Big Oil in America's Arctic
Update:
On May 20, Royal Dutch Shell will be hosting their Annual General Meeting in The Hague, Netherlands. Sierra Club and its coalition partners will be their to tell Shell to stay out of special places like Alaska's Polar Bear Seas.
Please take action and tell the Board of Directors of Shell Oil that the Polar Bear Seas are too important to drill.
Scientists say all of Alaska's polar bears could be gone by 2050 if we don't stop global warming from melting the Arctic ice caps where they live and hunt. But instead of doing everything possible to protect polar bears, Shell Oil is adding yet another hurdle to their survival: oil drilling.
In spite of controversy, court challenges and broad opposition, oil companies want to drill in Alaska's Polar Bear Seas. In February companies, like Royal Dutch Shell, broke records with their bidding on a lease sale in the Chukchi Sea, with bids exceeding $100 million for rights to drill a single 3-mile by 3-mile stretch of the sea. This lease sale auctioned off 30 million acres in the Chukchi Sea, off the coast of northwest Alaska, for destructive oil and gas drilling.
The sale didn't just break records for bidding prices. It broke records for the price they are willing to pay with our wildlife and wild places in its desperate quest for oil.
This lease sale should never have taken place. The Chukchi Sea, one of Alaska's Polar Bear Seas, is home to roughly one-tenth of the world's polar bears, as well as walruses and endangered whales. A number of Native villages along Alaska's North Slope rely on the sea for cultural and nutritional subsistence. The Interior Department's assessment of the impacts of drilling in this part of the world is neither complete nor realistic.
More dirty oil will only exacerbate the problem of global warming and accelerate the Arctic melt. Shell should be investing its $100 million in clean energy that will last and create new jobs, not on squeezing the last bit of dirty oil out of our most fragile ecosystem.
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