By Patricia Lee Sharpe
A letter to the NYT editor by the President of the Shell Oil Company complains that Shell's plans for Alaska are being “held up by unnecessary litigation and unreasonable federal permitting delays.”
Marvin Odum claims that Shell "is a leader in environmentally superior operations" and asserts that his company has "prepared one of the most environmentally sensitive and responsible exploration plans ever for offshore Alaska." Considering the highly insensitive operations of many oil companies, that's not saying much, but Shell's own record suggests that extreme caution is in order.
As one who worked in Nigeria, where Shell’s record is as deplorable as it gets, environmentally and from the point of view of human rights, I urge Alaskans and the federal regulators involved to be extremely careful about working with this company. Get everything in writing, in detail. Inspect operations rigorously. Watch everything and everyone every minute. Your land could be in danger. Your water could be in danger. Your wildlife could be in danger. And anyone who protests a spill would do well to think twice.
Prominent Nigerian writer and environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa led his Ogoni people in protest against Shell’s ruin of their Niger delta homeland. Operations were sloppy, and there was at best laughable reparation made to people whose lives were being changed forever. Instead of taking Shell to task, an oil-corrupted government in Lagos found a way to silence Saro-wiwa and fellow environmental leaders. They were hanged in Port Harcourt on November 5, 1995. Finally, in June of this year, and only because a high visibility trial was about to open, the Shell Oil company paid a settlement of $15.5 million to the heirs of those victims, claiming in the process that the company was shelling out purely from the goodness of its corporate heart. This article gives an idea of the sorts of damning documents that would have got wide circulation had the case actually gone to trial. Conviction was not unlikely.As for Nigeria today, militant pirates spawned by oil companies’ corporate greed and negligence continue to plague remaining oil pumping operations in the Niger delta and vast areas of Ogoni land remain infertile due to seepage from supposedly capped oil wells.
The solution to the “hypocrisy of relying on other countries’ resources” for fuel and energy isn’t to ravage Alaska and keep on pumping the pet. The solution is to promote major reductions in energy consumption and to replace as much petroleum-based energy as quickly as possible with clean and renewable energy.
Meanwhile, should there be excruciatingly careful scrutiny of Shell's plans for Alaska? Absolutely.