Shell's Kulluk drilling rig barge in 2012.
The Obama administration
gave final approval Monday for Shell Oil to drill for oil and gas in the hard rock of the Arctic ocean floor of the Chukchi Sea. It marked a victory for the company—a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell, the world's fourth largest company—which has not drilled an exploratory well in the region since 1991, and a defeat for environmental activists who have fought Shell's efforts for several years. But
those activists aren't surrendering.
Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, decried the approval: “Granting Shell the permit to drill in the Arctic was the wrong decision, and this fight is far from over. The people will continue to call on President Obama to protect the Arctic and our environment." Thousands of activists have made several attempts to block Shell, sometimes literally. In July, 13 activists in Oregon temporarily kept the Fennica icebreaker carrying a key piece of safety equipment from reaching the Pacific Ocean for its return to Alaska. At Friends of the Earth, climate activist Marissa Knodel said Monday: “When President Obama visits the Arctic this month, he must face the communities he is sacrificing to Shell’s profits.”
In May, having signed a letter with 17 other senators opposing Arctic drilling, Sen. Bernie Sanders said: “At a time when our planet is warming due to climate change, the last thing our environment needs is more drilling. What we need is for Congress and the White House to move toward clean energy such as solar, wind and biomass.” Hillary Clinton tweeted: "The Arctic is a unique treasure. Given what we know, it's not worth the risk of drilling."
The actual decision to allow Shell to drill was made in May, but that was conditioned on obtaining other government permits before moving ahead. In July, the government gave permission for drilling only the top two layers of ocean floor because a piece of equipment called a capping stack, which is meant to block the flow of oil within 24 hours of a blowout, was aboard an icebreaker—the Fennica—which was crippled by a gash in its hull.
With the ship now repaired, the permit issued Monday is an extension of the July permit and allows Shell to pierce the oil-bearing rock that geologists estimate lies 8,000 feet below the Arctic floor. Interior Department estimates put the potential fossil fuel bounty of the Chukchi Sea at 15 billion barrels of recoverable oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas.
But the ecologically fragile region—which has only been made drillable because of accelerated summer melting of sea ice caused by global warming from greenhouse gas emissions that come in great part from burning fossil fuels—is rich in something besides hydrocarbons: its huge biodiversity. The Chukchi is home to puffins, ringed seals, Pacific walruses, bowhead whales and polar bears, among other species. They and the Inupiak people who also live in the region would be at risk from an oil spill that scientists say has a significant possibility of occurring.
Shell has a poor reputation for safety. Just three years ago, in addition to violating air pollution regulations and discharging pollutants into the sea, it lost control of a barge carrying a drilling rig. The barge ran aground in the icy waters and had to be pried off the rocks. The U.S. Coast Guard, which had to rescue the rig and 18 workers, issued a scathing report afterward, saying Shell had apparently hurried its transport of the rig to avoid paying Alaska taxes.
If Shell actually finds what it's looking for in its exploratory wells and acquires production permits, burning those hydrocarbons will bring us that much closer to what scientists say is the emissions limit if we want to keep average global temperature gain below 2° Celsius. Just one more notch on the ratchet of the feedback loop that is heading the planet for disaster.