The perils of extracting petroleum and fossil fuels are well documented. Clearly, drilling in the arctic or offshore is difficult, expensive and dangerous. A spill is hard to contain and virtually impossible to clean up. Spills from 20 years ago like the Exxon Valdez in Alaska to recent ones caused by British Petroleum in the Caspian Sea and the Gulf of Mexico are testament to their devastating and long lasting effects. Greenpeace has “… identified oil drilling in Arctic waters as one of the biggest climate threats being ignored by the world’s governments.”
Continue reading “Petroleum Perils”Every year, according to Greenpeace, about 30 million barrels of oil products leak from wells and pipelines in Russia. An estimated four million barrels of that, roughly the size of BP’s Gulf of Mexico spill, flows straight into the Arctic Ocean through tributaries. !