MAOR DERRY

Rossport Solidarity Camp

2009-02-09T15:34:00.000-08:00

Rossport Solidarity Camp

At the invite of the local community, the Rossport Solidarity Camp was set up in June 2005 on the route of the proposed Shell pipeline. We have since been evicted from the camp and now have a house but the spirit of the camp remains and we continue to support the local community and the Shell to Sea campaign’s struggle for justice against the Irish Government and Shell. The solidarity house provides a base for people who wish to visit the area and learn more about the community campaign.

Callout for Spring 09

After a massive effort which helped stop Shell laying the off-shore section of the pipeline in Summer 08, we expect Shell to try lay the off-shore section again this Spring. This will be their fourth attempt at laying the off-shore pipeline, and we hope to make this as unsucessful as the previous attempts. However we will need your help so please get involved and in particular think of visiting the area around April or May 09 to join the resistance. See a summary of some of last years activities here: Review of 2008

The fight goes on. Be part of it.

Email: rossportsolidaritycamp@gmail.com

http://www.rossportsolidaritycamp.110mb.com/index.html

Shell to Sea call for a halt to Shell operations

2009-02-09T15:29:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday January 20th, Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin stated that it is "extraordinary" that gas from the Corrib field has not yet been brought onshore. Shell to Sea feels that what is really "extraordinary" is that the Government is still trying to force this experimental project through given the local community concerns regarding their health, safety and local environment.

Shell to Sea feel that the only way that this situation can be moved forward positively, is for Shell to halt their current operations in the area so that the Corrib debacle can be settled for once and for all. It is high time that the Government started taking the concerns of communities seriously and stops acting just in the interest of big business and banks.

In referring to the recent gas dispute between Russia and the Ukraine, Minister Martin failed to raise the most crucial point that this episode highlighted, which is that Russia has control of its' gas supply, Ireland on the other hand doesn't and won't under the current terms.

Responding to Minister Martins' comments, Shell to Sea spokesperson Maura Harrington stated "Micheál Martin spoke of our need for energy security, but seeing as we will have to buy our own gas back from Shell, the real question is, in these dark economic times where is the 'security of finance' going to come from so that we can get 'security of supply'?".

Recent Garda expenses figures show that for the month of October 08 alone, Gardaí claimed over €1 million for policing the protests against the proposed Corrib project. While a spokesperson for the Dept. of Justice stated that the Garda operation was needed as the protest weren't peaceful, given that no charges have been pressed against any of the protestors, this is totally disingenuous.

Local fisherman Pat O'Donnell stated "Last Autumn in a two month period, during Shells' failed attempt to lay the offshore pipeline over 40 arrests were made, however no charges have resulted from any of these arrests. I, along with other fishermen, was arrested on the water while we were trying to protect our property and livelihoods. The Government has always gone on about Shells' right to go to work yet I was wrongfully arrested at my place of work."

Mr. O'Donnell continued "How can the fact that no protestors have been charged, be tallied with the Department of Justices' statement that the protests aren't peaceful. The local community will continue to protest while their safety and local environment is put at risk by Shell and their friends in Government".

For verification contact:
Maura Harrington - 087 9591474
Terence Conway - 086 0866264

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More Info:

Article on the Corrib Policing Costs: http://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/mhsnojmhkfmh/

The great oil and gas give away continues despite a very real State contribution to exploration costs

2009-02-09T15:20:00.000-08:00

Colm Rapple

Irish Mail on Sunday, December 14, 2008

Oil giant Shell is keeping very tight lipped about the results of an exploratory well it drilled this year on the so-called Dooish prospect some 150 km north-west of Donegal. Earlier wells in this area yielded oil and gas finds which were described at the time as very encouraging. So encouraging, indeed, that Shell was willing to spent over €100 million on this latest well.

Mind you, the Irish taxpayer will be picking up the tab for a large chunk of that cost since Shell can write off the expense against its profits from the Corrib field. Because of that tax concession we effectively pay a quarter of the exploration and development costs of getting oil or gas ashore. That, of itself, would justify the 25% tax we can hope to get on the profits from a find.

With larger finds the tax take can now go up to 40% but even that’s a pittance given that we own the oil and gas. We own the oil and gas, pay 25% of the exploration and development costs and yet, in the case of the Corrib find, for instance, will only get 25% of the profits.

But this latest drilling did cost Shell over €75 million so it was clearly optimistic about the prospects. But neither it, nor the Government, will reveal if that optimism was justified.

We are being denied information that would be very relevant in making a judgement about the appropriate of current Government policy on offshore exploration, in particular it’s approach to Shell’s development in Mayo and its decision to licence further key oil and gas prospects off the west coast on terms that are decidedly soft by international standards.

It suits both the Government and Shell to keep us in the dark. They have been playing down the possibility of other gas finds that could be routed through the Glengad landfall near Rossport in Mayo to the gas refinery being constructed at Bellinaboy. But if there is more gas out there, that’s where it will end up.

And the prospects are good.

While Shell was drilling on the Dooish prospect this year, one of its partners in the Corrib project, StatoilHydro, was drilling on the Cashel prospect which is only about 50km north-west of Belmullet and a lot closer to the Corrib find that Dooish. It was the first drilling into a structure that was believed to be very promising although the industry speculation is that StatoilHydro was disappointed with its results.

But speculation is only that but we won’t really know until StatoilHydro makes a formal statement. Exactly why it is keeping quiet is anyone’s guess.

The Dooish prospect off Donegal is even more promising. An initial well in 2002 encountered a column of hydrocarbon condensate, oil and gas. Shell’s predecessor, Enterprise Oil, was reported to be very encouraged by the results and confirmed that view by returning to the well in 2003, drilling a fresh hole at an angle to the original one. It once again encountered hydrocarbon flows.

These wells are in particularly deep water, some 1700 metres, so it is not surprising that even a very promising find would be left for some years before being revisited. But Shell was obviously sufficiently encouraged by the results to return this year to drill again in an area west of the original find.

The well was spudded on May 19 and plugged on July 28, all without any fanfare, not even a one-line press release from either Shell or the Department.

If the news is in any way good, it calls into question Green Minister Éamon Ryan’s decision to go ahead with another licensing round covering an offshore area the size of the country. We’ve known about his intentions for some time but it’s only in recent weeks that he formally requested applications for exclusive licences to a massive area off the west and north-west coast.

The companies will be able to cherry pick the choice areas and hold exclusive rights to them for sixteen years. To gain a licence they have to commit to an exploration programme but that may be satisfied by relatively cheap seismic studies and need not necessarily include a commitment to drill even a single well.

The licences will be subject to the slightly improved terms under which tax at up to 40% can be levied on very profitable fields. That’s a little better than a flat 25% but compares rather poorly with 50% in Britain, 78% in Norway and over 80% in some other areas.

Andrew Vinall, technical director at the British consultancy Hannon Westwood, recently described the new terms as in keeping with a regime that has always been “benign at least”. Even with the new terms, he added “if you do find oil and/or gas it is not going to be heavily taxed.”

We gave the Corrib gas away and now Éamon Ryan is intent on giving away the remaining choice areas of our offshore acreage at less than bargain basement prices. He risks giving away too much, too soon and too cheaply. Some of the areas on offer are very close to existing finds. If even one of those is declared commercial the terms for future licences could be greatly hardened.

Government studies suggest that there is oil and gas equivalent to 10 billion barrels of oil under the Irish Atlantic shelf. We’ve already given away our right to a significant proportion of it. Let’s not compound the error by issuing more licenses for next to nothing.

Shell to Sea: Review of the Year 2008

2009-02-09T15:16:00.000-08:00

We haven't gone away you know!

2008 has been a year of ups and downs for the Shell to Sea campaign, however generally the last months of the year have been very positive. This is a brief review of the year and a call-out for people to get involved next year when we expect a big push from Shell and the Government to again try to force this project through. At the moment, we are planning on the assumption that a pipe-laying ship (Solitaire or otherwise) will be back anytime from spring next year, to try to finally lay the offshore pipeline.

Related Links: Shell 2 Sea S2S stories on indy.ie

This year the area saw the switch of emphasis away from the refinery at Bellanaboy to Glengad where Shell wants to bring in the pipeline. While for about the first 6 months of the year people still turned up at the Shell to Sea trailer to show their opposition to the refinery, there wasn't very much physical direct action trying to stop the progress there. I think that after all the peat was removed from the refinery, people generally resigned themselves to the fact that the refinery would be built. Also some people had drifted away from the campaign, some thinking that the outcome was inevitable, and others kept away because they were sick of being harried by Gardaí at Bellanaboy. Since I have come to area, a lot of people involved in the campaign immediately around the pipeline area have always said that it would come down to the land and when Shell tries to come on the land. I always thought this was a risky strategy as if the refinery gets built; there would be even greater pressure on the government to have it used, and not to allow a giant corporation waste its money. However, this is the situation that we find ourselves in, but it has to be said that it is also a risky situation for Shell and the Government. They obviously thought that if they got the project this far, then the local community would see the futility of their fight and give up. This has not happened and will not happen for this next stage of the struggle at least.

Glinsk Proposal

Around late April of this year, a proposal to move the refinery to a more remote onland location – such as Glinsk - was backed by a number of local Shell to Sea people. The proposal had been made the previous November by the 3 priests of the parish to Minister Eamon Ryan but he had made no response. This move was seen by many Shell to Sea members as incompatible with what they had been campaigning for and it created significant difficulties at the time. Pobail Cill Comain was formed by the local people who supported the Glinsk proposal and they have worked closely with Pobail Le Ceile which is a local business group working against the current project.
While this development created some tension at the time, I feel that a lot of people in the area now think that overall it has benefited the campaign against the Corrib Gas Project. The fact that there are 3 groups now working locally against Shell might at times seem like overkill, but it has added new directions and dynamic to the campaign too. It is interesting to see how the mainstream papers have taken to the new groups and now normally add Shell to Sea comments at the end of articles in the "also said" section of the article.

Glengad

The big action of the year all occurred in the vicinity of Glengad where Shell & Statoil were planning to lay the offshore section of their pipeline. It is worth noting that this is the third attempt - and failure - to lay the offshore section. At the first attempt Enterprise Oil pulled out because of pressure locally, then in 2005 Shell & Allseas pulled the plug under pressure of a High Court case in the pipeline. This year, just before the pipe-laying was supposedly about to commence, a large section of the stinger broke off and the Solitaire eventually limped home for repair. How the stinger was damaged exactly remains a mystery.

What we do know is about the great resistance that took place around Glengad.

Maura Harrington went on a hunger strike from when the Solitaire entered Broadhaven Bay until it left Irish waters. This was a tough time for everyone involved in the campaign with a 24 hour vigil held for the 11 days outside the gates in Glengad where Maura stayed in her car while on hunger strike. Thankfully this ended with a happy outcome and Maura returned gradually to full health. One aspect that remained with me since this was the line from Maura letter to Allseas in which she stated the "people come and go in nano seconds; Place endures". I feel that this statement represents a lot of why Shell and the Government have not got their way so far with this project.

Other great heroes of this episode were undoubtedly Pat and Jonathan O'Donnell and Kevin McAndrew who in their small fishing boats defied the world's largest pipe laying ship and support vessels in-order to defend their livelihoods, property and area. Pat sought the assistance of Gardaí to prevent their lobster pots being damaged by the Solitaire, but instead the fishermen were arrested twice in 24 hours from his traditional fishing territory, and then released without charge. Pat and his son Jonathan lost approximately 150 pots to damage from the Shell fleet. It is worth noting that the fishermen had a legal right to fish in Broadhaven Bay, but in this instance the Gardai hypocritically abandoned the principle of "people’s right to go to work" so often used to break up peaceful protest at Bellanaboy.

Instead the Navy were drafted in along with the Garda Emergency Response Unit, Garda Water Unit and Kent Police (yes that's English police) to stop the rowdy fishermen, locals, national and international supporters.

One interesting point was how some of the media seemed willing to accept that when it was fishermen fighting for their livlihood then the protest was in some ways acceptable but (implicitly) other members of the local community have less of a right to protest unless they are as directly affected.

In the meantime, members of Rossport Solidarity Camp and international supporters took to the seas and began harassing the Solitaire while it was up in Killybegs and disrupting Shell's operations around Glengad. Again on at least two occasions we were extremely lucky that someone didn't get seriously injured or killed when a digger operator continued working and ended up dropping tonnes of debris within feet of 2 protestors. Lots of other resistance around the time included lock-ons and reclaiming access to the beach (albeit temporarily) which was illegally being blocked by Shell fencing. Also a load of solidarity actions happened all around the world at Shell stations and Irish embassies, in places such as Galway, Dublin, Belfast, England, Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Australia. In the US, I heard of a lady who went on a 3 day fast in solidarity with Maura Harrington’s hunger strike.

On the 22th of July, 13 people challenged the work that Shell were carrying out on the land just over the cliff-face to the beach on a Special Area of Conservation (SAC). They asked to see the legal permission for the work being carried out. Instead of showing any permission however Supt. John Gilligan had the 13 arrested and brought to Belmullet Garda Station where they were subsequently released without charge. However while in the Garda Station, one of the 13, Naoise O'Mongain was injured and subsequently mis-handled by Gardaí and is still on crutches to this day from the incident. These 13 arrests were the among the first of about 50 arrests that happened in course of the next 2 months in Glengad, every single one of whom were subsequently released without charge. In some cases the people involved weren't even told they were arrested or what they were being arrested for.

Regarding the permissions for the land work that took place in Glengad, it turned out that on the 27th of June, Minster for Energy (& former Shell to Sea supporter) Eamon Ryan had given permission for the work in Glengad and exempted the first 100 metres or so (up to the valve station) of the on-shore pipeline from the planning process. However this permission had not been made available to the public, an omission Minister Ryan called an "oversight".

A few days later, local people were pushed off a section of the Glengad beach by about 50 Gardaí and about 70 of Shell's newly employed security force IRMS. Shell then proceeded to fence off about a 100m wide of the section of the beach and so the beach remained split in two for about 4 months. Inspite of Shell claiming in their work method statement that they would allow pedestrian access across this zone, no member of the public was permitted through the fences for about a 4 month period.

At first the security force IRMS (Integrated Risk Management Services) initially took to filming everyone who went down on the beach including young children and swimmers, however the bad publicity that this caused resulted in them being a bit more subtle afterwards.

The works on the site have now all been removed although significant damage has obviously been done to the SAC (water pollution, gravel & silt remain on the beach and churned up soil on land, but this has been totally ignored by National Parks & Wildlife (NPWS) and the Dept of Environment. Hundreds of tonnes of placed material fill were washed away, and the pollution could be seen, the fishermen say, for miles out to sea at times.

One moment I remember down on the beach was when I tried to point out to one of the Gardaí there, how both he and all the Shell workers were basically getting paid from the same purse. He seem to think that I was suggesting that Shell was paying him too. What I meant was that the taxpayer is paying both him (directly) and the Shell employees (indirectly). Because of changes made by Ray Burke in 1987, oil & gas companies can write off all their exploration & development cost against tax. So the tiny percentage of the Corrib Gas field's worth that is to come back to the Irish Exchequer is being lessened by the amount that Shell are spending on security and community bribery funds.

Policing and the Courts

The decision not to prosecute anyone in connection with the resistance in Glengad this year presumably has to do with the shaky legal ground that Shell are on with some of their operations down there. Obviously for the fishermen, their arrest was totally unlawful as they were defending their property and if anyone should have been arrested it should have been the personnel on the Shell vessels. Also it was never made clear to the kayakers or swimmers who were arrested and in some cases illegally detained on the water what exact laws they were breaking other than not obeying a police officer. Also there was the case where people used sledges, car jacks and pipes to take down a number of sections of the fence along the beach in full view of the Gardaí and security. No prosecution has ever come out of this, also presumably because of Shell breaching their exempted permission regulations.

In the courts, it has been a torturously slow progress of the cases dating back to 06 & 07. When you see other cases in the District Court being dealt with fairly rapidly, it seems likely that part of the punishment for being arrested for a Shell to Sea protest is that the case will be dragged out significantly. However it should be noted that this is not always to do with the Judge and sometimes equally to do with delays sought from the defence side. Among some the cases heard this year, John Monaghan who had been found guilty of assault before Judge Mary Devins was found not guilty of assault on appeal. Ed Collins was found not guilty of an assault on a Garda from an incident from which he still has significant injuries. Pat and Jonathan O'Donnell and Enda Carey were found guilty on appeal of a Section 2 assault with sentencing being carried out in the New Year. Michael Healy was recently found guilty of obstruction, while he and 3 others who received significant injuries on the day in question were found not guilty of assault.

Also this year, Maura Harrington took a Judicial Review of Judge Devins’ decision not to allow Ms Harrington to have her own stenographer present to record her court case. The High Court found that Ms Harrington had a right to have a stenographer present at her own expense to record proceedings. Another Judicial Review was taken against Judge Devins’ by a Shell to Sea member which secured the right to get a copy of a court transcript from the hitherto unprecedented provision of stenograpy services at District Court by the Court Services (just for Shell to Sea cases).

Overall I think it’s fairly obvious that the judiciary are not acting independently and that Shell to Sea protestors are getting totally different treatment in front of the courts than if they had been arrested as individuals.

Road to Glengad

One success that Shell seem to have had of late is that the road to Glengad seems to be coming together for them. Mayo County Council (MCC) has really exposed themselves in the manner in which they have pushed this through though. They have resorted to bribing, threatening and bullying people and will now have a reasonably good road for Shell come the spring. They have been working on this 8km section of road for over 6 months now and bit by bit they have taken inches here and there. Recently they (both Shell & MCC) have also succeeded in turning one of the local landowners who had been against the road, with both threats and a significant amount of money. On the road the Road Safety Authority, EPA, Fisheries Board, NPWS, NRA, Ministers for the Environment and MCC themselves, were all made aware of breaches that occurred both in planning and laying of the road but each turned their back on these breaches.

Onshore Planning Application

The manner in which the onshore pipeline planning application has been handled by both Shell and RPS (pipeline planning consultants) to me illustrates both arrogance and incompetence in equal measure.Recently RPS withdrew Shell's planning application under the Strategic Infrastructure Act for the onshore section of the pipeline saying that they will need to seek minor realignments to the pipeline route. RPS and Shell have been working on this planning application for well over a year now and the fact that they had to withdraw it at the final hour must have been some kick in the nuts for them. Basically my reading of the situation is that Shell still hasn’t managed to survey the approximately 3km section of the proposed pipeline route which lies on Rossport commonage. I believe that An Bord Pleanala were trying desperately to accept Shell's planning application (illustrated by the fact that they were willing to receive further information from Shell on the 18th of November), but simply couldn't because of the huge holes that existed in the application. These holes would no doubt have been exposed in an oral hearing by the mountains of knowledge that now exist in this area regarding pipeline siting.

In recent weeks Shell employees and AGEC (Applied Ground Engineering Consultants Ltd) geologists have been trying to get access to the Rossport commonage to do survey work but they have been prevented from doing so by vigilant Rossport residents. The fact that it is presently illegal for Shell to do survey work on the commonage doesn't seem to deter Shell from trying - they have been caught red-handed on at least one occasion. In November 07, Shell sought permission to carry out the survey work on the commonage in Belmullet District court; however Judge Mary Devins found that the notice given by Shell was inadequate and so dismissed Shell's application. The fact that Shell still went ahead with trying to carry out the survey work is surely contempt of court; a similar reason saw the Rossport 5 spent 94 days in jail.

Forums
Towards the end of the year Ministers Ryan & O’Cuiv organised a Forum for Development in North West Mayo, which wanted to link the Corrib Gas Project with the local development of North West Mayo. Shell to Sea chose not to part-take in the Ministers’ Forum for one because the Forum refused to discuss the siting of the refinery, the forcing of a raw gas pipeline on the local community and the great gas giveaway. Also the Minister’s Forum is only open to selected groups; therefore any individual who has questions about the Corrib Gas Project cannot attend just to represent their concerns. A separate Peoples Forum, (which was open to all and fully recorded) was held alongside the Minister’s Forum and was a significant success, with local people voicing their concerns.

Conclusion

The main reason for this article is to try to encourage people to get involved. Even though Shell has made progress on the refinery in Bellanaboy, they still face various significant problems in even getting the legal permissions from the more than compliant authorities to finish the project.

However I believe that the only way that this project will be stopped is if people get involved and make it unworkable for both the Government and Shell. This is still possible and the current recession gives us more opportunities to highlight the daylight robbery of our natural resources. When you hear local Fine Gael TD, Michael Ring starting to rail against the giveaway gas deal, I sense he's guessing which way the wind is blowing.

Indications at the moment are that there will be another fourth push by Shell to lay the off-shore section of the pipeline next spring. At that time we really will need people to come and help us here in Erris but also to put as much pressure on the Government and Shell wherever they are.

Last August & September, even amid all the tension and worry regarding the Solitaire and Maura's hunger strike, there was a really good pro-active atmosphere in Glengad and in particular at the Rossport Solidarity Camp, whose marquees appeared once more and attracted many people back to Glengad. The Rossport Solidarity Camp organises from a permanent house and office at Glengad where people are always welcome to come and stay and lend their support. We intend to set up camp again in spring as a solid base for action against Shell and any new attempt of theirs to progress their doomed pipeline laying efforts.

I feel it’s always good to end an article with a quote from a wise man. So in this case the wise man is Trevor Sargent (current Minister for Food & Horticulture) and the quote is from when he addressed the crowd assembled on the day that the Rossport 5 got out of jail.

"At this point I'd like to pay tribute to my parliamentary colleagues in the other smaller parties and independents who have kept pressure on this FF/PD/Shell - like - Government and who continue to stand firm with the people of Rossport. We're united in fighting the good fight. And it feels good. Because we're going to win."

The rights and wrongs of the Corrib Community Forum

2009-02-09T15:12:00.000-08:00

Thursday, 11 December 2008

DeFacto
Liamy MacNally

IT IS comforting to note that the Chairman of the Government-backed Community Forum, Mr Joe Brosnan, is willing to meet local community groups in north Mayo who have decided to stay away from its deliberations. Not so comforting is the news that three Government Ministers, senior Mayo County Council officials and officials from other statutory bodies were present on the opening day, all suited, booted and on expenses.
The hope is that the Community Forum set up in north Mayo last Friday will not become another ‘whipping boy’ against the local community. Representatives of some local groups claim that they wrote to the main Ministers (Éamon Ó Cuív and Eamon Ryan) seeking clarity on the Community Forum before it started. They claim that they were not even afforded an acknowledgment.
The main problem with the Community Forum is that while Ministers and officials can smile for the cameras on the day, the harsh reality is being ignored. The elephant in the room is not being acknowledged – issues of concern to local people that centre on health, safety and the environment. Before the Forum even got under way the shackles of power had been tightened around its agenda – no discussion of a possible relocation of the Bellanaboy site and no revisiting of consents and permissions granted by Government departments. Already the Forum is doomed to failure by its limitations and its unwillingness to address the issues that have dogged the Corrib gas project since its inception. The only changes from the Government and Shell’s side have been the faces of the personnel dealing with the local people. The local people who raised concerns at the outset are still there, beating their drum, singing the same song that will not be silenced by cheque-book submissions. Peddling the Community Forum as a pretext for managing the benefits of the Corrib gas project for Erris and northwest Mayo and the region only adds to the problems. There are still too many unresolved issues that financial benefits, emanating from the state or Shell, are not of concern to people for whom local consent is still a major worry. How many times must it be said that health, safety, the environment and local consent are what should be tackled in any forum? What is the Government afraid of?
Too many Government ‘initiatives’ associated with the Corrib gas project have been used to belittle local people. The Advantica Report, Peter Cassells’ recommendations and many other so-called reports have been used as cannon fodder against local people, to name but a few. The Community Forum will become the latest weapon against local people if local concerns are not addressed. Window-dressing is not what is needed at this stage of the Corrib saga but truth and a willingness to listen to genuinely-held concerns.
The Corrib history is littered with questions. It started with Coillte’s sale of the site without any reference to the local community, which is against Government policy. When legal issues emanated over the upstream pipeline a new law was introduced by Government. When the project was floundering in the judicial bogs the Strategic Infrastructure Bill came in handy. The pipeline was welded together without permission by Shell even though a senior Government official told a judge under oath that all consents were in place. Removing the peat in Bellanaboy was ‘impossible’ at one stage, then it was done! The original planning permission for the refinery has had four alternations with another in the offing. Putting the pipeline through the bog was not an option one time, now it is perfectly feasible. The list goes on. In a recent interview the Garda Commissioner stated that he would need extra gardaí for the laying of the upstream pipeline next year, yet no decision has been made on this. Does he know something other people do not?
I admit that it is not popular to highlight negatives about the Corrib project. Shell has done an excellent job with its PR machine, winding its way into every nook and cranny of life in Mayo. It has used donations and grants while also drawing on the expertise of professional people, from former journalists and clergy to senior former Council officials and former senior Gardaí. Action is taken on critical reports, sometimes directly, other times, indirectly. Of course there is pressure placed on people who make negative comments about the project. Sure, there are positives with Corrib, from construction jobs to security of supply for the State (but not at reduced prices!) It all boils down to a simple question – do the ‘rights’ of a multi-national, in association with the State and state bodies, take precedence over the rights and concerns of actual people? Put that on the Forum agenda.

Positive steps on first day of engagement

2009-02-09T15:07:00.000-08:00

Tuesday, 09 December 2008

THE Chairman of the Community Forum for Development in North West Mayo, Mr Joe Brosnan, engaged in contingency talks in the coming weeks with some community groups opposing the Corrib gas project.
A retired senior civil servant, Mr Brosnan was in Belmullet on Friday last with Ministers Eamon Ryan and Éamon Ó Cuív for the inaugural session, which was boycotted by a number of groups opposing the controversial project.
Community groups Pobal Chill Chomáin, Pobal le Chéile and Shell to Sea believe the terms of reference should include the relocation of the refinery at Bellanaboy and should prioritise community consent.
However, during informal engagements at the forum venue, Mr Brosnan asked the Chairman of local business group Pobal le Chéile, Mr Ciarán Ó Murchú, to outline to him a process which would be acceptable to his group – and Pobal Chill Chomáin – to ensure their future inclusion.
Mr Brosnan said there was not any ‘no-go’ area and that he was disappointed that all those invited had not attended the forum.

Meanwhile, a broad range of community groups and State agencies engaged with the one-day forum, initiated by the two Ministers on November 6 last, to address concerns about the Corrib gas project and overall economic development in the Erris region.
In attendance, Shell Ireland’s Managing Director, Mr Terry Nolan, said the company will work with the forum’s chairman and other participants ‘to leverage the development opportunities that will flow from Corrib’.

Speaking at the forum, Minister Ryan said: “Safety, environmental concerns and equitable dealings towards all will be my priorities throughout this process.”
He also observed that north west Mayo could become an energy hub and ‘has some of the best ocean and wind resources in the world’.
Addressing the forum, Minister Ó Cuív said: “We have to do all we can to maximise the local dividend of such a major project, so that we have the best outcome for Ireland, for Mayo and particularly for Erris.”

At a press briefing afterwards, he likened the potential of the initiative to Northern Ireland’s Forum for Peace and Reconciliation, but stressed that both Ministers had to act within legal constraints.
When asked about ongoing High Court legal challenges to original consents, Minister Ó Cuív said that any such rulings would also be adhered to.
Chairman of the Erris Inshore Fishermen’s Association (EIFA), Mr Eddie Diver, who participated, said the forum should have happened years ago when it could have made a real difference.
“Our group resolved our issues with Shell during the summer over the disposal of pollutants at sea. We think the forum is constructive but the terms of reference are too narrow,” said Mr Diver.
Local Fianna Fáil councillor, Tim Quinn, also criticised the narrowness of the terms of reference. “The forum should be open to everyone and the terms of reference should include the issue of the location of the refinery. What’s the point of having dialogue when the whole agenda is constricted,” said Cllr Quinn.
Chief Supt Tony McNamara expressed his disappointment that opponents of the project had declined to engage with the project. He said it was the function of the Gardaí to maintain law and order and conceded that there had ‘obviously been significant policing issues’ relating to the project.
Chairman of Pobal Chill Chomáin, Vincent McGrath, said that all parties agree that the Erris region needs sustained economic development but that shouldn’t be confused with ‘the elephant in the room which is Corrib’.

Mr PJ Moran noted that ‘one good thing’ about the initiative was that ‘a finger could now be pointed at specific Government Ministers’ about ongoing problems.
“Next summer when they try to lay the pipeline and there are bodies all over Rossport, Éamon Ó Cuív and Eamon Ryan will have to take responsibility for it,” said PJ Moran of Pobal Chill Chomáin.

Shell to Sea held a separate open forum at the same venue on Friday. They highlighted ‘the continued Government giveaway of [the country’s] oil and gas resources at a time of great economic need’ and the situation of the refinery in a water catchment as further key issues.

New Corrib Gas Documentary

2008-10-20T14:37:00.000-07:00

by Revolt Video Collective

This video represents the many people not given a voice in the mainstream media.

They have been denied a voice mainly because of their dissenting views about the Corrib gas project in its current form.

There are interviews with many people who have suffered both personally and financially for daring to oppose the oil and gas industry.

This industry has been supported by the various intimidatory and violent methods used by the Garda.

The mainstream media has consistently misrepresented the facts, and has failed to report human rights abuses taking place in Mayo.

It has instead tried to demonise anybody who goes against their neo-liberal view-point on how Ireland should be organized and structured.

Most of the interviews were filmed over the last month.

Thanks to all of the people who generously gave up their time and energy to make this no budget documentary.

This is the first part of an ongoing documentary about the Corrib Gas Project.

Successful Shell To Sea Benefit held in Derry

2008-10-20T14:22:00.000-07:00

On behalf of Derry MAOR, we would like to take this opportunity to thank the management and staff of Sandino’s Café Bar for their kind and exceptional help and assistance in making possible the recent Punk benefit night to highlight the ongoing Shell to Sea campaign in North West Mayo.

In doing so, we would like to extend our appreciation to the bands for their support and talent from The Lobotomies, Axis Of, Death Warrant and Anti -State who without their energy and commitment such an enjoyable evening itself would not have been possible for the Derry public who turned out to express genuine solidarity with the ‘Sea To Sea’ Campaign.

This event helped create greater awareness and knowledge of a multinational company known worldwide for having destroyed entire communities; incite government corruption and profoundly damaging protected ecosystems from the continents of Africa and America to the shores of this country and more specific the west coast of Mayo.

With the aid of the Irish administration, such multinational Oil companies have attempted to impose their might on the people of North West Mayo for the last 7 years.

By doing so, they have torn apart entire communities by ignoring their overall human rights and concerns. Not to mention threatening their health and safety by bribing both neighbours and politicians alike, with the confiscation and illegal occupation of their lands, all this with the protection of private security firms as An Garda Síochána at the cost of over 10 million euro.

In closing, we would again call upon everyone in locally throughout the North West to Mobilise, Act, Overcome and Reclaim our rights to our country’s own natural resources as it is the belief of MAOR that this is just the beginning.

UPCOMING EVENTS

2008-10-20T10:51:00.000-07:00

‘Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will’.
Fredrick Douglass 1819 - 1895, former slave, abolitonist, author, reformer, political activist

Upcoming events
24th to 26th October : AFRI Hedge School 2008

Pipelines and Profits: People Under Pressure

Film screening Friday 24th at 8.30pm

Conference sessions Saturday 25th and Sunday 26th

Registration 9.15am Saturday in Glenamoy Community Centre, Erris, Co Mayo

Lifts can be arranged to Mayo, contact MAOR.

13th November : MAOR meeting in Carndonagh

Carndonagh Carnival office, 7pm Thursday 13th November

Possible leafleting and information giving in Carndonagh prior to the meeting.

Details to follow

Shell to Sea Meets Ministers Ryan and Ó Cuív – Nothing New From Government

2008-09-29T14:13:00.000-07:00

Monday September 29, 2008

No solution or new thinking on the Corrib fiasco from the pro-Shell Government emerges from cynical PR exercise

A number of groups from Erris and Co. Mayo went to meet with two government ministers, Éamon Ryan (Natural Resources) and Éamon Ó Cuív (Gaeltacht & Community Affairs) in Ballina today. These groups included Shell to Sea, Pobal Chill Chomáin, and Pobal le Chéile; a number of Erris fishermen accompanied by the parish priest of Kilcommon also met the ministers despite not having been invited.

The ministers also met with the Pro- Gas Mayo Group and the Council for the West, organisations that could be candidly described as ‘astroturf’ (i.e. fake grassroots) and stalking horses for Shell. Following these encounters, the ministers met with the TDs for Mayo and county councillors from Erris, to round off what was a cynical PR exercise by an alarmed clueless government.

In the wake of recent events in Erris, Co. Mayo, when Shell’s pipe laying ship the Solitaire was made to leave Broadhaven Bay amid controversy, alleged structural damage and determined community protests, the Irish government hurriedly issued invites to community groups from the Erris area to meet with Ministers Éamon Ryan and Éamon Ó Cuív, who would be accompanied by their departmental secretaries, and Ciarán Ó hÓbáin who is the Principal Officer of the Petroleum Affairs Division of the Dept. of Communications, Marine and Natural Resources.

After having met Pobal Chill Chomáin, Pobal le Chéile and the Pro-Gas Mayo Group/Council for the West, the ministers met with the Shell to Sea delegation just after 1p.m, over an hour later than specified on the invitation. Ó Cuív and Ryan then attempted to delay the meeting even further again by using the RTÉ crew’s timetable worries as an excuse.

The Shell to Sea delegation stood their ground forcefully, and got the ministers to start the meeting immediately.

It was clear from the off that the government had nothing new to offer in terms of a solution to the Corrib Gas fiasco or indeed any new thinking at all, when Ryan began the talking by describing the encounter as a ‘listening exercise’.

Ryan and Ó Cuív indeed had to listen, as the delegation described to him again in detail the brutalisation of a community at the hands of a corrupt alliance of Shell and the state, the destruction of one of the few environments in Ireland worthy of being called ‘unspoilt’, and the corruption endemic in Irish public life that made (and makes) the Great Gas Robbery possible.

Strangely, it was the latter charge of endemic corruption that drew a response from Ó Cuív, who was indignant that his profession and his colleagues could be so impugned. The delegation pointed out to him that not only was one of his ‘colleagues’ convicted and jailed for such corruption (the ever-relevant Ray Burke), that Mr. Ryan beside him had also been in the impugners’ chorus before the Greena Fáil shotgun marriage last June.

In this reporter’s opinion, some of Mr. Ó Cuív’s contributions bordered on the bizarre, referring to half-forgotten meetings in Belmullet in 2002 and that ‘in my enquiries in the 1990s on this issue non-Fianna Fáil sources assured me that there was nothing wrong with the offshore licensing terms’.

These ‘non-FF sources’ turned out on further probing to be senior civil servants from the Petroleum Affairs Division of Mr. Ryan’s department, of whom most would have long career histories with major oil companies. It goes to show the calibre and disinterestedness of the advice the government receives on these matters.

Both ministers were selectively deaf when it came to the policing of the Corrib Gas dispute. They attempted to fob the delegation off with claims of departmental non-responsibility, but people were having none of it and reminded the ministers and their secretaries that the presence of three navy ships and the Garda Emergency Response Unit are not mere details to be taken up with somebody else, but an integral part of the state/Shell approach in forcing through the Corrib Gas project on an unconsenting community.

Mr. Ryan had the effrontery to opine that the navy ships were there to provide 'safety' , as 'those big boats are very dangerous to go near' (not nearly as dangerous as having a high-pressure raw gas pipe go through your neighbourhood Éamon!)

They were also reminded that they will have to deal with this facet of the controversy eventually, either on the floor of Dáil Éireann or in the court of public opinion.Not only were the ministers bereft of any new ideas, it was also intimated to Shell to Sea that Shell would get permission from the Parks and Wildlife Service to continue works at the Glengad landfall site into October and beyond, in open breach of the conditions attached to the planning permission granted originally.

While it is always good to speak truth to power whenever possible, today’s exercise left a bad aftertaste, because there is no real listening going on at government level concerning the Corrib Gas project, only the re-iteration of ‘it’s going ahead anyway’ and the sheer cynicism of he who supported Shell to Sea in the past saying he’s doing all in his power to ensure that this odious project is ‘safe, legal, and environmentally correct’.

Now, if you wonder who the Pro-Gas Mayo group are, then go to - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro_Gas_Mayo_Group

And, if you enjoy your humour black and ironic, try this! - http://www.shell.com/home/Framework?siteId=ie-en&FC2=/i....html

Statement from Maura Harrington as she ends hunger strike

2008-09-22T12:41:00.000-07:00

I thank Divine Grace and the support of decent people everywhere that the Solitaire has left Irish territorial waters.
The courage of 'the Chief', Pat O'Donnell and his son Jonathan, who fought to uphold their rights at sea, and the tenacity of local people, together with national and international support, in their quest for justice is a testament to what is best in all of us.
Local people have borne the brunt of Shell's arrogance and Government neglect for the past eight years. Yet Corrib remains a national issue because the Government continues to put the profits of Shell before the needs of the Irish people.
Any alternative location for the Corrib Gas infrastructure will not build new schools, new hospitals or contribute to the National Pension Fund. Until we the People benefit from what is rightfully ours, any attempt to extricate Shell and the Government from the mess that is Corrib remains doomed to failure.
It is fitting that the latest episode in the Corrib debacle should occur on the anniversary (by day and date) of the landslides which devastated Glengad and the wider Dooncarton area in 2003. If Shell is capable of any rationality, now is the time for them to accept that they will never put a pipeline through Glengad.
I believe that the Shell to Sea campaign gives hope to all who strive for an Ireland that cherishes all its people equally and upholds values that don't carry a price tag.

Cork Shell to Sea, Green Party shenanigans

2008-09-22T12:36:00.000-07:00

Cork Shell to Sea paid a visit to the Green Party office on Douglas St this afternoon as part of the sustained and mounting campaign to get the Solitaire out of Ireland, Shell out to Sea and Irish Gas in the hands of the Irish people.

The group of about 7 activists entered the office and found all the politicians out with a paid worker left running the place. Our quarrel wasn't with her but with her employers so we made our point firmly and clearly and she passed it on.
After a short and cordial discussion we went outside with a banner and leafleted passers-by to an encouraging response.
Around this point we were contacted by Senator Dan Boyle who expressed his irritation with our protest and said he hoped we weren't disrupting visitors to his office.
In much the same way we hope that residents of Erris aren't having their lives disrupted by Shell and Gardai, DanCouncillor Chris O'Leary also contacted us and offered to take a letter to the Party think-in.

Text follows
Eamon Ryan, John Gormley, Trevor Sergeant,All Members, The Green Party.
RE: Maura Harrington, Corrib Gas Project.Green Party Sell-Out.
Dear Sirs/Mesdames,
We are writing motivated and shocked into action by Maura Harrington’s hunger strike, and, as long-time Shell To Sea activists, with a passionate interest in justice, human rights and a clean and safe environment, we are disgusted and disappointed by the Green Party’s recent u-turns on numerous issues, but, principally, the Corrib gas project.
We have read the Green Party principles, and found them to be completely at odds with reality. We ask the Green Party to redeem itself and stand by its principles by:
 Ensuring, by any means necessary, the permanent removal of the Solitaire from Irish territorial waters;
 Supporting the Irish people in the reclamation of their natural resources for the benefit of future life on the planet;
 Apologising to Green Party voters for recent betrayals vis-à-vis Corrib gas project, Tara and military flights through Shannon;
 Issuing a clear statement as to why the Green Party abandoned Shell To Sea.
In the event that the Green Party is unwilling or unable to fulfil these requests, we call for the resignation of all Green Party government Ministers, and the re-writing of Green Party Principles to conform with the new reality.
We invite any Green Party members who are dissatisfied with the current situation to get in touch with us and/or support the aims of Shell To Sea, as they see fit.
Yours,Letter ends
The Green Party principles are worth reading as an aspirational document from a more idealistic hopeful time and they were displayed in the window of the office but on request from us they were removed as they portray a false image of the party.

Maura Harrington Ends Hunger Strike - Solitaire Gone From Irish Waters

2008-09-22T12:29:00.000-07:00

Friday September 19, 2008

Maura seals victory over Shell and the state and thanks all who helped on the way

This afternoon, the Shell to Sea campaigner Maura Harrington ended her 10-day-old hunger strike after confirmation that the Solitaire had indeed left Irish waters. She read a statement to the press and the public outside the gates of Shell’s compound at Glengad in Erris, Co. Mayo, and then announced that her hunger strike had come to an end.

In what may be seen in times to come as a landmark victory for people power over the will of an overbearing multinational and state power, Maura Harrington ended her 10-day-old hunger strike this afternoon at 3pm after hearing the news that the Shell pipe-laying ship the Solitaire had left Irish territorial waters after over a week of hanging around in Killybegs, Co. Donegal. The Solitaire left Killybegs late last night or early this morning, and is now currently docked in Clyde Port, Glasgow, in Scotland. It remains unclear what the Solitaire’s future plans are; it is hoped it stays away from Broadhaven Bay for the rest of this year.Maura read a statement to the assembled press and people present at the Shell compound gates. Afterwards, following a brief photo-call, she was hugged joyfully by her many friends present and did the rounds of an elated and relieved crowd. Her energy and good spirits were inspirational after her 10-day ordeal, and once she had finished dealing with the press and accepting the embraces of fellow Shell to Sea campaigners she left with family to begin her recovery at her home.The text of her statement is:‘I thank Divine Grace and the support of decent people everywhere that the Solitaire has left Irish territorial waters.‘The courage of ‘the Chief’, Pat O’Donnell and his son Jonathan, who fought to uphold their rights at sea, and the tenacity of local people, together with national and international support, in their quest for justice is a testament to what is best in all of us.‘Local people have borne the brunt of Shell’s arrogance and Government neglect for the past eight years. Yet Corrib remains a national issue because the Government continues to put the profits of Shell before the needs of the Irish people. Any alternative location for the Corrib Gas infrastructure will not build new schools, new hospitals or contribute to the National Pension Fund. Until we the People benefit from what is rightfully ours, any attempt to extricate Shell and the Government from the mess that is Corrib remains doomed to failure.‘It is fitting that the latest episode in the Corrib debacle should occur on the anniversary (by day and date) of the landslides which devastated Glengad and the wider Dooncarton area in 2003. If Shell is capable of any rationality, now is the time for them to accept that they will never put a pipeline through Glengad.‘I believe that the Shell to Sea campaign gives hope to all who strive for an Ireland that cherishes all its people equally and upholds values that don’t carry a price tag.’
Related Link: http://www.corribsos.com/

Two Arrested After Shell to Sea Rooftop Banner Drop on Shell’s Belmullet HQ

2008-09-18T13:07:00.001-07:00

Thursday September 18, 2008

Two Arrested After Shell to Sea Rooftop Banner Drop on Shell’s Belmullet HQ

Gardaí go back on their word – Maura Harrington’s hunger strike continues into ninth day

Shell to Sea paid a visit to Shell’s offices in Belmullet this afternoon and draped a banner from the roof saying ‘Solitaire Out Now’, and protested outside the office until after the workers inside went home. Two people were arrested just after they came down from the roof.Maura Harrington’s hunger strike continued into its ninth day today. Her strike will end when Shell’s pipe-laying ship the Solitaire leaves Irish territorial waters, or she will die.

In a daring action this afternoon at about 4pm, three Shell to Sea activists dropped a banner from the rooftop of the Shell local offices in Belmullet reading ‘Solitaire Out Now’. The banner remained there for over an hour and a half, while shell to Sea supporters protested outside the front of the Shell offices. More banners were draped across the entrance area, and when the shell employees left work at 5:30 they were hailed with a chorus of boos from the assembled protestors. One Shell to Sea campaigner had his name taken by Gardaí for politely attempting to speak to prominent Shell apologist and former journalist Christy Loftus.Two of the three Shell to Sea campaigners who had been on the roof were arrested when they descended to the ground. The Garda in charge of policing this protest, Insp. Martin Byrne went back on word he had given to the Shell to Sea protestors to the effect that the rooftop team would not be arrested if they gave their names and addresses. When the first person came down, he said he would wait until all three were down and then they would all give details together. This did not suit the Gardaí however, and they grabbed him forcibly and dragged him to a waiting Garda van. The second person down wasn’t even given a chance to give his details, and was also dragged to the Garda van. The Gardaí did not arrest the third rooftop team member, and did take identity details from him. The two arrestees were released quickly afterwards.Outside the gates of the Shell landfall site compound in Glengad, Maura Harrington’s hunger strike entered its ninth day today. She remains in good spirits, but the strike is slowly exacting its toll. She remains in her car, under the glare of powerful arc lights and with a constant heavy presence of Gardaí nearby. The 24-hour protective vigil of Shell to Sea campaigners continues to watch over her. Maura’s hunger strike will end when the Shell pipe-laying ship the Solitaire leaves Irish territorial waters. The Solitaire remains at anchor in St. John’s Bay, Killybegs, Co. Donegal at the time of writing.
Related Link: http://www.corribsos.com/

Shell says Solitaire to leave Irish waters today

2008-09-18T13:07:00.000-07:00

Thursday September 18, 2008

In the last hour Shell has announced that the Solitaire pipe laying ship is to depart from Irish territorial waters and go to a British port for repair and assessment.

The company has always claimed that it was not responding to pressure from protests against its plan to install an offshore section of production pipeline without any planning permission for the onshore section. Maura Harrington, who is on hunger strike at the Shell compound at Glengad beach, has yet to make a statement, but it is hoped that if the company claim is true, and the ship leaves, then she will end or suspend her protest.

Ring up the Solitaire - Tell Them to Leave Irish Waters!

2008-09-14T13:58:00.000-07:00

Rossport Solidarity Camp - Shell to Sea

Let that ship and its owners know your disgust at its continuing presence!The Shell to Sea campaign is requesting that people phone and email the Solitaire and its owners Allseas Group SA to let the ship's captain and crew, and that company know that its continuing presence in Irish waters is unwelcome and that continuing to delay its eventual departure is forcing Maura Harrington to continue her hunger strike. Shell to Sea is asking people to demand that Allseas Group SA unambiguously and publicly announce the Solitaire's imminent departure from Irish waters not to return this year.Allseas' & Solitaire's contact numbers and emails are in the main body text.Contact numbers/emails for the Solitaire, its captain Mr. Simon van der Plicht, and for

Allseas Group SA's legal and public relations depts.:
The Solitairetel.: 0047 5140 7930 ext.
100email: solmaster@solitaire.allseas.comAllseas Group SA Public Relations

Dept.public.relations@allseas.com
Allseas Group SA Legal Dept.
legal@allseas.com

Shell to Sea also requests that carbon copies of your correspondence to the Solitaire and Allseas Group SA be sent to Rossport Solidarity Camp at:
rossportsolidaritycamp@gmail.comfor

those who rely only on the surface mails, here's a few postal addresses for
Allseas Group SA:Allseas Group S.A.
Route de Pra de Plan 18Case Postale 4111618
Châtel-Saint-DenisSwitzerlandtel: +41 21 948 3500fax: +41 21 948 3599
Allseas Marine Services N.V.Stationsstraat 180B-2910
EssenBelgiumtel: +32 3 670 1830fax: +32 3 667 7969
Allseas Engineering bvPoortweg 122612 PA Delft
The Netherlandstel: +31 15 268 1800fax: +31 15 257 1623Allseas EMEAFunchal,Madeira,Portugal
The Allseas SA UK office address in London is not given on Allseas' website.
Get busy with your phones and computers and ask them to leave immediately!

Solitaire Plays Deaf to Pleas to Leave from Shell to Sea!

2008-09-14T13:55:00.000-07:00

Sunday September 14, 2008

Shell's pipe-laying ship pretends not to listen: meanwhile 500+ cars join protest rally in Erris

Hunger striker Maura Harrington's daughter Astrid and son Iollan travelled to Killybegs Co. Donegal, today to make a personal plea to the Shell pipe-laying ship the Solitaire and its captain Mr. Simon van der Plicht to leave Irish waters immediately, and allow Maura to end her strike. Meanwhile, over 500 cars (with their drivers and passengers) drove around Erris this afternoon in a massive show of support for Ms. Harrington, who has now entered the sixth day of her hunger strike.
A deputation from Shell to Sea travelled to Killybegs, Co. Donegal today to attempt communications with Shell's pipe-laying ship the Solitaire and with its captain, Mr. Simon van der Plicht. the deputation included two of hunger striker Maura Harrington's children - her daughter Astrid, and her only son Iollan, who was brutally arrested by Shell's Gardaí during yesterday's beach reclamation action in Glengad, Co. Mayo.At about lunchtime, soon after the Shell to Sea deputation arrived in Killybegs, radio contact was established with the Solitaire, which replied to initial VHF radio contact. Once the deputation announced their identity and their purpose over the radio, all radio contact with the Solitaire ceased, and all communications on VHF radio channels were met with silence. Disappointed with the ship's attitude but undaunted, the deputation kept communicating their message to the Solitaire over the radio, with Astrid and Iollan eloquently explaining the current situation in Mayo and why their mother has chosen to go on hunger strike, and they made dignified requests for the Solitaire to leave Irish waters, so that their mother can end her strike. The other ships that were involved in Shell's abortive pipe-laying operation in Mayo were similarly addressed; these communications were also met with silence. A further attempt at communication with Shell's ships some two hours later was met with silence again. The Shell to Sea delegation kept trying to establish communication for about a half an hour, but were ultimately fruitless.Between the communication attempts, Astrid boarded the Irish Naval Service ship the LÉ Eithne, which was moored in Killybegs harbour. She managed to encounter its captain, and she began explaining to him calmly the situation in her home place in NW Co. Mayo and her disgust at the Irish Navy's role in Shell's attempt to begin pipe-laying in Broadhaven Bay, but he walked away from her without commenting. She was then escorted off the ship.Meanwhile back in Co. Mayo a motor car rally of over 500 cars made its way around Erris this afternoon - a sign of the massive support Shell to Sea's and Maura Harrington's stand command in the locality. The rally started at Barnatra at 3:30pm and is continuing at the time of posting.Maura Harrington entered the sixth day of her hunger strike this lunchtime. Her health and spirits remain strong, as she stays in her car parked before the Shell Glengad compound gates. The gates area is kept constantly lit by Shell an an attempt to disrupt her sleeping pattern, and the numerous Gardaí stationed there continue to behave in a aggressive abusive manner. A vigil of supporters keeps watch on Maura 24 hours a day, and help combat the various Garda verbal and physical nastinesses. Her hunger strike will continue until she receives solid assurances from either the Solitaire or its owners Allseas Group SA that the ship will not be pipe-laying in Broadhaven Bay this year and will be leaving Irish territorial waters without delay.Come to Mayo and see for yourself what Shell and the state have done to a resisting unconsenting community!
Related Link: http://www.corribsos.com

Interview with Maura Harrington

2008-09-13T12:53:00.000-07:00

http://www.politube.org/list?tab%5Bid%5D=all

Four Arrested as Shell to Sea Reclaim Glengad!

2008-09-13T12:35:00.000-07:00

Saturday September 13, 2008

Maura Harrington’s son arrested as Shell’s Cops violently defend Shell’s unwanted compound

Today at 12 noon a group of determined local residents accompanied by Rossport Solidarity Campers asserted their right to walk the foreshore illegally enclosed by Shell into their compound in Glengad. An Garda Siochana once again showed who they really want to work for as they defended Shell’s ‘property’ with their customary zeal and thuggery. Four people were arrested during this action; the Gardaí were particularly rough with those arrested, and the four arrested were released at around 5pm. Maura Harrington’s hunger strike continues..

To show the continuing determination of the Shell to Sea campaign to halt this environmentally and economically destructive Corrib Gas Project, a group of local residents made the attempt to exercise their right to public access to the foreshore at Glengad, where Shell have illegally enclosed a section of the foreshore right down to below the low water mark. One of the many conditions attached to Shell’s operation at Glengad is that they allow the general public access to the entire foreshore. This is also one of the many conditions attached to their operating permission that they blithely ignore, as with so many other ones, and Shell’s Gardaí sure as (S)hell won’t even think of keeping them honest!At the beginning of the action, the participants requested their rightful public access, which was of course refused by Shell’s insecurity headman. They were then informed that the people assembled did not accept the refusal of their right to public access, and that the group would take action to exercise that right. Then out came the fence dismantling tools.Several sections of fence were cut loose from their foundations and pushed back to effect public access to all of Glengad. The immediate Garda response was to fill the fence breach with their bodies and grab anyone who sneaked past their line into the ‘compound’ for arrest. Four people were arrested during this period, and Gardaí were deliberately rough and violent to arrestees. Some of the ‘Garda arresting procedure’ was particularly harrowing to watch, as arrestees screamed in pain from being held in stress positions.A stand-off on the beach between massed Gardaí and locals/Shell to Sea campaigners continued as this reporter left to file this report. Gardaí were also using violence to seize equipment and possessions off from people on the foreshore, allegedly as part of ‘gathering evidence’, grabbing banners and bags indiscriminately and with menace.One of the arrestees is the son of Maura Harrington, who is continuing her hunger strike outside the gates of Shell’s Glengad compound. Gardaí treated him with particular venom, as part of an ongoing campaign of violence and harassment against all his family. Maura’s strike is now in its fifth day. Her health and spirits are still holding up, despite being surrounded 24 hours a day by hostile Gardaí and Shell security. Shell are refusing to confirm unambiguously that they do not intend to attempt pipe-laying works this year, or to unambiguously confirm the departure of the Solitaire from Irish territorial waters. A rotating local vigil is continuing to keep watch on her as her hunger strike continues.
Related Link: http://www.corribsos.com/

Shell to Sea Press Release - September 9th 2008

2008-09-10T12:50:00.000-07:00

Shell to Sea campaigner begins Hunger Strike

This evening Shell to Sea campaigner Maura Harrington has begun a Hunger Strike to coincide with the arrival of the Solitaire, pipe-laying vessel in Broadhaven Bay. In a letter that was handed into the Solitaire in Killybegs yesterday, after being previously sent to Allseas Ltd (owner of the Solitaire), Ms Harrington stated that she placed her life in the hands of the Master of the Solitaire, Mr Simon van der Plicht. In her letter, she stated that her hunger strike will end in one of two ways, either that the Solitaire leaves Irish territorial waters or her death.
A constant vigil has started at the gates of the Shell compound at Glengad in support of Maura Harrington and her opposition to the Corrib Gas Project.
For verification phone: Maura Harrington - 087 9591474 or Terence Conway - 086 0866264

Shell claims that the Solitaire is leaving Broadhaven Bay, but says it will take 48 hours

2008-09-10T12:45:00.000-07:00

Wednesday September 10, 2008

Story may be a ruse to attempt to kill media reports of hunger strike
RTE and other media outlets are reporting that the Shell pipe laying ship is to leave Broadhaven Bay within 48 hours. Some journalists are speculating that the ship's captain has had a crisis of conscience and has left the area in response to the hunger strike, but Shell's statement claims the move is in response to damage to the ship's equipment. In situations like this, it is usual that false claims are made, and even deals are agreed to, purely to diffuse the situation.

Campaigners remember the lies that were told to Tara campaigners who had tunneled under the roadworks at the ancient site recently. Readers with longer memories will know that in previous hunger strike situations, media outlets have been used to spread misinformation. It is likely that Shell is trying to manage the media coverage of the situation, and a tactical withdrawal at this stage might suit them, since the campaign is going to find it hard to keep the attention of a fickle media when the novelty of the current situation has worn off. It is not clear from Shell's statement why it will take them 48 hours to move a ship back to the Donegal coast, since it can make the trip in a matter of a few hours under normal conditions. rte report here: www.rte.ie/news/2008/0910/corrib.html

Urgent Call Out! Escalation in Erris as Solitaire arrives - solidarity needed

2008-09-10T12:43:00.000-07:00

Tuesday September 09
The Solitaire arrived in Broadhaven Bay this evening, as the accompanying security operation was stepped up significantly. Vanloads of Gardaí; including special public order units have started arriving. Local woman Maura Harrington has gone on hunger strike at the gates of the compound. Her demand is that the Solitaire leave the bay or else her hunger strike will continue. Local fisherman Pat O'Donnell has just been arrested whilst trying to defend his lobster pots. Meanwhile, internet services in the area have been mysteriously cut...

Eight Arrested as S2S Flotilla Acts Against Winching Preparations

2008-09-07T13:36:00.000-07:00

Thurs. 4th September.

The Shell to Sea Flotilla took to the waves in Broadhaven Bay this evening towards sunset in an attempt to foil winching preparations in advance of the pipe-laying ship the Solitaire’s arrival possibly sometime soon. The intrepid S2S Flotilla were opposed in their mission by Shell’s fleet of security mercenaries, Gardaí, and the Irish Naval service, which were deployed in overwhelming numbers and in an aggressive, deliberately un-safety-conscious manner. Seven S2S marine protestors were arrested and taken to Belmullet Garda station. In a simultaneous action at the gates of the Shell Glengad compound a local man was arrested and taken to Belmullet Garda station. An earlier marine S2S sortie successfully held up shore-based dredging operations in the Glengad compound this afternoon for about two hours; there were no arrests that time.

More Blockades, More Shell War-Boats!

2008-09-02T13:39:00.000-07:00

Tuesday September 02, 2008 20:31

Defiance all round by S2S as the Irish Naval Service disgrace themselves again
Report and photos from this morning’s blockade of the Shell compound in Glengad, Erris, Co. Mayo, and the Shell to Sea Flotilla’s second visit to Shell War-Boat Orla which left Broadhaven Bay this afternoon. Also there is confirmation of the arrival of a second Shell War-Boat, the Aoife.

Locals and Solidarity Campers blockaded the shift change at Shell’s pipeline landfall site compound at Glengad about 7am this morning. Protestors assembled before the compound gates at approximately 6:50am. The blockaders were opposed by nearly 40 Gardaí who were in quite confrontational mood, but even so the protest continued for over an hour in spite of the Gardaí being rather rough when pushing back blocking protestors. The protest ended soon after 8am when Gardai forced open a path for the last vehicle to enter the compound. Then, this afternoon at about 1:30pm Shell to Sea Flotilla’s Emerald Squadron took to the sea to once again approach the Shell War-Boat Orla. The purpose of this sortie was to re-attempt communications with the Orla, in order to ascertain her intentions in Broadhaven Bay and to enquire why Shell’s cops had called up a second War-Boat to force through the Corrib Gas Project over the seas, lands and bodies of an unwilling local population. Once again Shell’s gunboat refused communications. S2S Flotilla’s Emerald Squadron repeated their requests, this time as Gaeilge, but they met with another refusal of communications. Meanwhile the Orla was weighing anchor, stoking up and making haste to depart (RSC Coastwatch confirmed Shell War-Boat Orla’s departure from Broadhaven Bay about 2:45pm).They also visually confirmed reports from Erris residents that a second Shell War-Boat had indeed entered Broadhaven Bay early this morning (RSC Coastwatch had missed her entry due to rain and poor visibility). The new Shell War-Boat was identified as the Aoife (P-22), but it was not approached today. It will be investigated more closely in the coming days.Other than the comings and goings of Shell’s War-Boats, there were no other significant movements of Shell vessels. The pipe-laying ship the Solitaire is reported to be still in Killybegs harbour at the time of posting, and its ‘support ship’ the Highland Explorer remains beyond the horizon outside Broadhaven Bay. Little or no work in progress was observed by campers and residents in the Shell Glengad compound.Even though current events have something of a ‘phoney war’ about them, the Shell to Sea campaign remains vigilant on the ground here in Erris. Once again the Shell to Sea campaign and the Solidarity Camp urge all members supporters to come to Mayo, especially if they have good ideas for action and the resolve to follow through. If supporters cannot come then Shell to Sea would greatly appreciate solidarity protests and actions in their home locations. The Solitaire can arrive any day soon – with your help the people of Erris can resist this invasion more effectively!

Second Navy Vessel arrives in Broadhaven Bay

2008-09-02T13:30:00.000-07:00

Tuesday September 02, 2008

Aoife joins Orla

Another Irish Naval Service warship arrived off the Mayo Coast this afternoon. Given the small sizse of the Irish navy, the priority which is being put on this operation is alarming. As recent events have shown, the Irish coast is often used by criminals importing large quantities of drugs into the country fro further export to Europe, and the navy is supposed to be an impotant line of defence against this. Instead two ships ae being used to intimidate the local population of a small part of the west coast, to discourage protests against Shell.

Last week the LE Orla was deployed, and the Department of Defence claimed it was in suppot of the Garda. What the Gardai could want with a second warship can only be speculated on. Many fear that the Navy will seize fishing gear in the bay and thus help Shell's pipe laying operation. By the time the gear is legally returned, it will be too late to stop the Shell work.

Today's news from Glengad, Erris, Co. Mayo

2008-09-02T13:23:00.000-07:00

Sunday August 31, 2008

At about 1pm a delegation of Gardai called to the Rossport Solidarity Camp, ostensibly about informing campers of section 8.1 of the Public Order Act. While annoyed by their presence on the camp, the Gardai were prevented from snooping around the marquees, though the use of a video camera by Gda. Burke (old foe) to follow young children around roused righteous ire in their parents. Once they delivered their utterly pointless message they were escorted off the site to the road and their waiting squad car and van.In the late afternoon, S2S Flotilla exercises were held off the Glengad compound and the marine protest/action squadron used the fine weather today to sharpen their nautical skills. Exercises lasted an hour, followed by a quick shower and off to the next S2S activity.At 6:45 pm local residents and Rossport Solidarity Campers mounted a blockade of the gates of the Shell Glengad compound. This caught the Gardai off balance, and they deployed only in sparse numbers, very slowly, and remained firmly ensconced in their vehicles.

After an hour of blockading, locals and campers returned to the Solidarity Camp for tonight's party on the foreshore (a celebration of our mutual capacity for resistance to the corporate juggernaut and a bit of R&R too!).Still no sign of the Solitaire. The clock is well-burnt now - she remains in Killybegs harbour but she's still a looming threat that must be met.The need for people to come here and help in the struggle to save Erris and stop the Great Gas Robbery remains urgent. Come to Glengad if you can!

Shell to Sea Press Release

2008-09-02T13:20:00.000-07:00

Sunday August 31, 2008

Navy Warship LÉ ORLA must fly the Shell flag
Text of press release issued this afternoon by Shell to Sea regarding the presence of the Irish Naval Service's warship the LÉ ORLA in Broadhaven Bay, Co. Mayo, as an auxiliary to the Gardaí and Shell Security. Please read main body text for details.
Shell to Sea Press Release - Sun. 31st August 2008Navy Warship LÉ ORLA must fly the Shell flagLate last week the Irish Navy Warship, the LÉ ORLA arrived in Broadhaven Bay to support Gardaí and Shell Security who persist in pushing the Corrib Gas Project on by force.According to Irish Defence Force and Military information the LÉ ORLA is a high speed vessel, designed to move rapidly about the patrol area and to bring her considerable firepower to bear where necessary.At approximately 5pm on Saturday 30th August a squadron of Shell to Sea kayaks put to sea in order to deliver a message to the Captain of the LÉ ORLA.The Shell to Sea ‘Shamrock Squadron’ paddled to within a respectful distance of the warship and the ‘James Connolly’ attempted to establish contact with the navy vessel on channels 14 and 16 of the VHF radio, in order to determine the intentions of the Captain and his crew.The Captain failed to respond to radio communication and consequently the Shamrock Squadron paddled closer to establish visual and verbal communication – to be seen and heard.A request to speak to the Captain was denied.Concerns about the presence of the warship were expressed to the Officers on the deck of the LÉ ORLA and they were asked to declare their intentions. Although the officers listened, they did not respond and would not communicate in any way.Shamrock Squadron invoked their constitutional rights to act in the defence of the natural resources of the State which have been given to Shell and the Corrib Gas consortium. The Irish navy crew were asked whether they intended to assist in the protection of those natural resources or act in collusion with Shell and participate in the ‘Great Gas Giveaway’.“Without any clear intention from you we assume that you are acting for Shell”, said one of the Shell to Sea crew. “It’s confusing for us that you are flying the Irish flag from the mast of your ship on behalf of Shell, as we fly the flag on behalf of the Irish people. We maintain the right to fly the flag and we say that you are no longer entitled to fly the Irish flag”.The navy officers were offered a Shell flag to fly from their mast which they would not accept.An invitation to the Captain to come to dinner at the Rossport Solidarity Camp was declined.The Shamrock Squadron thanked the navy crew for their attention and paddled back to shore.Shell to Sea marine activists are experienced in dealing with the Spanish, German, Dutch, Royal and US Navies. This fresh threat from the Irish Navy, which comes in addition to the overwhelming numbers of Gardaí and Shell security in the area, is totally disproportionate to the legitimate protest which will continue against the Shell Corrib Gas Project in spite of this unprecedented development.ENDS.

For verification or comment contact Niall Harnett at 086 8444966.
Related Link: http://www.corribsos.com

2008-08-27T14:10:00.000-07:00

Interview with Shell to Sea activist about the struggle in Rossport 11.96 Mb

13 Arrested so Shell can continue illegal work

2008-08-27T14:02:00.000-07:00

Tuesday July 22, 2008

In Glengad, today 13 people were arrested when they confronted Shell over digging in a Special Area of Conservation. 13 anti-Shell protesters were arrested at Glengad on Tuesday, while challenging Shell on the permissions they had to do excavation and other works around the site of the proposed landfall area of the pipeline. The arrested people included Goldman Prize winner Willie Corduff as well as Shell to Sea trailer hostess Mary Horan.

Protesters arrested resisting Shell at Glengad beach

2008-08-27T13:59:00.000-07:00

Thursday August 21, 2008

Garda patrol boats used to intercept protesters
A number of protesters have been arrested in Mayo resisting Shell contractors who have been trying to install pipeline infrastructure on Glengad beach. Five people were reportedly arrested this morning and another three this afternoon. It is unclear whether all those arrested have been charged under the Public Order Act or have simply been detained.Shell has been working on the beach, which is a Special Area of Conservation, under a foreshore licence granted by Minister Mary Coughlan and permissions from Minister Eamon Ryan, even though they have yet to receive planning permission for the onshore section of their proposed pipeline.

Last month, thirteen people were arrested on the beach at Glengad for protesting against this work. The Minister for the Environment has yet to make a statement on the matter. At the weekend , an internal Shell report showed that the company had misled its own advisors in relation to the impact the work would have on protected habitats. Some of those associated with the campaign against Shell have welcomed the fact the gardaí seem to have abandoned a previous policy of not arresting people and simply used brute force to stop protests.

Shell to Sea Pirates begin Week of Action against Shell's Solitaire.

2008-08-27T13:53:00.000-07:00

Saturday August 16, 2008

Today (Saturday) at noon a flotilla of sea kayaks reclaimed Glengad beach, Pollathomas, Co Mayo; the landfall site for Shell’s offshore pipeline.Members of the ‘Great Rebel Raft Regatta’ recently deployed at the E.ON coal fired power station at Kingsnorth in Kent, England, have made their way from Climate Camp UK to Erris, in order to assist Shell to Sea campaigners in their opposition to this pipeline construction at Glengad.The first wave of the Rebel Regatta arrived today following Marine & Public Information Notices which announced the arrival of the world’s largest pipe-laying vessel, the Solitaire, in Broadhaven Bay, any time from today onwards.Captain Ahab of the Rebel Crew states, “It’s unacceptable what Shell are being allowed to get away with here in Mayo. We intend to plunder Shell’s compound at Glengad and board the Solitaire when she arrives in the bay. We take no prisoners. It’s the gang-plank for these boys. This environment needs protection from these marauders of Shell’s.”

Shell halted as Shell to Sea '8' are illegally detained.

2008-08-27T13:50:00.000-07:00

Friday August 22, 2008

Shell Proving They Care About Safety
This morning at 10am, 15 Shell to Sea activists entered the water at Glengad Beach to stop Shell pipeline excavation work. Dinghies, surfers and swimmers surrounded the machine and stopped the work by their presence in the water.3 members of the Garda water unit then began picking people out of the boats and the water and bringing the protestors into the Shell compound where other Gardaí conveyed them then to Belmullet Garda station. Gardaí were questioned by activists, asked to identify themselves, and give reasons why they were pulling people from the water. Gardaí were questioned as to what authority they had to give directions or use force against protesters in the water. They refused to account for themselves. “Public Order Act” shouted one very aggressive Garda.

Related Links: Shell to Sea Coverage on Indymedia.ie Glengad, Mayo - July 29th Shell & Gardaí Force Community from Glengad Beach

Rossport Solidarity Camp Returns to Glengad with a Fresh Call Out for Action.

2008-08-27T13:43:00.000-07:00

The Camp Welcomes You Back.
The Rossport Solidarity Camp was originally set up on ‘Rossport 5’ Philip McGrath’s land in 2005. In the Spring of 2006 the camp was set up again close to the beach at Glengad near the ‘landfall’ for Shell’s proposed pipeline. Following a mendacious but successful application by Mayo County Council for an order of eviction against the camp in September of 2007, the camp agreed to leave the dunes by January 1st 2008. Since then the 'camp' has organised from the Rossport Solidarity House in Pollathomas.On Saturday 16th August 2008 the camp was set up afresh for the purposes of reorganising Shell to Sea resistance to Shell's latest plans to construct its offshore section of the pipeline from Glengad out to the Corrib Gas Field. A number of actions against that work have already taken place and local, national and international supporters are returning to the area to continue the fight.As one supporter put it, "If there was ever a time to come to Mayo, this is it".

Related Links: Shell to Sea Coverage on Indymedia.ie Glengad, Mayo - July 29th Shell & Gardaí Force Community from Glengad Beach Shell halted as Shell to Sea '8' are illegally detained Audio Interview with S2S activists after weekend trip down

MAOR calls for immediate government action to support the people of Glengad

2008-08-27T12:53:00.000-07:00

GARDAÍ yesterday arrested 12 protesters following clashes between Shell workers and locals on a Mayo beach near Glengad. The arrests of 11 men and one woman included that of Goldman Prizewinner, Willie Corduff, one of the five Rossport men who spent 94 days in jail in 2005 after protesting against Shell’s activities. The arrests sparked off a new wave of calls on Government to intervene and, after years of lobbying, to rethink its overall energy policy and its approach to facilitating and supporting the work of multi national companies. In other areas of the county where gas exploration is underway, many groups expressed their solidarity with the people of Rossport and Glengad.
In Donegal, where gas projects are, as yet, at the exploration stage, questions are being asked as to why the Government continues to doggedly pursue an energy policy which, in economic terms, has only marginal benefit to the people of this country. Gas exploration is currently being carried out off the coast of Donegal and further licenses have been recently announced by the Department of Marine, Communications and Natural Resources. A network of concerned groups have been established throughout the north west by MAOR; with groups in west Donegal, Inishowen, Letterkenny and Derry. In light of the arrests yesterday, MAOR issued a statement of support for those arrested in Glengad :
‘The use of compulsory orders to push a project through without the consent of the people, the lack of support by both local and central government for the rights of local people, the use of An Gardai Siochana to serve the interests of multi national companies; these are issues that effect us all. If the approach taken in Rossport is the template for how our government will facilitate private companies; every community which is subject to gas exploration off its coastline must stand in solidarity with the people of Rossport and Glengad.’
The arrests occurred as Shell contractors were carrying out works at Glengad. The area is where the controversial Corrib gas pipe-line is planned to come ashore. “Shell have no permission for the work they are carrying out at Glengad, since planning permission has not been granted for the proposed onshore section of their production pipeline,” said a Shell to Sea spokesman. Protestors claim Shell is preparing a landfall for the pipeline and say written queries to gardaí, Shell, the Department of Marine and local wildlife services have been left unanswered.
The situation in Mayo has been one where the state agencies, including local and central government, the Parks and Wildlife Service and the Gardai have continually supported and protected the interests of large, multi national companies with little regard for the rights and concerns of the local community. The arrests in Glengad, County Mayo yesterday are further evidence of the lengths that the state will go to in ensuring that the interests of multi national companies are placed above the rights of local communities.
At the local authority level, Mayo County Council in March 2008, gave the go ahead for a road to be expanded at the request of Shell, Statoil and Marathon specifically for the purpose of improved access to the gates of the proposed refinery at Ballanaboy. With the overall local government approach in Mayo appearing to be one of appeasement and facilitation, local residents have accused the council of being negligent in their duty to local communities. Thirty two submissions were received with respect to the proposed road expansion. According to Mayo County Council’s Director of Services, Peter Hynes, only three were in support of the road expansion. It should be noted that among the submissions was one that was signed by 111 people from the area, which raised questions on the purpose, lack of consultation, safety and environmental impact of the road.
However, MAOR were keen to highlight the fact that there has been a shift at local level in Donegal, where Donegal County Council recently passed a motion calling on the government to renegotiate the terms of the licenses granted to companies exploring for gas off the coast line. Given that this was the first time that any local authority had made a proposal which is a clear departure from the position of Central government, perhaps one of the lessons learned from Mayo is that where the rights and concerns of local people are ignored; finding a solution can become impossible to achieve. Six years after Shell to Sea first articulated their concerns with regard to the health, safety and environmental risks associated with the Corrib Gas Project, a resolution seems further away than ever.

Notes
Background on MAOR
MAOR (Mobilise, Act, Overcome, Reclaim) , is an Irish word meaning 'guardian' or 'steward'. MAOR is a non-party political group based in the North West who have formed in response to the issues surrounding gas and oil exploration off the Donegal coast which commenced in 2008. We are keen to raise awareness of and generatediscussion on ownership and management of Ireland's natural resourcesincluding 'alternative' energy sources such as wind, wave and solar.To date, branches of MAOR have been formed in Letterkenny, Inishowen, Derry and South Donegal. MAOR events continue to engage people in a variety of creative, critical and issue based work including street theatre, public forums and meetings, films, workshops and media events.

Saved by the Atom

2008-03-28T16:11:00.000-07:00

Peter Bunyard, Lawellen Farm, Withiel, Bodmin, Cornwall, PL30 5NW, United Kingdom;

Tel: (44) 01208 831205; Mobile: 07740404819; email: pbecologist@gn.apc.org

26 March 2008

Well, now we have it; nuclear power is once again going to save the day. In the past it helped save us from coal, now it is going to save us, if the rest of the world follows our example, from global warming. On March 26th, 2008, John Hutton, Business Minister, announced to UNITE, a trade union with 26,000 members in the energy sector, that not only will we be replacing the existing 24 reactors, which give us some 20 per cent of our electricity, but we will go much further and presumably attempt to achieve what France has done, with more than three-quarters of its electricity coming from nuclear generation. We will, announced Hutton, create not just a £20,000 million industry, but also 100,000 new jobs. As a reference point, he referred to Sizewell B which, post 1994, took seven years to build and employed 4000 people in its construction, from some 3000 British companies.

Phew, problem over. We can forget our hand-wringing as to whether or not the ‘renewables’ will make it and all that discussion about unsightly wind turbines littering the landscape, especially given their unpredictability and whether or not the wind is blowing.

Were it as easy as that. We are again being deceived into thinking that nuclear power will somehow enable us to keep going with our consumer lifestyles without jeopardising our futures because of global warming or indeed because the world is running out of oil, with demand running ahead of new discoveries. As we shall see, it is a dangerous deceit and whatever the pros and cons, nuclear power can never be the panacea for the world’s energy problems and certainly not take on the role as the ‘green’, low-carbon-emitting answer to climate change.

And, we have been there before. Those of us, who, in the past, fought against the nuclear power programme on the basis of cost, safety, security, weapons proliferation and continued radioactive contamination, and who participated in public inquiries, ranging from the Windscale Inquiry of the 1970s to the Sizewell B Public Inquiry of the 1990s, and who saw sound, well-presented arguments brushed aside in the inspector’s final report, will have a sense of foreboding that we have gone back to square one. Same old concerns — safety, radioactive waste disposal, security against terrorism or aberrant states, the health impacts of permitted releases of radioactive fission products and transuranics — these are all going to surface again.

And, if we push ahead with a brand new nuclear power programme, can we self-righteously deny suspect countries such as Iran or North Korea the right to build their own ‘civilian’ nuclear reactor? Not that our hands are so clean. In the 1960s and 70s we extracted plutonium via reprocessing from our civilian Magnox reactors and dispatched the fissile material to the United States for their nuclear arsenal.

It is essential that we deconstruct the myth of nuclear power as an energy source which necessarily results in low greenhouse gas emissions. As William Keepin, energy analyst from the USA, remarked more than 25 years ago, an accelerated programme in OECD countries, to follow in France’s footsteps, and get nuclear power to generate 70 per cent of electricity by 2010, would bring carbon dioxide emissions down by 7 per cent at best in those self same countries. Furthermore, we need to put the UK’s attempts, so far feeble, to reduce carbon emissions, in the context of the overwhelming damage that we in the world are doing to our life-support ecosystems and in particular to tropical rainforests, where destruction may contribute between 20 and 30 per cent to total annual carbon emissions.

And, if we are going to be serious about substituting nuclear power for fossil fuel powered electricity generation in the world, so as to make a difference, we would need an urgent, production line programme to build at least 5,000 gigawatt-sized reactors by 2020. Every two days we would have to start on the construction of a new reactor, with the programme costing at least, £20 million million, or some thousand times the cost of the proposed nuclear construction programme over the next two decades in the UK. Moreover, after one generation of say 30 to 40 years, the whole cycle would have to start all over again.

Even if we could find enough suitable sites to put up all the reactors and enough water to cool them, the massive costs involved must surely put nuclear power well out of reach of all but a handful of nations. And where would nuclear power be without using fossil fuels for uranium mining, for processing the ore, for preparing reactor fuel, for constructing the reactor, the cooling ponds and the reprocessing plant, the electricity connection, let alone for the casks used in transporting spent fuel, whether by rail, sea or road? In effect, fossil fuels have subsidized nuclear power and will continue to do so. In that respect, the cost of nuclear power generation cannot be divorced from the costs of fossil fuel use, and as those costs rise, so too will the costs of nuclear power. Indeed, a carbon tax on fossil fuels would lead automatically to higher construction and maintenance costs for nuclear power.

Nor are carbon emissions so minimal, and as we will see, will exceed those from fossil fuel use once a major worldwide nuclear programme gets underway. In that context, the UK government’s efforts to promote nuclear power as a solution are creating a dangerous example. In France, where some 60 nuclear power stations generate 375 terawatt-hours (TWh = one million million watt-hours) annually, CO2 emissions amount to more than 13 million tonnes, or about 9 per cent of France’s total emissions, according to the Öko-Institute of Germany, which takes into consideration everything that goes into making nuclear power stations operate. That includes the mining of uranium, uranium enrichment to raise the proportion of fissionable material in the fuel, the construction of the reactor, the extraction and then reprocessing of spent fuel, the disposal and long-term safeguarding of radioactive waste, and finally the decommissioning of the reactor.

Nor is that the end of the story. The average household in an industrialised country such as the UK consumes two-thirds of the energy in the home for heating and just one-third for electrical appliances. Even in France with its subsidised nuclear power, consumers prefer to use natural gas-fired boilers and cookers for hot water, space-heating and cooking rather than resort to expensive electricity.

And were we to be persuaded to use electricity for everything in the house, including heating, we would push up demands on the electricity supply industry to the point where considerably more generating capacity would have to be built. To maintain the supply so that householders can get what they want at the flick of a switch, requires capacity to be built which may get used only at peak times. Meanwhile, to ensure an instantaneous response to demand, power stations need to be ticking over, as ‘spinning reserve’. France, for instance, has a total installed capacity of over 110,000 megawatts (electricity) of which 63,000 MW is from nuclear plants. A significant proportion of that capacity is now used inefficiently to meet peak loads. In fact, the daily peak load for electricity in winter reaches 70,000 MW which is more than three times the load that may be encountered in summer.

Currently we obtain uranium from the best ores, with an uranium content of about 0.2 per cent. At that concentration, about 96,000 tonnes of uranium-containing rock and shale have to be mined just to provide the fresh fuel for one large PWR — pressurized water reactor — such as Sizewell B. Even before getting to the ore, vast quantities of overburden have to be shifted. The ore is partially processed on site and what gets left behind as tailings is dangerously radioactive with thorium, radium and radon gas. Radon from a mine has been found as far as 1000 miles away. The radioactivity of fresh fuel to run a PWR for a year amounts to some 10 curies, the tailings some 60 curies. After a year in the reactor, the fuel becomes enormously radioactive, to the tune of 170 million curies, with all the potential to contaminate large swathes of countryside, as occurred following the Chernobyl accident in May 1986.

Just one such accident in the UK, or even across the Channel in France, could put paid to agriculture for a hundred years to come, let alone to the need to evacuate millions of people, at least for their lifetimes.

Today’s reactors, totalling some 350 GW(e) provide three per cent of the total energy used in the world, for which they consume some 60,000 tonnes of natural uranium each year. At that rate, economically recoverable reserves of uranium — some 10 million tonnes — would last less than 100 years. A worldwide nuclear programme of some 1000 nuclear reactors would consume the uranium within 50 years, and if all the world’s electricity, currently some 60 exajoules or 17,000 terawatt-hours (million million watt-hours), was generated by nuclear reactors such economic reserves of uranium would last just four years.

True, the world contains masses of uranium, millions upon millions of tonnes. The rub is that the average in the crust is 0.0004 per cent and in seawater 2,000 times more dilute. We would have to expend vastly more energy than could ever be gained extracting such uranium for use in a nuclear reactor — an exercise as fruitless as trying to gather wind in the Doldrums.
Even at much better concentrations, such as in the Tennessee shales in the United States, which has uranium concentrations between 0.1 and 0.01 per cent, the amount of electricity gained per unit mass of mined ore hardly makes the exercise worthwhile. Nuclear power on a grand-scale will not only cost us dear in economic terms, but will lead to greater greenhouse gas emissions than if we had never embarked on such a programme. In fact, below 50 parts per million, the energy extracted is no better than mining coal, assuming that the uranium is used in a once-through fuel cycle, and is not reprocessed, but is dumped in some long-term repository. Apart from the self-evident dangers of dissolving spent fuel in acid and keeping the bulk of radioactive waste in stainless steel tanks until a final disposal is found, reprocessing offers very little, if at all, in terms of energy gained through the extraction and re-use of uranium and plutonium in mixed oxide fuel (MOX).

Once the nuclear industry has to resort to poorer ores, a gas-fired combined cycle power station, or a cogeneration plant that simultaneously generates electricity and heat for domestic and industrial use, comes out better in terms of carbon dioxide emissions. And if we were to have a co-generation system that ran on biogas, then emissions of carbon dioxide would be seven times less than a nuclear power/natural gas combination, such as is currently used in the majority of French households. Indeed, if the consumer were to obtain both electricity and heating from a single co-generation system; the efficiency returns can amount to as much as 90 per cent of the original energy and, therefore, some three times better than if nuclear generated electricity were to be the sole source of energy in the home.

A proper evaluation of greenhouse gas emissions therefore demands that the method of production gets taken into account when estimating the total release of greenhouse gases. Both coal and fuel oil used in a co-generation plant are still inferior by a factor of two to a nuclear power/natural gas combination in terms of greenhouse emissions. But that figure is already far-removed from the 300 times advantage so heralded by the nuclear industry and its supporters when comparing nuclear power electricity generation with coal. Meanwhile, a natural gas co-generation system is level-pegging with the nuclear power/natural gas combination again in terms of emissions, while being far cheaper to the consumer simply because of the three fold better efficiency in delivering end-use energy.

Increasingly too, local ‘ embedded ’ generation, such as from a wind farm, or a co-generation plant, is a challenge to the notion of single large power plants attached to a central grid. In a world ever more competitive in terms of reducing cost, an inefficient, high capital cost nuclear power plant, requiring impregnable security in an increasingly turbulent world, is an anachronism, and especially so when we take into account the limitations imposed by the quality of the uranium ore.

The renewables will undoubtedly make a valuable contribution to our energy needs, especially when tied in with more efficient end-use and energy conservation practices. Were wind-machines to provide 20 per cent of UK requirements, therefore 80 TWh (terawatt-hours), they would cover just over 1 per cent of the total UK land area in terms of the space required between each machine. In principle, the UK could meet up to 20 per cent of its current electricity needs from the use of land-based wind-turbines. Add to that offshore wind-turbines and the proportion could go up significantly and certainly surpass nuclear power’s current contribution of 25 per cent of all electricity generated in the UK.

Critics of wind power in particular and the renewables in general make much of their intermittency — the fact that they do not deliver a steady source of electricity hour by hour throughout the year. But all these assessments are based on the notion that the electricity to the consumer, will be supplied through a central grid system, mainly from large power stations. We should instead going hell-bent for a system that relies increasingly on local, ‘embedded’ generation. For instance the use of efficient combined heat and power plants, or indeed of hydrogen burning fuel cells, tied in with intermittent generators such as wind, wave power, tidal power and photovoltaics, would significantly reduce the overall need for generating capacity without diminishing the quality of life one jot.

Systems that do just that have been in operation for at least 30 years and were part and parcel of small-scale generating systems used in isolated dwellings and communities, both in the UK and in countries such as Nepal, Sri Lanka and Colombia. The idea is simple. A fluctuating source of electricity, such as from a mini-hydro scheme is sent to an electronic black box that divides the power into two streams, one to a heating circuit and the other to the fuse box for lights and power points. When the electricity is not being used to run appliances, what is left over goes to storage-heaters, immersion coils and even storage-heater cooking stoves. The amount of power available ultimately limits the number of appliances that can be switched on at any one moment.

Imagine the use of such black boxes throughout the UK: they could be set to allow in a set amount of electrical capacity. When the household was asleep and using minimal appliance power, the electricity entering the building would pass automatically through to heating circuits. In effect, each household would be granted base-load requirements that could be regulated from month to month, season to season, with all the electricity within that requirement being used up between the two circuits.

Were the demand to go above the set amount, then the consumer would pay heavily for the marginal costs of bringing in more electricity. Such a system would not only reduce the need for generating capacity but it could be made to work extremely well through the combination of intermittent sources and an embedded, highly efficient electricity generator such as a biofuel burning CHP plant. Essentially the back-up plant is there to take up the slack and once the levels of electricity supplied by the intermittent source, such as from wind turbines, approaches a set critical point, then the back-up system would automatically come on stream, levelling off as the wind came back and then switching off when the wind had reached full strength. The management of such a system could be left to electronic controls combined with self-responsibility to ensure that household electricity use remains within pre-determined limits.

But, we are going nuclear and the UK government is taking us back into a world of old-fashioned concepts that by now should have had their day. A nuclear power programme will cost us dear, if not the Earth.

'A Crude Awakening': The film and the science

2008-03-22T08:13:00.000-07:00

Looking around, it is easy to get the feeling that nobody really knows how much oil is left - or at least, no-one who is willing to speak in earnest.

According to A Crude Awakening, a documentary about the impending energy crisis, to be released in the UK on 9 November, we have already reached peak oil production and face an imminent and dramatic change to the lifestyles that we in the West have become so accustomed to.
The film takes a little while getting to the point. It's not immediately obvious what story the directors are trying to tell. But the early clips of 1950s petroleum ads demonstrating in cartoons and stylish black and white that petrochemicals underlie every consumer good we know and love ??? from the telephone to the synthetic silk n??glig??e ??? are very amusing.

Gradually a narrative emerges, eloquently put by one professor who was asked by a student if his grandchildren would ever fly in a plane. The answer could very well be "no".
The point is our current lifestyle is unsustainable and the world is badly in need of politicians who will be brave enough to put research into alternative sources of energy at the top of their agenda.

The film misses a few tricks. How much longer oil reserves could last if appliances were made more energy efficient is not addressed.
There's little attempt to actually put a date on when peak oil will be or was reached. Every alternative energy solution is quickly brushed aside except possibly hydrogen, which we are told is "easily 40 years away".

We are left wondering what the answer to the problem is.The movie feels a bit one-sided with none of the interviewees challenging the theory that there is virtually no or very little oil left to be extracted. But overall, it's compelling viewing and definitely serves its purpose: to help those who remain unaware of the problem wake up and smell the coffee.

Since watching A Crude Awakening last night, I've had a quick scan around to see what various groups say about the peak oil hypothesis. This is the theory, first put forward by Shell geologist M. King Hubbert in the 1950s, that at some point global oil production will peak and start an interminable descent as the last remaining reserves are sucked dry.

A report released by the International Energy Agency (IEA) in 2005 declared that "There is no shortage of oil and gas in the ground" and "the hydrocarbon resources in place around the world are sufficiently abundant to sustain likely growth in the global energy system for the foreseeable future".

Shortly after the IEA report came out, the Peak Oil Netherlands Foundation issued its own version of the story, which was supported by the Energy Research Centre of the Netherlands. Their conclusion was in stark contrast to the IEA's: peak oil, they said would be reached sometime between 2012 and 2017, possibly before.

Then, in July this year, the IEA released its Medium Term Oil Market Report. This time, it didn't look so sure:"Certainly our forecast suggests that the non-OPEC, conventional crude component of global production appears, for now, to have reached an effective plateau, rather than a peak. [...] While hydrocarbon resources are finite, nonetheless issues of access to reserves, prevailing investment regime and availability of upstream infrastructure and capital seem greater barriers to medium-term growth than limits to the resource base itself."

The conclusion, as Salon pointed out, seemed to be that oil reserves are still plentiful but our capacity to extract it is reaching its limits. Part of the problem lies in the fact that companies are increasingly looking towards unconventional sources of oil, such as tar sands, which are more difficult and require more energy to "mine".

According to the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, production of conventional oil has already peaked ??? that happened two years ago in 2005.There's no room here to go into more detail, but if you're interested, the Energy Bulletin has got an interesting expose of the issue. Obviously, it's important to remember that many people ??? not least the oil-producing OPEC nations ??? have a vested interested in demonstrating that reserves are still plentiful.

A Crude Awakening is produced and directed by Basil Gelpke and Ray McCormack.

What is Geothermal Energy

2008-03-22T07:57:00.000-07:00

Geothermal Energy is energy from heat inside the Earth.

The centre of the Earth is around 6000 degrees Celsius - hot enough to melt rock. Even a few kilometres down, the temperature can be over 250 degrees Celsius.

In general, the temperature rises one degree Celsius for every 36 metres you go down.
In volcanic areas, molten rock can be very close to the surface.

Geothermal energy has been used for thousands of years in some countries for cooking and heating.

The name "geothermal" comes from two Greek words: "geo" means "Earth" and "thermal" means "heat".

How it works
Hot rocks underground heat water to produce steam. We drill holes down to the hot region, steam comes up, is purified and used to drive turbines, which drive electric generators.
There may be natural "groundwater" in the hot rocks anyway, or we may need to drill more holes and pump water down to them.

The first geothermal power station was built at Landrello, in Italy, and the second was at Wairekei in New Zealand. Others are in Iceland, Japan, the Philippines and the United States.
In Iceland, geothermal heat is used to heat houses as well as for generating electricity.
If the rocks aren't hot enough to produce steam we can sometimes still use the energy - the Town Hall in Southampton, England, is partly heated this way.

More details
Geothermal energy is an important resource in volcanically active places such as Iceland and New Zealand.How useful it is depends on how hot the water gets. This depends on how hot the rocks were to start with, and how much water we pump down to them.
Water is pumped down an "injection well", filters through the cracks in the rocks in the hot region, and comes back up the "recovery well" under pressure. It "flashes" into steam when it reaches the surface.
The steam may be used to drive a turbogenerator, or passed through a heat exchanger to heat water to warm houses. A town in Iceland is heated this way.
The steam must be purified before it is used to drive a turbine, or the turbine blades will get "furred up" like your kettle and be ruined.

Advantages

Geothermal energy does not produce any pollution, and does not contribute to the greenhouse effect.

The power stations do not take up much room, so there is not much impact on the environment.

No fuel is needed.

Once you've built a geothermal power station, the energy is almost free. It may need a little energy to run a pump, but this can be taken from the energy being generated.

Disadvantages

The big problem is that there are not many places where you can build a geothermal power station. You need hot rocks of a suitable type, at a depth where we can drill down to them. The type of rock above is also important, it must be of a type that we can easily drill through.

Sometimes a geothermal site may "run out of steam", perhaps for decades.

Hazardous gases and minerals may come up from underground, and can be difficult to safely dispose of.

Is it renewable?
Geothermal energy is renewable. The energy keeps on coming, as long as we don't pump too much cold water down and cool the rocks too much.

'Who Killed the Electric Car? Film Review

2008-03-22T07:36:00.000-07:00

Magazine NOW talks to director Chris Paine about his upcoming documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?"

The film looks at the hopeful birth and untimely death of the electric car, an environmentally-friendly, cost-saving salvation to some, but a profit barrier to others.

In a film that has all the elements of a murder mystery, Paine points the finger at car companies, the oil industry, bad ad campaigns, consumer wariness, and a lack of commitment from the U.S. government."[The film] is about why the only kind of cars that we can drive run on oil. And for a while there was a terrific alternative, a pure electric car," Paine said.

In 1996, General Motors (G.M.) launched the first modern-day commercially available electric car, the EV1. The car required no fuel and could be plugged in for recharging at home and at a number of so-called battery parks.Many of the people who leased the car, including a number of celebrities, said the car drove like a dream."...the EV1 was a high performer. It could do a U-turn on a dime; it was incredibly quiet and smooth. And it was fast. I could beat any Porsche off the line at a stoplight. I loved it," Actress, Alexandra Paul told NOW.

After California regulators saw G.M.s electric car in the late 1980s, they launched a zero-emissions vehicle program in 1990 to clean up the state's smoggy skies.Under the program, two percent of all new cars sold had to be electric by 1998 and 10 percent by 2003.

But it was not to be. A little over 1,000 EV1s were produced by G.M. before the company pulled the plug on the project in 2002 due to insufficient demand. Other major car makers also ceased production of their electric vehicles.In the wake of a legal challenge from G.M. and DaimlerChrysler, California amended its regulations and abandoned its goals. Shortly thereafter, automakers began reclaiming and dismantling their electrics as they came off lease.

Actress Alexandra Paul in her EV1, G.M.'s electric car.Some suggest that G.M. -- which says it invested some $1 billion in the EV1 -- never really wanted the cars to take off. They say G.M. intentionally sabotaged their own marketing efforts because they feared the car would cannibalize its existing business. G.M. disputes these claims.

For more on the film, visit Who Killed the Electric Car?

Buy now, Pay later: an insight into ethical consumerism

2008-03-22T07:18:00.000-07:00

With the planet dying of consumption, can a shift in our shopping habits save the day? If only it were that simple, sighs Jess Worth.

When I was growing up, I remember my parents used to drink something called ‘Campaign Coffee’. Its name was always accompanied by a slight shudder because it was: a) quite expensive and b) pretty foul. Heroically purchased by a committed clique of clergy, NGO workers and the ‘loony left’, it was one of the very first attempts at trading with the Majority World in a way that was less exploitative.

Things have definitely changed since then. ‘Ethical’ shopping is all the rage these days. Consuming with a conscience – once seen as the preserve of beardy-weirdy tree-hugging freaks and barely registering on the radar of corporate execs and politicians – has suddenly burst noisily into the mainstream. You can now buy a more socially or environmentally responsible version of just about anything: clockwork mobile phone chargers, organic anti-wrinkle cream, recycled silk designer handbags, solar-powered bird baths…

Green shopping websites abound. Ethical consumer guides are dropping out of the most surprising magazines. Fair trade coffee tastes good these days, there’s an abundance of brands to choose from and you can drink it in Starbucks in 23 different countries, or – if you live in New England – even in McDonald’s.

Earlier this year Nestlé launched a fair trade coffee line. In May, long-time animal-tester L’Oréal (also part-owned by Nestlé) bought the Body Shop. In June, pile-‘em-high sell-‘em-cheap pioneer Wal-Mart announced it is switching much of its fruit and veg to organic. Ebay is even setting up a special ‘artisans’ site’ for fair trade producers. Welcome to the moral mainstream!
Green futures

The so-called ‘ethical consumerism’ phenomenon is nothing new. I expect that, like me, many NI readers have been boycotting Nestlé – and other notorious transnationals – for years. I also suspect that, given you are reading this magazine, many of you also partake in the more positive pastime of trying to buy things that don’t cause harm to people and the planet. Depending on your circumstances, this could include buying fair trade and organic food and drink, supporting local independent shops and farmers’ markets, buying energy-efficient appliances, or shopping online for sweatshop-free clothes.

But we seem to have reached a tipping point. Although ‘ethical’ sales still only account for a tiny part of the global economy, analysts and companies firmly believe the future of retail will be green, and are rebranding and repositioning themselves accordingly. Rob Harrison from Ethical Consumer magazine has been charting this trend: ‘The big companies have moved into the ethical market defensively. They seem convinced it will become dominant in developed economies – there’ll be a broad ethical mainstream with most players guaranteeing basic ethical standards, with a super-ethical niche sitting on top.’

So what are we to make of this enthusiastic encroachment on to ‘our’ territory by the brands we love to hate? Are we witnessing the final triumph of progressive values over naked corporate greed? Should we junk the boycott and start buying Nestlé’s fair trade coffee in order to encourage them to do more? Are consumers becoming the de facto regulators of industry, curbing corporate abuse more effectively than any government has yet managed? Is this part of the answer to the world’s problems?
A dangerous diversion

We should certainly celebrate where we have got to. Those of us who have been campaigning for years against grinding global poverty, corporate carnage and ecological meltdown have started to win some important arguments. But though sustainable shopping is becoming big business, we shouldn’t pop the organic champagne corks just yet.

For a start, we should be wary of the claims being made. Irish rocker Bono, ever the self-appointed spokesperson for charitable causes, recently pontificated that: ‘Shopping is politics. You vote every time you spend money.’

The view that you can spend your way to a sustainable world is echoed in much of the ethical shopping sector’s marketing. New Consumer, which purports to be the ‘ultimate ethical lifestyle magazine’, enthuses that: ‘creating a world that works for everyone has never been easier. It lies in your simple shopping decisions and lifestyle habits!’ Steady on now. It would be great if this were true; but it isn’t.

In fact, what ethical consumerism can accomplish is limited in many different ways. Of course no-one wants to undermine the hard work, dedication and real progress of the many pioneers who have made consuming with a conscience possible. What they have achieved is amazing. But if we do not face up to the limitations of a consumer-driven approach to solving the world’s problems, openly debate the contradictions and shortcomings that are becoming increasingly clear, and refocus our attentions on collective political action, we risk heading down a very dangerous diversion that takes us away from the route towards genuine global justice.

The problem with the concept of ‘ethical consumerism’ is that it’s something of an oxymoron. The dictionary definition of ‘consume’ is ‘to destroy by or like fire or disease: to cause to vanish’. A consumer is ‘a person who squanders, destroys, or uses up’. So we may be trying to do it in an ‘ethical’ way (what’s ‘ethical’ is of course subjective, but let’s not even go there right now) but often we are still engaged in a destructive activity.

Shop till we drop
And consumerism is indeed destroying the planet. The fatal flaw in treating consumer-led growth as the main indicator of economic success in industrialized countries is that it assumes infinite growth is possible, and doesn’t take into account environmental and social limits. As a result, we are already well into the red, ecologically. The oil, water, land, soil, clean air and mineral resources we depend upon are under severe pressure or actively running out. It would take more than five planets to sustain the world’s current population at US consumption levels. Climate change, which is directly caused by human overconsumption, is already upon us and we in the industrialized world need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 60-90 per cent to have any hope of averting its worst effects.

We need to change the entire structure of our exploitative, wasteful, resource-intensive economy; and that includes buying much less stuff. Of course, purchasing more sustainable versions of the things we actually need has to form part of the solution. No-one’s arguing against low-energy lightbulbs (unless they are being used to offset short-haul air flights, that is).
But so much of the ethical consumption boom focuses on luxury goods: fair trade roses grown in huge hothouses next to Kenya’s Lake Naivasha, sucking up precious water resources and then being air-freighted to Northern supermarkets; pointless gadgets such as solar-powered cappuccino whisks; silver cufflinks handmade in Mexico, screaming ‘gilt without the guilt!’. Their main impact is to make the shopper feel good – ‘I’m doing something for the planet!’ – without having to change their lifestyle one bit, while the companies laugh all the way to the bank.

This frustration is keenly felt by British environmentalist and writer George Monbiot. ‘We all deceive ourselves and deceive each other about the change that needs to take place. The middle classes think they have gone green because they buy organic cotton pyjamas and handmade soaps with bits of leaf in them – though they still heat their conservatories and retain their holiday homes in Croatia. The people who should be confronting them with hard truths balk at the scale of the challenge. And the politicians won’t jump until the rest of us do.’3

Corporate self-defence
In fact, the rapid conversion of big business to all things ethical is not just about exploiting a lucrative new market and making efficiency savings – it is also a self-preservation strategy. As the science of climate change and evidence of shocking corporate practices in the Majority World have become undeniable, the writing is slowly materializing on the boardroom wall. How to avoid being broken up, regulated, eco-taxed, boycotted? Be one step ahead of the game and show you’re doing the right thing without the need for governments to resort to any extreme, potentially profit-curbing measures.

‘Our customers know that, if they shop at M&S, we’ll have done all the hard work for them,’ explains Mike Barry, head of corporate social responsibility at UK department store Marks & Spencer. ‘They’re interested in ethical issues, but they just want us to get on and manage them... What we’ve done is look at the market research, the focus groups, the way the media is playing it, the way the NGOs are playing it, and then transected all those issues. We’ve worked out what customers are beginning to tell us, anticipated it, then gone out and given them what they want.’

This is what is known as ‘choice editing’ and it’s the new industry buzzword. Quite simply, unethical options are removed from the market, ‘edited out’ by the company, reducing consumer choice in pursuit of the greater good. How do you stop people buying energy intensive incandescent lightbulbs? Just don’t offer them as an option to consumers. It’s as simple as that.

The problem is that this approach relies on the company to really do what is most ethical, which from time to time will inevitably contradict what will make them money. So it’s possible that the best option for the environment would be not to buy a particular item from Marks & Spencer at all, but to buy it second-hand, or maybe borrow it, or even – are you sitting down for this? – to go without it completely. Given that the company exists to sell stuff, it’s hard to imagine ‘don’t buy this’ appearing as one of the edited options.

The voluntary nature of ‘responsible’ business is another severe limitation. How do you enforce it? How do you know whether what you’re being told is true, or just ‘cleanwash’? One of the depressing things about researching this magazine has been the discovery that, as soon as you scratch the surface, almost nothing is as ‘ethical’ as it seems, especially if you look at the whole picture rather than squinting through specific ‘environment’ or ‘labour’ or ‘fair trade’ lenses.

Chipping away the ‘cleanwash’
It turns out that the boom in organics, far from boosting small-scale sustainable farming around the world, is industrializing the sector, squeezing the small farmers out and watering down organic standards.
Fair trade is increasingly driven, not by the needs of poor producers, but the demands of big business. ‘When fair trade cotton came on the market, you couldn’t get the bloody stuff,’ reveals Paul Monaghan, head of ethics and sustainable development at the Co-operative Group. ‘M&S went out and bought the whole lot. When fair trade roses came out, Sainsbury’s got them. We were all fighting over the roses.’

‘Lifestyle’ magazines revel in the feelgood factor.
Apparently the fair trade labelling organizations were put under so much pressure to deliver these new products that corners were cut and compromises made. They began to certify huge privately owned flower plantations rather than small co-ops, and certifying only the way the cotton is grown as fair trade – allowing the shocking possibility that, further down the supply chain, a garment made from fair trade cotton could be put together in a sweatshop and still marketed as ‘fair trade’ to oblivious consumers…

We know flying food around the world is environmental idiocy, but there are ethical issues raised by its more sustainable alternative – shipping. Seafarers are some of the most brutally exploited and abused workers in the world.
And what about the people who work in sectors not currently influenced by consumer power? Communities devastated by copper mines in Peru, palm oil growers in Indonesia thrown into jail for forming a union... The sources of their suffering are ubiquitous ingredients in Northern consumer goods. Must we really rely on NGOs to orchestrate costly campaigns on each and every one in order to mobilize consumer power to reform them? This is far too circuitous a route to bring about change.

Sugar coating on a bitter pill?
Of course there are many visionary people around the world who are really trying to make alternative business models work – and it’s worth taking the time to seek them out. For example, one of the first fair trade companies, Cafédirect, has two Southern coffee and tea producers sitting on its Board. They recently issued ‘ethical’ shares for investors to buy on the understanding that they would not require the company to maximize profits at the expense of its values – an unheard-of stipulation in most of the corporate world.

But by and large, producer power is conspicuously absent even in the ethical business arena. Consumer power still rules and Northern consciences seem to be the main beneficiaries of ethical consumerism so far. Indeed, it is difficult to find much that has been said and written about the phenomenon amongst Majority World commentators. Those I have spoken to have been dismissive. ‘It’s sugar coating on a bitter pill that can prevent us from focusing on real structural issues,’ argues Indian activist and academic Anuradha Mittal, a fierce critic of ‘corporate social responsibility’ initiatives that mask the misdeeds of the companies who signed up. It’s just a way for ‘middle-class NGOs to get a piece of the capitalist action,’ declares Firoze Manji from African social justice network Fahamu.

Others see this as yet another way in which the poor are being disenfranchised. If exercising consumer power is the way to bring about political change, then if you are not a consumer, you are excluded from the process. This is equally true within rich countries, where the ethical marketplace is largely a playground for the middle classes. If shopping is politics, then the rich and privileged get to hog all the votes.

Drowning out the mood music
So as a means to change the world, the ethical consumerist approach is a blunt and imprecise tool. It is most effective when used collectively and strategically. Fair trade would not have got into the public consciousness – and the supermarkets – without dedicated campaigning by thousands of people in their local communities. Many small producers in the Majority World are certainly benefiting even if they are a drop in the ocean compared to those whose livelihoods have been jeopardized by the trading system as a whole.

But if we give ethical consumers too much power, if we believe that the moral issues are black and white, if we get seduced by the idea that the market will respond to our ethical and environmental concerns, adapt accordingly and somehow the woes of the world will be solved, then we are making a huge mistake.

The mistake is partly to trust the market and ignore the central role governments must play in ending unsustainable patterns of consumption. Surely an important tool in curbing corporate abuse is to regulate against it. Governments can use taxes and other economic instruments to reshape economies and control markets, and can introduce and enforce ethical and environmental standards. Trade will not be made fair, paradoxically, by buying fair trade.

Governments must engage with changing the international rules that currently regulate it. None of these things are easily done, but we won’t achieve them by going shopping.
Perhaps an even bigger mistake is not to face up to the scale of change that’s required. Surviving the multiple impending catastrophes that our throwaway lifestyles have triggered will involve a seismic shift in the way we live our lives.

We must move away from limitless consumer-driven growth and towards a sustainable, low-carbon model that meets everyone’s needs through more connected communities rather than gleaming shopping malls. Sometimes our most ethical shopping choice will be to buy nothing; to embrace the idea that less can be more. But this is the one message that is not coming through clearly – from NGOs, governments, business and the media. And this particular eco-bullet is one we now have to bite.

We should not get too obsessed by whether we as individuals are consuming as ethically as possible. It’s important and rewarding to do what we can, but the achievement of moral purity is an impossible dream in such an imperfect world. As Andrew Simms from the New Economics Foundation puts it: ‘Ethical consumerism is mood music, rather than a re-engineering of the economy in a meaningful way. It feels palliative – a passive observer, not an active agent of change. We’ve got to get away from the passivity of being defined as consumers, and start making things happen.’

Ethical consumerism offers attractively simple answers when these do not exist. Buying a different brand of detergent is easy. But effecting social change is hard. Becoming more politically engaged with the impacts of everything we do in our lives is daunting. But this rise in ethical concerns is a huge opportunity, showing that more and more people are willing to act on the most pressing issues facing the planet. The challenge now is to find a way to harness and channel all this energy into something far more ambitious than getting fair trade kumquats on to the world’s supermarket shelves.

The Importance Of Alternative Energy Sources

2008-03-21T18:43:00.000-07:00

One of the biggest challenges the human race faces today is finding and using alternative energy sources. The push for means of generating electricity has been around for over 100 years, but when oil and coal-fired generators produced power inexpensively, the world put the search for alternative energy sources on the back burner for a number of years.

We cannot procrastinate any longer, however, as many of the earth's natural resources, such as oil, are depleting.

A Short History Lesson on Alternative Energy Sources

The need for an alternate energy source was rekindled in the 1970's with the oil shortage that created lines at gas stations and produced critical shortages throughout the United States. The search for alternate power generation is not limited to finding new ways of powering vehicles, as supplying cheap power for homes and industries is a continuous endeavor. There have been many advances in the search for alternative energy sources, but the price of the power produced still remains too high.

Wind, water and sun are touted as renewable energy resources with claims that once the technology is perfected, making it more cost effective, they can replace the need for oil and natural gas to turn turbines in the generation process. Even geothermal power production is one of the alternate energy sources being researched.

The Source Of The Energy Depends on The Location

For many people the switch to alternative energy sources is a matter of finding the type of alternative power that works the best in their particular geographical location. Persons who live in areas that have limited exposure to the sun for example, may not be too excited about using solar panels to supply power. When the sun goes down for an extended number of days, the town can go dark.

In some of those areas, wind is not a problem as it seems to blow nearly every day. Using wind power to turn turbines to generate electricity can work there, but may not work in other areas that experience less windy conditions. Another of the alternative energy sources, hydropower uses the power of rivers to turn generators, but the cost of the infrastructure to get power to the people from the generator may still be high for long range use.

With the three major alternative energy sources continuing to be researched and advanced, the need for an answer to out problem becomes more evident every time a person receives their electric bill, or fills their car with gas.

The resources that we have left on the planet are running out. Do your part to keep educated on the latest changes in technology and any up to date with the issues at hand to learn what you can do to help solve the energy crisis.

Learn how you can save money and the planet by visiting: http://www.learntomakebiodiesel.com/

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Madison_Greene

Injustices by Shell Oil are the focus of 'Nobel Prize' for the Environmental Movement

2008-03-21T18:19:00.000-07:00

On Monday, 23 April 2007 William Corduff, a lifetime resident of Rossport, a sparsely populated farming community in North Mayo County, Ireland was awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in recognition of his resistance, along with his local community, against Shell Oil’s illegally-approved pipeline through their land.

What is significant about this award is that it once again, awards community resistance against Shell Oil.

On two previous occasions Shell Oil was the focus, first in Nigeria, when Ken Saro Wiwa received the Goldman Environmental Prize in 1995 and then in 1998 when Margie Richards was awarded the prize for her work in Louisiana, in the United States.

In 1998 Bobby Peek, a resident of Durban, received the award for his work with the south Durban community, resisting multinational corporations in south Durban, where Shell Oil operates the biggest South African oil refinery.
groundWork (Friends of the Earth, South Africa – www.gorundwork.org.za) and the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA – www.sdcea.org.za) have been part of the global Shell Accountability Campaign because of Shell Oil’s activities in south Durban which have resulted in Shell Oil’s pipelines leaking more than one million litres of petrol under community homes.

The Shell Accountability Campaign was started in 2002 with the release of the book ‘Riding the Dragon’ which documents Shell Oil’s impacts globally.
Since 2002, the Campaign has grown to include community groups from four continents and non-governmental organisations such as Friends of the Earth International and, in the US, Global Community Monitor and Environmental Health Fund.

Shell Oil planned to start off shore gas production in 2003 near Rossport, bringing toxic, unrefined gas ashore at Rossport via a high pressure pipeline stretching six miles to a refinery which was to be constructed in neighbouring Bellanaboy. Despite objections by many Rossport citizens, Shell was granted permission by the Irish government to run the pipeline across the property of more than two dozen farmers and landowners.

In response, William Corduff and his neighbours began a grassroots campaign to rally the support of their fellow Rossport residents in challenging the pipeline. In June 2005, after refusing Shell access to their property, William Corduff and four other men were jailed. Known as the “Rossport Five,” they were released after spending 94 days in jail.

William Corduff:
“The bottom line is we will not lie down. We can not. There is too much at stake. We’d have to leave our homes if we were to accept this. We have to protect ourselves, because no one else will.”

You can also watch video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLpDmh4BU8w

Permaculture explained

2008-03-21T18:05:00.000-07:00

There is an old saying: 'Civilised man has marched across the face of the earth and left a desert in his footprints.' (Carter and Dale, Topsoil and Civilization, p.6)

Today, worldwide, on land once rich with natural vegetation, we see deserts denuded of their topsoil, deserts of salt-encrusted soil from years of irrigation, deserts due to widespread deforestation having altered the regional climate.

The problem from a permaculture perspective has been a lack of design. Agriculture, from its invention and reinvention from some 10,000 years ago onwards, has generally involved a crude process of clearing the wilderness and establishing a cycle of digging or ploughing, then seeding with a few useful species, primarily grasses,then harvesting the crop to feed humans and livestock - and the cycle begins again year on year until the land is exhausted - after which a new area of wilderness is cleared.

Perhaps humans devised this system after surviving for a million years or so by hunting and gathering, and learning that regular firing of the undergrowth encouraged fresh sprouting pioneer species which were more nutritious for people and the grazing herds we hunted than did the stable, mature forest.

The solution from a permaculture perspective is to introduce design into agriculture in order to create permanent high-yielding agricultural ecosystems, so that humans can thrive on as little land as possible, thus leaving as much land as possible as wilderness, if necessary helping the wilderness re-establish itself. This visionary global mission is encapsulated in the word 'permaculture', a shortened form of 'permanent agriculture'.

In order to implement this global vision, we need local solutions, because every place on earth is different in local climate, land form, soils, and the combinations of species which will thrive. Not only does the land and its potential vary from place to place, but so do the people vary in their needs and preferences and their capacities. Every place and community requires its own particular design. Hence at the local level, permaculture designers often refer to permaculture as being about designing for 'permanent culture'.

The global vision can be lost sight of in the nitty-gritty of 'permanent culture' designing for local sustainability. But the vision is vital and can inspire us to keep going in the face of obstruction and apathy.

Bill Mollison explainsBill Mollison explains why freeing land for wilderness matters even for those who think only people matter:

'Even anthropocentric people would be well-advised to pay close attention to, and to assist in, the conservation of existing forests and the rehabilitation of degraded lands. Our own survival demands that we preserve all existing species, and allow them a place to live.
We have abused the land and laid waste to systems we need never have disturbed had we attended to our home gardens and settlements. If we need to state a set of ethics on natural systems, then let it be thus:

Implacable and uncompromising opposition to further disturbance of any remaining natural forests, where most species are still in balance;

Vigorous rehabilitation of degraded and damaged natural systems to stable states;

Establishment of plant systems for our own use on the least amount of land we can use for our existence; and

Establishment of plant and animal refuges for rare or threatened species.

Permaculture as a design system deals primarily with the third statement above, but all people who act responsibly in fact subscribe to the first and second statements. That said, I believe we should use all the species we need or can find to use in our own settlement designs, providing they are not locally rampant and invasive.

Whether we approve of it or not, the world about us continually changes. Some would want to keep everything the same, but history, palaeontology, and common sense tells us that all has changed, is changing, will change. In a world where we are losing forests, species, and whole ecosystems, there are three concurrent and parallel responses to the environment:

CARE FOR SURVIVING NATURAL ASSEMBLIES, to leave the wilderness to heal itself;

REHABILITATE DEGRADED OR ERODED LAND using complex pioneer species and long-term plant assemblies (trees, shrubs, ground covers);

CREATE OUR OWN COMPLEX LIVING ENVIRONMENT with as many species as we can save, or have need for, from wherever on earth they come.

We are fast approaching the point where we need refuges for all global life forms, as well as regional, national, or state parks for indigenous forms of plants and animals.

While we see our local flora and fauna as "native", we may also logically see all life as "native to earth".

While we try to preserve systems that are still local and diverse, we should also build new or recombinant ecologies from global resources, especially in order to stabilise degraded lands.'

Bill Mollision, Permaculture: A Practical Guide for a Sustainable Future, p.6

Permaculture in PracticePermaculture is about creating sustainable human habitats by following nature's patterns." It uses the diversity, stability and resilience of natural ecosystems to provide a framework and guidance for people to develop their own sustainable solutions to the problems facing their world, on a local, national or global scale.

It is based on the philosophy of co-operation with nature and caring for the earth and its people.

A system of design"Maximum contemplation; minimum action"

Permaculture is about thinking before you act.

Permaculture is not a set of rules; it is a process of design based around principles found in the natural world, of co-operation and mutually beneficial relationships, and translating these principles into actions.

This action can range from choosing what you eat, how you travel, the type of work you do, and where you live, to working with others to create a community food-growing project. It's about making decisions that relate to all your other decisions; so one area of your life is not working against another. For example, if you are planning a journey, consider other tasks that can be completed on the way to your destination (combining a trip to the leisure centre with buying food on the way home, for example).

It means thinking about your life or project as a whole system - working out the most effective way to do things that involves the least effort and the least damage to others, and looking for ways to make relationships more beneficial.

It is essential to observe your surroundings before making choices. Taking stock at the beginning of a project (whether it be building a house or planting a window box) of the available resources in terms of time, materials, skills, money, opportunities, land etc, and thinking about how these resources can relate to each other is a useful basis for designing a sustainable and effective system. To take the example of a garden - careful observation over the course of a few months can give information about the sunniest spots, the path of a neighbourhood fox, which areas are sheltered from the wind. Such information is not always immediately available, but can ultimately be very important.

A key feature of the design process in permaculture is "zoning". This is about placing things appropriately in relation to each other, and works on the principle that those things which require frequent attention are placed closest to the home. It is about using time, energy and resources wisely, which can be as simple as planting your most used herbs nearest to your kitchen, or as complex as planning a community.

Ethics and Principles"If we want to move on and create sustainability and a more fulfilling quality of life, the best way to do this is to understand the nature of the world and to live harmoniously and creatively with it - to understand that we are a part of the web of life, not separate from it."

Permaculture embodies a system of ethics and principles that we aim to put into practice. These focus around sustainability and fairness, and are generally divided into three main categories:

Earth CarePermaculture as a design system is based on natural systems. It is about working with nature, not against it - not using natural resources unnecessarily or at a rate at which they cannot be replaced. It also means using outputs from one system as inputs for another (vegetable peelings as compost, for example), and so minimising wastage.

People CarePeople care is about looking after us as people, not just the world we live in. It works on both an individual and a community level. Self-reliance, co-operation and support of each other should be encouraged. It is, however, important to look after ourselves on an individual level too. Our skills are of no use to anyone if we are too tired to do anything useful! People care is also about our legacy to future generations.

Fair SharesThe fair shares part of the permaculture ethic brings earth care and people care together.

We only have one earth, and we have to share it - with each other, with other living things, and with future generations.

This means limiting our consumption, especially of natural resources, and working for everyone to have access to the fundamental needs of life - clean water, clean air, food, shelter, meaningful employment, and social contact.

Permaculture does not provide prescriptive solutions to the problems facing the world - nobody is going to demand that you put an herb spiral in the bottom left corner of your garden, or wear only hand knitted recycled non-bleached organic fair trade clothes. It is about allowing you the freedom to observe your surroundings, and make decisions that will work for you, in your situation, using the resources you have.

Self-Reliance and Community Sufficiency "We try to empower people to take control of their own lives. If you can see something needs doing, then give yourself permission to do it"

Permaculture seeks to foster the skills, confidence and imagination to enable people to become self-reliant, and to seek creative solutions to problems on a global or local scale. While the individual has a part to play, in most places it is not realistic for an individual household to provide for all of their own needs in terms of food, clothing, work etc, and the emphasis is more on self-reliance and increased sufficiency within the community, rather than individual self-sufficiency.

In practice, this does not mean each person growing enough food to feed themselves in their back garden; it means that as many as possible of the inputs for a community (food, skills etc) come from within that community - perhaps in the form of community food growing schemes, Local Exchange and Trading Systems to exchange skills and produce etc.

Permaculture means different things to different people. One person may interpret it in a practical sense in terms of growing food, perhaps, while another will focus on a more spiritual side. This diversity is important; it helps to keep a sense of balance, and encourages people to share their resources and knowledge with others.