Nothing like the words “Arctic” and “oil drilling” to get the environmental campaigners excited.
Add banks to the mix, and you have the perfect mix for a modern day witch-hunt.
The latest targets are Cairn Energy and the Royal Bank of Scotland. In a joint press release, PLATFORM, Friends of the Earth Scotland and the World Development Movement on Tuesday said they “condemn [the] link between public money and Cairn’s Arctic drilling – RBS provided loan to oil company one month before it acquired rig for arctic drilling.”
The amount in question is a reported $100m lent by RBS – majority owned by UK taxpayers – last December.
The (first) problem with their point, however, is that RBS is a corporate broker to Cairn -so the $100m is likely to be just a fraction of the total it lent to the oil company last year. There seems to be no evidence to show that this particular $100m and the Arctic drilling are linked.
Secondly, the environmentalists’ outrage at taxpayer money financing oil drilling bizarrely stops with the Arctic. Drilling in Rajasthan – where Cairn in fact gets most of its oil – doesn’t seem to be a problem. Yet why is it less acceptable to drill near barely-populated frozen landmass than in the middle of India, where actual people may be affected by the drilling operations?
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