Update: Shell has filed a lawsuit in federal court in Alaska asking the court to issue an injunction against the six Greenpeace activists who have climbed onto an oil rig, the Transocean Polar Pioneer as it was being transported across the Pacific on the Dockwise Blue Marlin dry tow vessel.
ABC News Reports: “Annie Leonard, Greenpeace USA executive director, said in an email that the injunction request is Shell’s latest attempt to keep people from standing up for the Arctic. ‘Shell wants activists off its rig. We want Shell out of the Arctic,’ she said. Greenpeace USA has the right to peacefully protest Shell’s ‘attempts to destroy the Arctic’ and to let the public know about them, Leonard said. ‘We plan on watching over Shell’s activity all the way up to the Chukchi Sea, where Shell’s track record is already objectively reprehensible,’ she said.”
Further they report that “Greenpeace developed a dedicated website to chronicle the protest, the lawsuit said. ‘Greenpeace has a demonstrated pattern of conducting direct actions against Arctic oil and gas operations that violate the rights of others and create dangerous situations for their targets, law enforcement, and their own members.'”
Activists in Seattle are developing a flotilla to great the Shell ship when it arrives in Seattle. The Backbone Campaign is organizing Kayak training courses today and Saturday for what Seattle’s The Stranger has dubbed Kayactivists. Sign-up at sHellNo.org
You can follow the action on board the oil rig on Twitter with the hashtag #TheCrossing or the Save The Arctic website.
Greenpeace Activists Barnacle Themselves To Shell Oil Drilling Rig
Guess we now know why many of those attractive activists (“attractivists,” as coined by The Stranger‘s Mike Force) have backgrounds in extreme sports.
Greenpeace reports that this morning, six activists from the Esperanza—the Greenpeace vessel tracking a Shell oil drilling platform called the Polar Pioneer as it travels across the Pacific Ocean—managed to scale the rig and affix themselves to the underside of the main deck.
The six are now tweeting from the rig, located 750 miles northwest of Hawaii.
So why hop on now, in the middle of the Pacific, a week away from port?
“This was the best window for the climbers to act,” Greenpeace spokesperson Travis Nichols wrote in an e-mail. “We know that Shell could start drilling in 100 days, which doesn’t leave people who oppose them much time to act. They wanted to make sure their work could have the biggest impact.”
Activist Aliyah Field says Greenpeace is willing to stay on the rig until Shell has “received the message that drilling in the Arctic is completely unacceptable.” VINCENZO FLORAMO/GREENPEACE
UPDATE: One of the climbers, Aliyah Field, 27, called The Stranger from a satellite phone. The activists are camped out on a catwalk under the rig’s main platform with food and supplies, about 30 to 40 meters from the water, Field estimates. Morale is running high, and they plan on sticking it out on the rig until Shell has “received the message that drilling in the Arctic is completely unacceptable.” The group has hammocks, climbing gear, and a wind shelter. The crew of the Blue Marlin, the heavy lift vessel carrying the Polar Pioneer, has seen the activists, Field says, but shows no signs of interfering with them.
“Protesters from Greenpeace have illegally boarded the Polar Pioneer, under contract to Shell, jeopardizing not only the safety of the crew on board, but the protestors themselves,” Shell spokeswoman Kelly op de Weegh told Fuel Fix.
