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The news from earlier this week that Ken Wiwa, the son of the Nigerian activist and writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, has died at the young age of forty seven, is a devastating shock to anyone who knew him.

A state of emergency was declared yesterday in southern California after 105,000 gallons of oil poured out of a ruptured pipeline near Santa Barbara.

Nigeria lost one of its most iconic, out-spoken and passionate advocates for social and environmental justice last week with the cruelly early death of Oronto Douglas at the age of forty eight.

In the desperately dark days following BP’s Deepwater Horizon accident in April 2010, one of the issues that I highlighted on this blog was the dangers of BP’s chemical Corexit, which the oil giant was using to disperse the oil.

There is growing evidence that transporting tar sands oil maybe as inherently dangerous as carrying the volatile Bakken shale oil.

We can’t go South, we can’t go West, we can’t go East, so, hey, lets’ go North”. That is the latest thinking of the Canadians in their increasingly desperate attempts to export the dirty, carbon intensive tar sands from Alberta.

For the oil industry business comes first. After years of preparation, on Saturday Exxon began drilling a $700 million well in the Kara Sea in Russia's Arctic. It is Russia’s most northerly well.

If there is one country where Shell’s broken promises ring hollower than anywhere else it is in Nigeria.

Late last week, the Norwegian government issued a license to energy giant Statoil to allow it to start drilling in the controversial Arctic waters of the Barents Sea.

And so the battle lines have been drawn. On the one hand you have Canada’s federal government, ever eager to please Big Oil, which has just agreed to let Enbridge build its highly controversial $8 billion Northern Gateway pipeline from the toxic tar sands of Alberta to the rugged coast of British Colombia.