Greenpeace boss risks jail to stop Arctic drilling

You can’t get much higher-profile than this. The International Executive Director of Greenpeace, Kumi Naidoo, has scaled the controversial Arctic oil rig currently 120 km off the coast of Greenland. He is breaching a court injunction against his organisation imposed by a Dutch court a week ago at the request of Cairn Energy, the company operating the oil platform. The court order, sought by the company a week ago after 20 Greenpeace activists were arrested for stopping the rig operating, means a 50,000 Euros a day fine and the risk of jail for the Greenpeace chief.

Kumi Naidoo is carrying a petition with 50,000 signatures from all over the world, appealing to Cairn to release its plans for dealing with a possible oil spill in dangerous waters, which could have devastating impacts on the fragile Arctic ecosystem.
Before he scaled the platform, Naidoo described efforts to stop drilling in the Arctic as “one of the defining environmental battles of our age”, drawing attention to the paradox of drilling for more fossil fuels in a region already affected twice as much as the global average by climate warming.
Kumi Naidoo is an African and keen to highlight the fact that the Arctic is of key importance to the global climate as a whole and global sea levels. The latest report by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, a working group of the Arctic Council indicates dramatic warming and ice melt has been taking place there. I just wrote an article on the Unprecedented Arctic Ice Melt, see also Arctic Nations eye region’s potential.