Environmental campaigners are to converge on Shell’s London headquarters this morning to highlight the company’s ”shocking” pollution record.
The move coincides with the publication of a new book, Riding the Dragon: Royal Dutch Shell and the Fossil Fire, which catalogues more than 50 years of environmental and public safety spills.
Activists such as Desmond D’Sa, chairman of the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance, will call for talks with the company on a range of local problems.
D’Sa said Shell’s rhetoric on social corporate responsibility sat awkwardly with the kind of pollution dwellings in South Africa were facing from Shell’s facilities. ”The pipeline that runs from Shell’s Durban refinery to the storage tanks at the port are constantly leaking into the community that borders it. I want a commitment from top management that instead of constantly patching up the pipelines they will be renewed.”
His group hopes to hand in copies of the book, written by Washington environmental consultant Jack Doyle. Doyle accepts that Shell is seen by its peers as an ”outstanding company” and one that has been trying to show a more caring, sharing face.
He argues that the Anglo-Dutch company must turn its back on fossil fuels if it is to escape a legacy of well blow-outs, oil spills, chronic air pollution and polluted rivers.
”Few places and few species, no matter how remote or how special, have escaped the untoward and insinuating effects of oil and petrochemicals,” Doyle argues.
Shell said last night it had not yet seen the book but believed it covered historical incidents that had been made public before. ”It does not appear to publish new evidence or provide a new analysis of the incidents. Nevertheless, we take all such events very seriously so that we can learn from them as we strive to improve our environmental and social performance,” said a company representative.
He thought it unlikely any meeting would take place today but might be organised at a later date to discuss the book and individual grievances. The company has become adept at dealing with these kinds of attacks stemming from the lessons it learned during the Brent Spar platform sinking and Nigerian human rights controversies of the mid-1990s.
The words ”Brent Spar” still bring a shudder to those Shell managers who were around when attempts to dispose of a former production platform at the bottom of the Atlantic led to worldwide boycotts and arson attacks on its petrol stations in Germany.
Greenpeace subsequently admitted it had got wrong some of its information about the toxic content of the huge steel structure but public opinion had already ruled against Shell and one of the world’s most valuable brands had been tarnished.
The problems were compounded by events in Nigeria where Shell was caught up in a controversy over the state execution of poet Ken Saro-Wiwa. He had campaigned against the oil group’s environmental record and associated human rights abuses by the military in Ogoniland and a New York court case against the oil company has been brought by relatives of Saro-Wiwa.
The last years of the 1990s brought frantic soul-searching by Shell top brass who concluded that a successful business in the new millennium could not be built around the pursuit of profits alone. Care of the environment, human rights and what is now termed ”corporate social responsibility” and ”sustainable development” became more important issues.
The Shell Foundation was quietly launched two years ago as a legally independent charity to house new social investment programmes which would not directly benefit the commercial arm of the group. About $250-million was pumped into the new body which has its own team and a board of trustees made up of three oilmen led by Phil Watts, chairman of Shell group, and three outsiders: Sir John Houghton, former head of the meteorological office, Enos Ned Banda head of Credit Suisse in South Africa, and Pieter Winsemius, former Dutch environment minister.
Is there not a danger that Shell could run into future trouble that embarrasses the NGO? Marek Markus believes the risk is small but accepts that difficulties will always arise in businesses especially when they have the global scale and breadth of a huge oil company. He said: ”It is not surprising multinationals have got problems because our small clients [businesses] have issues and dilemmas. So we are realistic on that side.”
Cynics might believe that Shell, which is expanding its commercial network of petrol stations in Slovakia, is just using the NGO to oil the wheels of its commercial venture.
What does Greenpeace, which is hounding ExxonMobil over its global warming policies, think of Shell’s new commitment to the wider community? ”There are no angels in the oil industry but there are progressives and regressives and within that context it’s fair to say that Shell and BP are on the side of the progressives,” says Rob Gueterbock, senior climate and energy campaigner at Greenpeace. – Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001