![\"Whanau](\"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/aotearoa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/65094_115865.jpg\" "\\"Whanau")
<\/strong><\/p>\nThe New Zealand government has been selling off large chunks of the oceans to foreign oil companies with a view to exploratory, very experimental, very very deep sea oil exploration and drilling.<\/p>\n
Ask any rigger and they will tell you that drilling for oil is a risky business at the best of times, but the deeper you go, the higher the risk of an accident, the higher the cost to the environment and the lower the economic returns to the Oil companies and to the country.\u00a0 It is a high risk, low return venture and it smacks of desperation.<\/p>\n
I come from Scotland and I remember the buzz about North Sea Oil when the rigs started exploratory drilling off the coast of Aberdeen.\u00a0 The hype at the time was all about the fiscal benefits Scotland would enjoy, but what transpired was something quite different.\u00a0 Scotland became poorer as a result.\u00a0 Sure there was a little more money coming from the pay packets of the riggers themselves, but the \u2018trickle down\u2019 effect was marginal to say the least.\u00a0 I don\u2019t remember the deep sea oil drilling managing to stave off the depression of the nineteen seventies, or softening the blow of the stock market crash of the late eighties and it certainly made no difference at all in two thousand and eight when the world economy turned south.<\/p>\n
What I do remember is the night of the Piper Alpha disaster that killed one hundred and sixty seven men, and I do remember the Gannet Platform spewing crude into the North Sea and I do remember the Elgin Platform\u2019s poisonous gas cloud that spread across the sea as far as four miles creating a no-go area and I do remember the fact that none of this made Scotland any richer, and I pray that New Zealand doesn\u2019t fall for the same snake oil salesman\u2019s pitch.<\/p>\n
The New Zealand government are pushing this high risk auction of the seas as a panacea for all our ills, saying that if we follow them to somewhere over the oily rainbow we will find a New Jerusalem, but its sheer fantasy.\u00a0 The truth of it is more akin to asking the New Zealand public to swallow this sour medicine in the vain hope we might somehow puke up a unicorn.<\/p>\n
The only winners in this equation are the board and the shareholders of the foreign oil companies.\u00a0 We take all the risk and they reap all the rewards.\u00a0 Our people lose their lives, our seas are poisoned and our traditional ways are destroyed.<\/p>\n
Now even the Oil companies are realising that the task is just too risky for them and they don\u2019t want a bar of it.\u00a0 First Petrobras pulled out, on the back of sustained resistance by Te Whanau a Apanui working with the support of local sailors, fishermen and Greenpeace (much more on this in a future post) which was a major blow to the Government and now the American oil company \u2018Apache\u2019 have said that they have \u201c\u2026reviewed where we are at and decided to invest our money elsewhere.\u201d So they are heading home too.<\/p>\n
The great news for New Zealand is that as each individual oil company realises that they won\u2019t get an easy run of it in New Zealand and decide to pull out, the opportunity becomes less and less attractive for any oil company to come here at all.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s break it down, here\u2019s how it goes\u2026<\/p>\n
1: The NZ Government sell off licences for exploratory deep sea drilling to foreign oil companies.<\/p>\n
2: The Foreign oil companies club together and share the cost of bringing infrastructure and an oil rigs to New Zealand.<\/p>\n
3: The fewer companies that can share that cost, the less attractive the opportunity and the less likely it becomes that any oil company will shoulder that burden alone.<\/p>\n
So as you can no doubt see, each time we come together, we become stronger and we can make the next Petrobras or Apache Oil decide that it just isn\u2019t worth the effort, the closer and closer we get to safe guarding our seas.<\/p>\n
Each victory in this sustained campaign is a small step forward.\u00a0 It may take some time, but together we are sailing our waka in the right direction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The banners that welcomed the new Rainbow Warrior into Auckland read \u201cHaere Mai\u201d \u2013 Welcome home. The state of the art ship is here in her spiritual home to bring attention to the fact that John Key and his cronies have reckless plans for the seas that surround our beautiful country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":1678,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_planet4_optimize_post_is_variant":false,"_planet4_optimize_experiment_name":"","_planet4_optimize_variant_name":"","ep_exclude_from_search":false,"p4_og_title":"","p4_og_description":"","p4_og_image":"","p4_og_image_id":"","p4_seo_canonical_url":"","p4_campaign_name":"","p4_local_project":"","p4_basket_name":"","p4_department":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[26],"p4-page-type":[6],"class_list":["post-1017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-greenpeace","tag-oil-and-gas","p4-page-type-story"],"yoast_head":"\n