The Obama administration has granted Royal Dutch Shell final approval to resume drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic Ocean for the first time since 2012 despite widespread protests from environmental groups. Shell first obtained drilling permits in the Arctic during the George W. Bush administration, but drilling stopped in 2012 after a series of mishaps.
The Interior Department’s decision comes just weeks after a protest in Portland, Oregon, temporarily blocked an Arctic-bound rig of Shell’s from leaving the city after a group of activists from Greenpeace dangled off a bridge, blocking the ship’s movement while “kayaktivists” took to the water below. A coalition of environmental groups have pushed the Obama administration to say no to Arctic drilling, citing the dangers of a possible oil spill in the pristine region and the impact new oil extraction would have on the climate.
The Interior Department approved the Arctic drilling ahead of President Obama’s upcoming trip to the Arctic later this month. He mentioned the trip during his recent speech unveiling his plan to slash carbon emissions from U.S. power plants.
Athan Manuel talking:
we’re very disappointed. As you said in the lead-in, this president really gets it on climate change, talks about climate change all the time and talks about it in his trip to Alaska. This is just a very bad decision. You know, Shell is not a very clean company. They have a history of mishaps and problems with drilling anywhere in the United States—anywhere in the world, but especially in an area as challenging as the Arctic Ocean. And as you mentioned, this is not going to make our climate any better. If we’re serious about fighting climate change—and this president seems like he is serious about fighting it—we know we need to keep dirty fuels, like oil and gas and coal, underground where they belong. And so, this is really a disappointing decision, one we can’t figure out, one that’s not consistent with what this president has done in other realms around climate change.
the only reason that Shell can even consider drilling in the Arctic Ocean is climate change, you know, now that it’s getting warmer in the Arctic, the ice is breaking up, and in the summer the ice breaks up enough where companies can operate boats and put up temporary drilling rigs. So it’s a very—but still, it’s a very short drilling season. They have permits to drill in August, September. They have to end in August, when it starts getting colder again, cold enough to freeze up the entire ocean. So it’s a very narrow window that they have to operate in.
But the problems are that it’s just a very dangerous place to drill. The oil is—there’s still ice that tumbles through the water. There’s no onshore facilities where you can stage cleanup equipment, unlike the Gulf of Mexico where there’s lots of ports, lots of people, lots of boats. None of that exists on the North Slope of Alaska. There are no ports on the North Slope of Alaska. So it’s just not—there’s no infrastructure to clean up a spill. But if a spill happens, there’s almost no way to clean it up. You see that anywhere in the world, but you’ll see that even worse in the Arctic Ocean.
There’s no logical reason why this kind of president, one who cares about climate, one who inherited this problem from a Republican president, wouldn’t step in and say this is a terrible idea. It’s bad for our climate. It’s bad for the ecosystem there. It’s bad for marine mammals and fish. It’s bad for Alaskan natives who depend on the Arctic Ocean for their way of life and for subsistence. So it’s really a head scratcher. We can’t understand it. It’s completely inconsistent with what he’s done recently, when you look at the clean power plant rule, when you look—you talked about the methane regs that are going to come out today. This president has clearly attacked climate change and has made it a signature issue of his. And this decision to just not reconsider Shell’s drilling record and not consider how this drilling would impact the climate negatively really makes no sense. We can’t figure it out. We’re not going to stop pushing him, though, on this issue, and it’s going to be a priority for Sierra Club and Greenpeace and other groups going forward.
The agency that regulates drilling says there’s going to be a spill if they allow drilling there. So, no, none of it adds up. It makes absolutely no sense. This is really a huge mistake by the Obama administration to allow Shell to operate there, knowing what we know about the risks of operating in an area like the Arctic Ocean, which is very dangerous and very remote.
the one thing is, this is just a first step in Shell developing this field. You know, they probably want to put—do two more rounds, two more years of exploratory drilling, before they even consider putting a permanent platform there. So we’re going to fight them every step of the way. I think you’re going to continue to see more protests like you saw in Portland, but see those all around the country, all around the world, really, as this issue gets more and more high-profile. And we’re going to continue to fight them in the courts using laws like the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act. This is a long road that we’re going to continue to fight every step of the way to prohibit Shell from putting up any production platforms that industrializes the Arctic Ocean.
if you really care about climate and care about protecting Alaska’s North Slope from the impacts of climate change, why are you allowing drilling in the Arctic Ocean? The Alaska natives who live in that area above the Arctic Circle understand the impacts of climate change on their villages and on their way of life. And most of those folks oppose drilling in the Arctic Ocean, for all of the reasons we do, as well. So, he’s going to be confronted with that contradiction when he goes up there at the end of this month.
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Athan Manuel, director of the Sierra Club’s Lands Protection Program.
— source democracynow.org