Activists from Friends of the Earth Scotland are gathering today outside Cairn Energy’s AGM in Edinburgh, dressed as cowboys to highlight what they see as the company’s bizarre oil spill plan.
Cairn announced its intention to return to the Arctic in 2014 having taken a break to secure finance for its exploration activities. The Scottish company is known for its strategy of going after high-risk marginal oil.
Paul Daly, Corporate Accountability Campaigner at Friends of the Earth Scotland, said:- “Cairn is utterly cavalier in its pursuit of Arctic oil, taking advantage of melting ice caps in its hunt for increasingly high risk fossil fuels.
“We urgently need to kick our addiction to fossil fuels to avoid disastrous climate change, not take advantage of its impacts to find and burn ever more oil.”
According to FOE, Cairn Energy intend to drill deeper than the depths drilled from the Deepwater Horizon platform in the Gulf of Mexico, and the activists claim that the consequences of an accident on a scale of Deepwater Horizon in the Arctic would be even more disastrous with harsh conditions hampering any clean up operations. Total became the first big oil company to rule out Arctic oil drilling as just too risky in September last year.
Daly added:-“Cairn’s oil spill response plan is laughable, and was dismissed as woefully inadequate by a recent parliamentary inquiry. These ‘cowboys’ have some daft ideas about how they would clean up after a spill that demonstrated quite how little regard they have for the Arctic.
“Cairn should abandon their crazy Arctic plans.”
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