Global warming has ignited a rush to exploit Arctic resources—and Greenpeace is determined to thwart that stampede.
Employing the same daredevil tactics it has used against nuclear testing or commercial whaling, the environmental group is now dead-set on preventing oil companies from profiting from global warming by drilling for oil near the Arctic’s shrinking ice cap.
The campaign took off in May 2010, when oil was still gushing from a ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico. At the time, Greenpeace was startled by reports that a small Scottish energy firm was proceeding with plans to drill for oil and gas in iceberg-laden waters off western Greenland.
“It felt slightly surreal,” recalled Ben Ayliffe, now the head of Greenpeace’s campaign against oil drilling the Arctic. “After what happened in the Gulf of Mexico, how can anyone respond to that by going to drill in similar depths in a place called Iceberg Alley?”
Greenpeace quickly arranged to get a ship to Greenland, where four activists attached themselves to a drilling rig for two days until a storm forced them to abandon the protest.
That stunt, a similar one in 2011 off Greenland and protests this month at an oil rig off northwest Russia are at the core of what Greenpeace calls “one of the defining environmental battles of our age.”
“Polar work feels like it’s going back to the early campaigns: simple message, people get it and the lines are very clearly drawn,” Ayliffe said.
