After Shell Oil spent $4 billion lobbying in Washington, D.C. to win support for Arctic drilling, activists in Seattle are mobilizing to stop them. A Shell drilling rig is on its way to Seattle. Shell plans to use Terminal 5 of Seattle’s port to repair the rig and send it back to drill in the Arctic “no matter what in the pursuit of profit,” said Kshama Sawant in a phone conversation with Greenpeace activist Aliyah Field, who was aboard the oil platform headed for Seattle.
“It is activists on the ground – ordinary people like all of us – who will be building this movement, who will be reminding everybody that this is the People vs. Shell Oil,” said Kshama.
“As long as Shell and big oil corporations control all these resources, we don’t have a say in these backroom deals that they made. The lesson is that we cannot control what we do not own,” said Kshama later in that same call. “These climate-destroying corporations need to be transferred into democratic public ownership to allow a transition toward clean energy, and we need a massive green jobs program where we can demonstrate that we can create good living-wage jobs and maintain the sustainability of our environment.”