Marvin Odum, the President of Shell Oil Company, just testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. During that testimony, Odum said of OCS [Outer Continental Shelf] offshore oil drilling, “There are those who promote a ‘do nothing’ approach to OCS development. Perhaps they have an outdated view of how the oil and gas industry operates today. I appreciate the opportunity to provide the facts because the facts show that environmental stewardship and oil and gas activity are not mutually exclusive.”
Offshore drilling for oil and environmental stewardship are not mutually exclusive? How did Mr. Odum explain, then, the compatibility of environmental stewardship with the recent oil spill from an offshore drilling platform in the Timor Sea – an oil spill that continued, unchecked, for two and a half months before the platform finally burst into flames raging hundreds of feet high for two days straight until the disaster was finally stopped?
Nothing. Mr. Odum didn’t have a thing to say in his testimony about the Timor Sea oil spill. He just pretended that the environmental disaster never happened. Neither did Odum have anything to say about an incident this July in which 63,000 gallons of crude oil leaked from a cracked pipeline in the Gulf of Mexico – a pipeline set up by his own company.
Shell Oil’s policy for dealing with environmental problems associated related to offshore oil drilling seems to be to pretend that the problems don’t exist.
Oh that’s SOOO two weeks ago, can’t we just “move on”.