Black is the colour of mourning and grieving. A black ribbon may indicate wanting to raise awareness for or against something. Draping an entire house in black? I would say it is an amalgamation of all layers of symbolism associated with black.
3rd August 2023 was an eventful day for both Greenpeace activists and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
For Greenpeace activists: it was because they decided to protest against the British Prime Minister’s decision of backing new oil and gas licences in the North Sea by draping his private home in black.
And for the Prime Minister himself? It was because he was receiving quite the backlash for having ruffled a considerable number of feathers that angered climate change activists.
In a recent image shared by Greenpeace UK on the messaging platform X (formerly referred to as Twitter), four activists were captured atop a property in northern England. The scene depicted the activists draping the property with yards of black fabric. Two other activists among them held up a banner that read, “Rishi Sunak-oil profits or our future?”
A question that has been asked over decades and should be asked not only from politicians but also from oil tycoons far and wide.
Black gold vs environment
Oil drilling is a multi-billion dollar industry. Therefore, however one may argue, the decision to drill is typically one that is centred around economic considerations. In simple terms, money is the ‘A’ factor. And the trajectory of recent trends shows that in the hope of generating more oil wealth, there is a steady increase in on-shore and off-shore drilling. Making matters life-threatening for everyone, say the activists and health-care sector workers who are pleading with the oil industry to stop drilling.
In a signed opinion letter released by the Family Medicine and Community Health Alliance in the UK, they bring to our attention how the impact of climate change on human health is deeply concerning.
Oil drilling results in an emission of an unhealthy level of carbon dioxide. Which directly contributes to global warming.
Furthermore, in regions where oil and gas are extracted, the spaces left behind by the extraction process become filled with water instead of the original insulating materials (such as coal, oil and gas). Water is not as good of an insulator as these natural materials. As a result, more heat from the Earth’s interior can travel to the surface through these areas. This leads to the warming of the land and the ocean.
Owing to an outcome as such, the healthcare sector voiced its worries because, in recent times, healthcare professionals are witnessing the direct impacts of poor health due to unbearable heat conditions, severe weather events, and environmental pollution. For instance, during the heat waves from June to August 2022, over 3000 additional deaths were documented in England and Wales. If appropriate measures are not taken, it is projected that the number of heat-related deaths in the U.K. could increase to around 7000 annually by the 2050s.
The reason why the U.K. is in the limelight recently is because of British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his decision to support oil drilling. However, we should not let that divert our attention from the global stance that protesters worldwide are taking against oil drilling.
The UK, obviously, is not the only culprit
In Belém, Brazil, on 6th August 2023, protesters demonstrated their disdain towards Amazon River oil drilling. This took place during a Brazilian government environmental conference: ‘The Amazonian Dialogues’ that opposed the actions of the state oil company Petrobras’s plan to initiate offshore drilling at the entrance of the Amazon River.
Petrobras, one of the leading oil companies that found itself in the list of top ten oil drilling companies in the year 2023, requested a licence that was denied by the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama) on May 17 due to technical inconsistencies. According to Ibama, the area at the mouth of the Amazon River is considered environmentally sensitive as it contains conservation units, indigenous lands, mangroves, and diverse marine life, including endangered species like corals and sponges. Not to mention that the Amazon is the largest river that keeps the Earth alive. Causing any kind of disruption to it, minute or large scale would tilt the earth on its axes.
Despite all endeavours to reduce the carbon footprint left behind by all sorts of activities, the efforts are being overridden because of the tenacious pursuit of oil drilling. The scars that oil drilling leaves behind are the emission of greenhouse gases, deforestation, habitat destruction, oil spills, environmental damage, and feedback loops and tipping points (for instance, melting Arctic ice due to global warming has made previously inaccessible oil reserves more exploitable. However, the extraction and burning of these reserves feed into global warming and trigger feedback loops). And this is just the tip of the iceberg (pun intended).
But despite such large warning signs being shoved right up everyone’s noses, why are oil giants not backing off, or at least revising their decisions? Of course, they have CSR projects that prioritise climate change and fund NGOs that advocate for the environment. But what does a feeble attempt at being a part of the solution matter if they themselves are the problem. Is the way that they react impressive enough?
Turning a blind eye
With regards to how influential entities react toward the discourse around oil drilling and climate change, the justification that a source from British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s office gave was:
“We make no apology for taking the right to approach to ensure our energy security, using the resources we have here at home so we are never reliant on aggressors like [Russian President Vladmir] Putin for our energy”
What this statement may or may not mean, how the general public reads between these lines, and how everyone receives it is something that can be scrutinised on individual levels.
But what this montage of events coaxes us to realise is that this attitude of higher-ups who prefer oil wealth over taking measures for climate change is pervasive. In fact, ExxonMobil: one of the largest oil companies with its perfect research models and genius science team, had predicted the impact that oil drilling will have on climate change as early as the 1970s. Their private research indicated that burning fossil fuels would warm the planet, with accurate numbers. But they decided to sweep such findings under the carpet. When ExxonMobil was confronted about it, they denied such allegations by claiming that they were wrong.
However, as a BBC climate and science reporter Georgina Rannard in one of her articles posits, the findings (that were later analysed by external parties) indicate that ExxonMobil’s projections frequently proved to be more precise than those of even prominent NASA scientists in some cases.
Corporations such as ExxonMobil have generated billions in revenue by selling fossil fuels, which emit gases that science experts, governments, and the UN have identified as contributors to global warming. Which brings us back to the question, is oil profit more important than our lives? Because with the way things are going, it will be global boiling at some point and that will only be the tipping point of a catastrophe that we did see coming but turned a blind eye to.
(Sandunlekha Ekanayake)