Plans by Edinburgh’s Cairn Energy to look for oil and gas off Ibiza’s coast have united residents and friends of the island in anger. Even regular island visitor Paris Hilton has taken to Instagram to campaign against the Scottish company’s intended activity.
On Saturday I joined 15,000 people to demonstrate and sign a petition against a proposed 3D seismic survey by Cairn Energy of the Mediterranean between Ibiza and Valencia. It’s a plan that has roused unprecedented opposition from the Ibiza and the neighbouring small island of Formantera which together make up the Pitiusas Isles.
To put the figure of 15,000 in context: the total population of the Pitiusas is only a little over 100,000, including those who would be too young to sign the petition. Organisers expect to have 25,000 signatures by the end of this week. That’s about a quarter of the population. In Scotland that would represent over a million people.
Signing the petition is not that easy. To make your voice count you have to put your name, address and national identity number on three separate letters to be delivered to different addresses. Indeed, the whole process seems to have been designed to make opposition as difficult as possible. It’s hard to organise when a large part of the statutory three-month consultation period is taken up by the Christmas break. This is also the time of year when most people take their holidays as almost everybody works in the tourist trade over the summer.
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Despite these problems there has also been an unprecedented unity of opposition shown by the multiple tiers of local government. The socialists and greens have long voiced environmental concerns, but this time they have been joined by representatives of the right wing Partido Popular who have a majority in most of the local councils as well as nationally in Madrid. Cairn has united them in a way that nobody else has ever managed.
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Cairn says it will avoid this problem by letting off smaller explosions which will drive away endangered marine life before the louder ones are let off. The company also says its activities will be overseen by naturalists. But, until dead dolphins start getting washed up or not, it’s hard to know which set of experts to believe.
There is, however, a not-too-hidden subtext to the current anger. At the moment there is only a mechanism for protesting about the initial survey. Clearly, if signs of exploitable oil or gas are revealed, it won’t stop here.
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The thought of drilling off the coast of Ibiza and Formantera really scares many residents, visitors and politicians of every hue. The Mediterranean Sea is almost entirely landlocked so anything similar to a repeat of BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico could be totally catastrophic because the oil spill would have nowhere to go.
The waters around Ibiza are particularly sensitive. Just off its coast is an area designated by Unesco as a World Heritage Site for the marine ecosystem supported by posidonia oceanica seagrass which is only found in the Mediterranean.
You can sign this online petition, although it has no official standing.
If you want to know more about the opposition to drilling the Alliance Mar y Blava is the united organising body. Most of the information is in Spanish as is the local newspaper, Diario de Ibiza, which covers the story almost daily.
Google Translate works pretty well with both. Spanish. Finally, for the sake of fairness, Cairn Energy’s website is here.
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