#if u need any more proof oil and gas companies are evil

[drumlincountry]

It feels soooo silly to be like ‘holy shit, did you know oil & gas companies are evil?’ like ‘wooow omg did you know water is weT?’

But I was at a talk yesterday about fracking & they’re just, SO evil. It’s insane how evil they are?

First off, they are deliberately targeting traumatised communities. The activists I was listening to were from Northern Ireland, where approx 45% of adults have PTSD. The oil and gas companies were targeting NI because 1. the communities are so divided by the Troubles that they can’t always put prejudice aside to fight a big complicated fight, 2. similarly the political structures in NI exist on a sliding scale between ‘weak’ and ‘nonfunctional’, due to all the trauma and violence and division & they can’t effectively like, pass laws preventing extraction.

BUT if you do manage to develop laws preventing extraction, you’re still not safe ....because the oil and gas companies just change their terms! Say you outlaw fracking, right - they come back in two years time saying ‘ok, this thing we want to do now is the exact same industrial process, EXCEPT we are using a SLIGHTLY different machine so we aren’t calling it ‘fracking’ anymore. Now it’s called [dumb new acronym], and its totally legal!’

Oil and Gas companies lied consistently about the health impact of drilling/fracking/extraction on local communities, while the medical & scientific community spent decades building up irrefutable evidence that living near oil, gas, or coal extraction sites increases asthma, autoimmune diseases, infertility, cancer risk, etc.

Then what do the oil and gas companies do when they can’t lie anymore??? they just IGNORE IT. One activist (who was also a doctor) had a meeting with senior civil servants asking them to justify giving extraction licenses, given the health implications. And the senior civil servants said WAIT. WHAT HEALTH IMPACTS? WE’VE BEEN IN TALKS WITH THIS COMPANY FOR 3 YEARS NO ONE MENTIONED ANY HEALTH IMPACTS?

If you manage to create the community power & political will to prevent them from extracting oil and gas – they sue you for lost earnings! Millions & billions of pounds, euros, etc. Because there’s some international energy agreement that means they could have expected to earn money drilling somewhere, and you subvert that expectation, they can SUE YOU for what they ARGUE they MIGHT HAVE earned from drilling down there.

So now, when people create geothermal energy infrastructure, that involves drilling down into rock. If an oil or gas company gets their hands on that rock sample and finds there might be oil or gas down there, they can turn up out of NOWHERE and say ‘hey, we want to drill under this city centre because we saw there’s probably oil down there’ & the city are like ‘wtf? No?’ to which, oil and gas companies can say ‘yes. I expected you to say that. We’re now suing you for €€€€€€€€€€€€€€€!’

evil! evil! evil! evil!