Oil-Shale

Editor’s Note: The successful Irish struggle against fracking by multi-national gas company Tamboran offers key insights on community power building for anti-extraction movements across the world.The Australian corporation paints its international natural gas projects as ‘green’ with words like “Net Zero CO2 Energy Transition”. But people in the Beetaloo Basin in Australia and Leitrim in Ireland don’t fall for their lies. Read about how local people, farmers, fishers and artists - deeply intertwined with their land - unite to fight for what they hold dear: rivers and streams, peat lands and hills, villages and work on the land. ...

This article originally appeared in Mongabay. Featured image: Barge transporting oil drums in the Niger Delta. Image by Stakeholder Democracy via Flickr ( CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). Oil has been spilling from a wellhead in Nigeria’s Bayelsa state for a month now, with the local company responsible unable to contain it. Experts say the scale and duration of the spill is so severe that it’s imperative that local communities be relocated for their safety. Oil spills and other forms of pollution caused by the industry are common in Bayelsa, the heart of the oil-rich Niger Delta. Companies, including foreign oil majors, are largely left to self-declare the spills that frequently occur, but face only token fines for failing to respond quickly. Crude oil from a blowout has been pouring into creeks in the Niger Delta since Nov. 5, with the well’s owner, Nigerian energy firm Aiteo, unable to contain the spill and specialists called in to help. ...

By Frédéric Moreau In memory of Stuart Scott Each year while winter is coming, my compatriots, whom have already been told to turn off the tap when brushing their teeth, receive a letter from their electricity supplier urging them to turn down the heat and turn off unnecessary lights in case of a cold snap in order to prevent an overload of the grid and a possible blackout. At the same time the French government, appropriately taking on the role of advertiser for the national car manufacturers in which it holds shares¹, is promoting electric cars more and more actively. Even though electric vehicles (EV) have existed since the end of the 19th century (the very first EV prototype dates back to 1834). ...

Shale Must Fall: Global day of climate actions uniting sites of extraction in the Global South and beyond with their counterparts of consumption in the Global North. Friday Dec. 11th, on the eve of the 5th anniversary of the Paris Agreement, a diverse group of environmental movements from 20 different countries are mobilizing together to bring visibility to the environmental destruction of fracking. The movement is mobilizing to highlight the damage caused by European multinationals that do abroad what they are banned from doing at home (in this case, fracking) with the complicity of their governments that subsidize the industry. ...

by Center for Biological Diversity SALT LAKE CITY— Conservation groups today formally opposed the Trump administration’s plan to facilitate the first commercial oil shale development in the United States, a massive Utah project that would generate enormous greenhouse gas and deadly ozone pollution in regions already exceeding federal air-pollution standards. The Bureau of Land Management plans to grant the Estonia-owned Enefit American Oil rights of way to build water, gas, electric and oil-product lines to its 13,000-acre strip-mining “South Project” on private land. In total Enefit has 30,000 acres of private, state and public-land leases in the Uintah Basin. The land contains an estimated 2.6 billion barrels of kerogen oil, and its extraction would require pumping billions of gallons from the Colorado River Basin. ...

By Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance Great Basin On April 19th, myself and other organizers from the Salt Lake City community attended the Morning Energy Update, a meeting hosted by the Utah State Office of Energy Development. The meeting was held in a small conference room at the World Trade Center Utah building. The room was full - us five or six activists mixed in with energy industry businesspeople, State and County officials, and one or two journalists. I sat next to Cody Stewart, the energy advisor to Gary Herbert, the Governor of the State of Utah. ...