With Arctic drilling imminent, significant expansion into the tar sands and over 50 years of damage in Nigeria, the case for targeting the oil giant Shell has rarely been greater. A new campaign launched this month by Friends of the Earth Netherlands is challenging Shell to clean up its oil spills in Nigeria’s oil rich Niger Delta region. Watch two great videos from the campaign below.
1. Live With It! Shell’s new iPhone app:
This disturbing video from Al Jazeera shows what’s left of Chevron’s KS Endeavour gas rig, which exploded on 16 January 2012. Over 20 days later the site is still ablaze and the intense flames and plumes of smoke can be seen from the nearby fishing village. Local community activists released this footage:
“To an oil company, it’s liquid gold.”
That’s how filmmaker Sandi Cioffi describes Nigerian oil, known as ‘sweet crude’ because it is low in sulphur and therefore cheaper and easier to refine.
The trailer below is for Sweet Crude, the film. An amazing and insightful documentary by Sandi Cioffi, it looks at the appalling legacy of oil companies, in particular Shell and Chevron in the Niger Delta. The film features accounts of brutal military repression of protesters, including women, in the Delta, the role of oil companies in the conflict, and local forms of resistance.
“We’re looking at a time-bomb, and when it blows, it will blow us all away…”
Aljazeera produced this excellent video about Shell’s oil spills in Ogoni. In it, Ledum Mittee of MOSOP (the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People) calls on the Nigerian government to revoke Shell’s licence.
This video, made by Amnesty International, shows the horrifying extent of the pollution in Bodo village, where two oil spills from a burst Shell pipeline devastated the land and water which 70,000 local villagers depend on for their survival.
Also, Shell’s spills in Nigeria were the top story on BBC World News, which featured a lengthier analysis from PLATFORM.
Earlier in the day, PLATFORM’s analysis was also quoted in msnbc.com’s report on the same story, available here. The article covered Shell’s double standards in Nigeria, and the potentially ground-breaking implications of the company’s admission of liability for the 2 recent oil spills in Bodo.
In the court case filed in Britain, Shell conceded liability and agreed to proceed under the jurisdiction of the English courts last month, [Lawyer, Dan] Leader told msnbc.com.
The two spills in 2008 and 2009 at Bodo, Ogoniland, devastated the 69,000-person community, Leader said.
“The mood music is changing — oil companies are going to have to start no longer employing a double standard for the developing world and apply the same standards for America and Europe,” he told msnbc.com.
Protest groups have increasingly tried to seek compensation against western oil companies in the firms’ home jurisdictions.
Ben Amunwa of the British group PLATFORM, which monitors international energy companies, said that depending on the compensation that is decided in this case, the agreement could usher in a flood of claims from communities in the region.
“The potential in this decision is that Shell could face a mountain of claims,” Amunwa explained.
The lawyers and rights groups have said the amount of oil in these two spillages alone was approximately 20 percent of the amount that leaked into the Gulf of Mexico following the BP disaster.
“BP did more in 6-months for the U.S. communities than Shell has done in 50 years for the Ogoniland,” said Amnesty International’s [Audrey] Gaughran.
From the RSW blog: “New from Talib Kweli, this hard-hitting music video unpacks the story of of Nigeria’s oil curse, the Ogoni struggle and the complicit role of Western governments and companies. Warning: this video contains strong political lyrics.”
New from Talib Kweli, this hard-hitting music video unpacks the story of of Nigeria’s oil curse, the Ogoni struggle and the complicit role of Western governments and companies. Warning: this video contains strong political language.
The Financial Times pulled an Amnesty advert challenging Shell’s pollution in the Niger Delta today. The full page ad was due to appear the morning of Shell’s AGM, to contrast the company’s $9.8 billion profit with its role in causing Nigerian communities to drink polluted water, eat contaminated fish, farm on spoiled land, and breathe in air that stinks of oil and gas. The FT’s decision reminds of the power of both the oil majors to affect coverage and advertising in London’s main newspapers – in the past, the companies have had explicit policies of demanding to see critical coverage before publication, with the threat of cutting their adverts.
The Shell AGM saw a resolution pushed by PLATFORM, Greenpeace & FairPensions challenging the company’s tar sands plans in Canada and a spoof CSR release promising to “halt Nigerian offshore drilling” and “compensate local communities for past injuries”.
Amnesty also launched an online video focusing on Shell’s illegal practice of gas flaring (the burning of gas produced as part of oil extraction) in the same region:
Shell in the Niger Delta from Amnesty International on Vimeo.
The Niger Delta crisis is coming to an audience of millions as BBC 2 screen the long anticipated and award-winning drama, ‘Blood and Oil’ on prime time television.
Guy Hibbert’s tense thriller (starring Naomi Harris (28 Days Later), Johdi May (Defiance) Patterson Joseph and David Oyelowo) follows two women as they investigate the circumstances that led to the deaths of four hostage oil workers and their militant captors in the oil-rich Niger Delta.
A fictitious oil company, ‘Krielson International’, stands in as a thinly veiled corporate giant, whose corrupt deals and failed development projects infuriate local communities.
Without giving too much away, the oil company, Krielson, and the Nigerian military are profiting hugely from illegal practice of oil bunkering, at the expense of local communities and ultimately risking the lives of their own workers.
It may sound like a thriller plotline, but it bears a striking resemblance to real life events in the Delta, and in particular one of the darker chapters of former President Obasanjo’s repressive rule of Nigeria.
As scholar and author Ike Okonta writes:
20th August 2006. On that afternoon, soldiers of the Joint Task Force, a contingent of the Nigerian Army, Navy and Air Force deployed by the government to enforce its authority on the restive oil-bearing Niger Delta, ambushed fifteen members of the MEND militia in the creeks of western delta and murdered them. Continue reading