On Wednesday last week a Brussels-based anti-fracking
campaigner wrote
“things have been quiet on the fracking front. In England,
faced with a fractured democracy, campaign groups are becoming increasingly
creative and well organised. In Ireland, the Parliament has backed a
Bill calling for an outright ban, meaning it progresses to the next
legislative stage. Aside from having had to assist with a Twitterstorm, write
to elected representatives and keep others updated with developments, there has
been little else to do. Elsewhere in Europe, there has only been positive news
to share of late: Poland’s
last frackers pulling out and BNK
Petroleum relinquishing another licence in Spain.”[1]
This Wednesday, of course, Trump won the US election, which
casts a huge shadow over Native resistance to the Dakota Access pipeline at
Standing Rock and perhaps also to Keystone XL. We could say: what a difference
a week makes. Or we could say: what a difference politics makes.
This is often not how we talk about energy, where decisions
on petroleum are treated either as a technical issue (by its supporters) or as
a grim structural inevitability (by its opponents). But in practice the very
uncertainty of petroleum extraction projects points to how far they are
political decisions in the last instance.
This can be seen particularly in relation to tar sands,
where in the boom years 2010 – 2013 producers lost $30.9 billion, of which 55%
“can credibly be attributed to the impact of public accountability campaigns”[2].
It is also, of course, visible on a wider scale, in decisions such as that of
the UK government to remove subsidies for renewable energy while passing
legislation to facilitate the fracking industry and deciding to proceed with
the 3rd Heathrow runway – or on the widest scale around the Paris
agreement and the question of what it will actually mean in practice.
Politics, or more broadly social movements, is also an
outcome of struggles over petroleum production. Anna Szolucha, who completed
her PhD here, is now a Marie Curie research fellow working on energy democracy
and popular resistance to fracking. She writes
“In places where the protesters managed to make the energy
corporations abandon the drilling sites, the communities are organising in
egalitarian ways and forming new renewable energy co-operatives. The aim is to
take responsibility for meeting their own energy needs in a way that is local
and mitigates climate change. May new local energy co-operatives and grassroots
mobilisations against hydraulic fracturing reveal the potential for a
repowering of democracy?”[3]
In other words, if we want to think about the future of
petroleum we are talking not simply about inevitable technical or structural
factors, but about politics: about how people organise on both sides to push or
resist particular projects and alternatives. This matters to all of us, or at
least to those who will live long enough to be personally affected by global
warming or who have children and grandchildren.
This is why Ken Saro-Wiwa’s commitment to the struggle against Shell in
Ogoniland, or the struggle against Shell in Mayo, matter far beyond the people
involved: they are among the places where the future of the planet has been
fought out.
In terms then of assessing the politics of environmental groups facing the oil industry:
·
The period of low oil prices since 2014, in large part a result of OPEC hostility
to the new petroleum sources (fracking, tar sands, deep water drilling), has
had the desired effect of making such projects much less likely to be
profitable, and thus much less likely to be pursued, at least at present.
However once a project has been signalled, this gives local opposition advance warning for the long process of
organisation and education that is needed to win.
·
The shift towards “midge” firms, particularly in fields like fracking, is an added
weakness. As we have seen, it is far harder to resist a major oil company like
Shell, with massive reserves and a need to maintain a political image of
strength, than it is to resist a small and in part speculative exploration
company which cannot easily cope with declining prices and the costs of popular
resistance. (For a reminder: Shell to Sea raised the cost of the Corrib Gas project
from c. €800m to c. €3.5bn, quite separate from the costs involved in taking 15
years to build a pipeline). So the chances for effective resistance vary
considerably in terms of the size of the
company involved – bear in mind that the oil majors have bigger economies
than many small countries.
·
With the Paris agreement in particular, we have
started to see some light at the end of a
long historical tunnel. If Graham Kay’s research explores the moment when a
strategic commitment to secure petroleum reserves became a central motivation
for great power politics, we are now entering a period where this can no longer
be taken for granted, and where it is conceivable that major states can face
the industry (and its associated industries, like the car and aviation
industries) down. This does not mean, of course, that they always will: rather
that other economic actors and considerations (rising sea levels, comparative
costs, renewable energy) start to become thinkable
alternative options for states. Indeed some petroleum companies themselves
are investing increasingly in renewables, while divestment campaigns are having
a surprisingly easy ride of it.
·
Lastly, as in Ogoniland a substantial proportion
of new oil projects are in areas with significant
indigenous populations, not least in the USA and Canada. Such populations
are often fighting for their economic and cultural survival, and have less to
lose in that they have fewer ties to national power structures than others.
This is of course one reason for the often spectacular involvement and frequent
success of indigenous resistance to the industry.
So these are broadly speaking background conditions.
Environmental groups are, I think, winning more battles against the petroleum
industry now than perhaps ever before. It is also important to remember that
some defeats (like Rossport) represent Pyrrhic victories for the industry: the
Irish state will think twice and three times before signing up to another
project that might bring on the same kinds of conflict. This was, after all,
the experience both of the nuclear power projects of the 1980s and of the UK
government’s roads projects in the 1990s.
However the question of whether the light at the end of the
tunnel is just a mirage is ultimately one of politics. On the dark side, as we
can see with Trump and May, states are entirely capable of orienting towards
petroleum for non-strategic reasons. Conversely, if Putin’s petroleum strategy
has a logical geopolitical orientation, China’s relative openness to a gear
shift shows an alternative kind of state strategy from a surprising direction.
On the light side, much depends on alliances. This is very
obvious in relation to indigenous resistance, from the international
alliance-building of Saro-Wiwa’s MOSOP to Standing Rock. However it is equally
important elsewhere: between the “Lancashire Nanas” and eco-warriors in
Britain, or between unions, churches and environmentalists in Norway. There are
no guarantees here; and events like the Green Party’s presence in government
here when the Navy was used against Rossport protestors show just how bad
things can be.
So it really is up to us.
Laurence Cox
