Blog

The Obama and Trudeau announcement of an oil/gas development ban in Arctic/Atlantic waters was huge, but how each country explained it reveals a major rift.

Conservationists and environmentalists in Australia are celebrating a major victory after the oil giant BP announced that it is abandoning its hugely controversial plans to drill for oil and gas in the Great Australian Bight.

As Louisiana recovers from the worst flooding in the US since Hurricane Sandy, you would have thought that the chaos and lives lost in the flooding would force an immediate rethink from the Obama Administration regarding energy policy and our continued use of fossil fuels.

Oil giant Shell is still struggling to clean up an estimated 90,000 gallons of oil spilt in to the Gulf of Mexico last Thursday. This latest spill has led to increased calls by local residents on President Obama not to open additional leases in the next Five Year Plan for the Gulf.

There was more good news from the Arctic yesterday, when Norwegian oil company Statoil announced it was “exiting” the region, following recent exploration results in neighbouring oil and gas leases.

In a major set-back for the oil giant, BP’s highly controversial application to drill in one of Australia’s last great wilderness areas, the Great Australian Bight, has been rejected for falling short of environmental standards.

Just as BP finally agrees to pay nearly $21 billion to settle claims relating to the disastrous Deepwater Horizon spill, the oil giant is proposing to drill four exploration wells in the Great Australian Bight, which threatens these pristine waters off the Southern coast of the country.

Twenty years ago the oil giant Shell was embroiled in two separate controversies, which still haunt the company to this day.