No More Oil!

US – On September 14, at the annual meeting of the World Energy Council in Houston, Project Underground and the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) released a joint report, “Drilling to the Ends of the Earth: The Ecological, Social and Climate Imperative for Ending New Petroleum Exploration.”

The environmentalists, joined by Nigerian lawyer-activist Oronto Douglas and Colombian native activist and Goldman Environmental Prize winner Berito Kuwar-u’wa, announced the start of an international environmental and human rights campaign to end all new fossil fuel exploration.

The report quantifies, for the first time, the effect of oil exploration on forests, mangroves, coral reefs, indigenous peoples and the world climate. Ten years ago, the world’s nations promised to stop global warming by reducing the production of greenhouse gases. Yet, over the past decade, the number of countries and companies engaged in oil and gas exploration has almost tripled.

According to the report, the oil and gas industry spends more than $150 billion annually on new exploration and the territory opened up to exploration just over the last 10 years roughly equals the combined land area of the US and Europe. The ever-expanding search for ever-diminishing reserves of oil now threatens old growth forests in 22 countries, coral reefs in 38 countries and mangrove ecosystems in 46 countries. The report found that “indigenous peoples on every habitable continent… face an immediate or near-term threat from new exploration.”

“The petroleum industry’s quest for every last drop of oil is threatening the rights of indigenous communities, destroying the Earth’s last intact ecosystems, ensuring global climate disaster and locking developing countries in a death spiral of debt and dependency,” stated Project Underground’s Steve Kretzmann. “People need energy, not oil. Industry and governments need to support policies that favor people and the planet, not profits and pollution.”

“Oil’s day is over,” added RAN’s Shannon Wright, “It is time to invest in the wealth of renewable energy.”

The No More Oil Campaign is demanding an end to all new exploration, starting with projects in fragile ecosystems, in areas where local communities object, and in regions where traditional indigenous people live. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund are being challenged to “recognize the ecological debt owed by the North to the South and to directly support renewable energy technologies in developing countries.”

“In Nigeria, people are dying because of oil,” said Oronto Douglas (who served as attorney for Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Goldman Environmental Prize- winning Nigerian writer/activist who was executed by the Nigerian military dictatorship). “It is simply immoral to carry on with an outmoded product such as oil. Petroleum is poisonous for the Earth’s climate and it has been the cause of so much human suffering. The quest for more must end now.”

What You Can Do: For more the complete U’wa Declaration and for more information on the No More Oil Campaign, contact RAN [221 Pine Street, No. 500, San Francisco, CA 94104, (415) 398-4404, ext. 317; www.ran.org]