In a very respectful march and “encouragement rally” sponsored by GreenParty.org a group of people marched from the West Seattle Junction to near the Chelan Cafe and the currently closed Port of Seattle Terminal 5 on Sunday to urge the Seattle City Council to revisit their decision to allow Shell Oil to store oil drilling equipment at the Terminal 5 site.

A group of around 60 people carrying banners and signs made the march, in an effort to raise awareness for the issue. Spokesperson for the group, Alki Bike and Board owner Stu Hennesey, spoke about the reasoning behind the event.

“This is very disrespectful to do this without any public hearings. The only public hearing they had was with the Seattle City Council and they only found out three days before that had it. The people there were overwhelmingly against this lease agreement.

Shell oil company is the only company left doing exploring and the number of accidents they’ve had up there is the primary reason,” Hennesey explained.

The wells in the arctic are now facing declining output prompting new exploration. “What kind of damage do we do to get 20 to 30 years worth of oil? What kind of damage can we live with as a planet? We don’t know that.”

The current oil glut, being fed largely by fracking, a process of emulsifying shale and other sediments to release the oil within them, is largely seen as environmentally damaging. Mark Tabbutt of Saltchuk speaking at the West Seattle Chamber of Commerce last week said that for every single well in the Arctic it would require 5000 fracking wells to equal the output.

‘We’re not saying that fracking is a good thing. We’re going to stop that as effectively as what’s going on in the Arctic. But this is exploratory drilling, it’s not drilling to feed the machine so we have time to really work on getting through the oil glut that we have. Right now there’s really no reason to explore more.”

“When are we going to make the change to renewable energy? When do we turn that corner,” he said.

The problem with our oil prices the way they are now is that we’re bring oil out of the Dakota’s and Canada at $70 a barrel and selling it for $40 a barrel. That indicates to us that there’s something wrong with the whole premise that we need to make more oil. We don’t want to be accomplices to Arctic drilling.”

They also take issue with the contention that the storage of the gear would generate 500 jobs.
We have far more jobs being generated in the renewable energy industry than we do in the oil industry. That’s despite the fact that the oil and gas industry get 50 times the support as renewable energy. If you want to make jobs let’s not go with the dirty jobs. Let’s go with the jobs where people can be happy about what they are doing each day. That shift is starting to happen. If we slow it down by allowing more Arctic drilling we’re not going where we need to go.