Stena Carron protest in Shetland - Greenpeace Esperanza

[jetsam]

(** mod edit - updated thread title **)

whits dis lot goin ta get upta do u tink?

[blue beetle]

Opportunism, Cheap publicity, Fund raising. The same as they are always upto. Certainly beats having a real job. Cant believe anyone is naive enough to support them. Scum.! IMHO...

[Ghostrider]

A "New Zealand welcome" is all they're worth, even if it was the French that gave them it.

 

(** mod edit - Mind the T&Cs – there’s a line between having a joke and advocating violence **)

[Gorgonzola Butt-cheese]

Well im sure most of them mean well in their pursuits / ideals, but to think they are going to slow down the extraction of oil is naive in the extreme.

Apart from the small media circus which might get on the headline news for a brief period of time, the other achievments will be the burning of a sizeable tonnage of fossil fuel by their own ship.

Off course they will be hoping to cover this costs and more from the charitable donations stemming from this publicity.

[EM]

I think it is quite interesting that there has not been any mention on Shetlink of the Deep Water Horizon fiasco, despite the potential for stirring up "what if that happened here" type debate. People have preferred to ruminate on Tesco etc. I expect that this is down to a general opinion that as the Braer spill was cleared up naturally so quickly, offshore oil spills are not a credible worry here. Consequently, I don't see the Greenpeace stunt finding much support in Shetland.

[MuckleJoannie]

The Gulf of Mexico oil spill was due to poor safety standards. The opinion of the oil industry is that the Piper Alpha disaster caused a tightening up of standards in the North Sea, so a comparable oil spill is unlikely.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10523810

 

Malcolm Webb, chief executive of Oil and Gas UK, said: "There's a tendency to rush to judgement on what happened there and what the implications will be, but it's too early to speculate."

 

He suggested that American regulators would be more likely to move to a system similar to Britain's, which was changed in the wake of the Piper Alpha explosion which killed 167 people in 1988.

 

He said: "We're in a very different regulatory position.

 

"Since Piper Alpha, we separated out safety regulation from economic licensing regulation, so professional health and safety regulators are doing their independent job.

 

"Secondly, the regime over here is not the box-ticking proscriptive regulation, but goal-setting, so that the operator is charged with making sure operations are safe at all times."

[Ghostrider]

I think it is quite interesting that there has not been any mention on Shetlink of the Deep Water Horizon fiasco, despite the potential for stirring up "what if that happened here" type debate.

 

I tend to think that type of debate is a waste of time as far as the oil industry is concerned. Knowing what they're like, the chances of an identical catastrophe of any sort occuring for a second time with them is extremely remote. They take their bottom line, share prices and PR far to seriously for it to be otherwise. They simply don't make the same mistake(s) twice when such things are at stake.

 

If there's need for a debate of potentially catastrophic outcomes as a result of oil industry inadequacies, it needs to be about scenarios and outcomes which could, but have not as yet occured. As chances are if attention and funding is being diverted from anything, its from those things that are adjudged by he industry to be "lower risk" simply due to them not having had the required combination of circumstances present at one place and time for them to have occured as yet.

[EM]

I tend to think that type of debate is a waste of time ...

Yep. To be clear, I was quite impressed that nobody was trying to use dodgy "similarity" arguments to stir up knee-jerk reaction here. I think there was a lot of contempt locally for the reactions of many environmental pressure groups during the Braer incident. Remember the furore when one group's poster campaign used emotionally charged photos of oiled birds labeled as being from Shetland? They turned out to actually be from a Middle East oil spill because there weren't "good enough" oiled bird images from the lighter gullfaks Shetland spill.

[EM]

So, it seems Greenpeace have arrived to save us from the evil drillers and have acted out another of their James Bond delusional fantasies:

 

http://www.shetland-news.co.uk/2010/September/news/Greenpeace%20scale%20drilling%20ship%20off%20Lerwick.htm

 

I suppose it might have some short-term benefit for the end-of-season accomodation market, if they hang about, and the media can be bothered to send up some hacks. Otherwise it really strikes me as being highly juvenile.

[BounceBounce]

Just pull the anchor up when they are ready to set sail, the mindless idiots will soon fall off

 

(** mod edit - Mind the T&Cs – in this instance, there’s a fine line between having a joke and advocating violence **)

[Seaflech]

If anybody from Greenpeace has access to this forum, would it be possible for you to take a couple of minutes of your time, in between mending your wheat sandals and chowing down on a rice cake or two (had to slip in a stereotypical image, sorry) to tell us how large you calculate your own carbon footprint to be for this current operation?

From Aberdeen (where they recently arrived from Greenland) they have taken a large passenger ferry to Lerwick, and from there a speedboat (not noted for their fantastic fuel economy) to the Stena Carron, presumably with the same boat in constant attendance. It says in the news that the Esperanza, a 230ft long diesel burning vessel, is currently en route from Aberdeen to Shetland to join in the fun. That must be a lot of fuel in total just for this latest job - never mind taking all of this to the coast of Greenland as they did a couple of months ago.

Do you think they feel any guilt at all, even the slightest twinge of hypocracy or irony when they are refuelling their various vessels with the very oil that they are trying to stop us using?

Please Greenpeace, don't tell us that you are so incredibly arrogant to say that you are burning your little bit of oil in order to stop us burning any more of ours.....

[viblir]

My experience, of these type of activist, leads me to think it a little naive to think that any Greenpeace activist will listen to any argument other than the approved party line. Let alone consider that they might have faults in their argument.

[BounceBounce]

odd place to come, there's no trees here for there hugging sessions!!! Someone better warn kergord of a possible mass influx of complete tools

[EM]

At the time of the Deep Water Horizon fiasco I encountered the following schematic during a BBC news report.

 

http://www.erik-moncrieff.com/misc/OilDepths.png

 

It is a masterpiece of uselessness. Just what does it actually illustrate? Schematics need not always be drawn to scale of course, but just look at the numbers and the relative sizes. At best it says, "10,000m is deeper than 1,500m, which in turn is deeper than 400m." At worst: "Even the BBC haven't a clue what they are reporting about."

[Para Handy]

If you can bomb the Taliban, you can bomb Greenpeace. One is as bad as the other.

Don’t believe a word the say. Lucky I don’t have a tv anymore.

(Don’t have to put up with there Poop anymore)

But when I did! Then as soon as I heard the following “Greenpeace say’s†I would change the channel.