that they are getting away with the continued degradation and destruction of our planet’s ecosystems.

Shell is one of the largest of these oil and gas conglomerates, and it is also one of the companies that has been proven to have known about the detrimental effects of climate change thirty years ago. Yet, in spite of this fact, they keep on drilling with only lip service paid to greenwash their operations.

They keep drilling with subsidies from governments from around the world and then use that money to lobby the same governments to deregulate the oil industry further. It seems they only want to facilitate their plundering of our natural resources with little to no care for the people directly affected by their negligence. It’s high time that they pay up for their crimes against humanity, and with their profits in 2022 alone expected to be $83 billion, they have plenty to pay up with.

Greenpeace is an environmental campaigning network with a long history in direct action to spread awareness, as well as for material results in the fight against climate change. They are one of the most visible organizations putting the feet of those who do environmental wrong to the fire. They are doing just that with its most recent direct action against Shell.

On Tuesday, Jan. 31 of this year, four climate activists boarded a Shell oil platform bound for the north sea just north of the Canary Islands with a clear message. Stop drilling, and start paying. Carlos Marcelo Bariggi Amara of Argentina, Yakup Çetinkaya of Turkey, Imogen Michel of the UK, and Usnea Granger of the U.S. boarded the White Marlin in rough seas and dangerous conditions to show everyone that even at the heart of operations being conducted by companies like Shell, there are many who will risk their lives to secure their future as well as their future generations.

The oil platform is intended to unlock eight new wells in the Penguin Oil Field in the North Sea, a site that Shell says has already been used for years. However, this is the first time a crewed mission has been sent there in over 30 years. It could also generate more oil and gas from a new source that Shell is currently drilling. With the rise of renewable energy technologies and the impacts of oil and gas extraction being felt worldwide, oil and gas companies are becoming redundant. They are being held liable for the damages they have caused to the people who are least responsible for the climate crisis.

In January, a British law firm filed a lawsuit on behalf of 15,000 Nigerian farmers and fishers who have seen their farmland and ocean destroyed by the reckless pursuit of oil and profits in their country.

The protests on the White Marlin represent that wherever the polluters are: on the ocean, in boardrooms, in court, online, and at their headquarters, the people who live in the world they continue to destroy will take them on.

The message is clear; polluters will pay.

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