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The Price of Oil
Corporate Accountability

"The west has a big responsibility. The profits from oil come to Britain, because they sell the equipment, it is their technology that is keeping Nigeria’s oil going. It is in fact western credit that is keeping Nigeria alive. So they have a moral responsibility to intervene."
Ken Saro-Wiwa (1994)

Oil and gas run through the veins of London as they run through the geology of the Niger Delta. The UK consumes over 600 Million barrels of oil a year. But equally as important is the role London plays in global oil and gas production.

London's thriving financial centre is dominated by oil stocks. Just two giant companies – Shell and BP – make up around 12.5 per cent of the value of the London stock exchange. Everyone with a pension, savings scheme - even a normal bank account - benefits from this oil-derived prosperity. Your bank is taking your money and investing it in oil.

You can learn about London's oil and gas corporations at PLATFORM's Carbon Web site.

Ecological Footprints

Our oil-dependence is a major component of our wider ecological footprint. An ecological footprint is a way of thinking about the productive land we need to support our resource demands and absorb our waste. In affluent parts of the world, such as London, we require many times our land area to support our consumption and absorb our waste.

Ecological footprints can be quantified. Like most quantifications, they fail to calculate social and political impacts of consumption. Our consumption of oil has a huge environmental impact but it also has social impacts. Nigeria is a particularly bad example of oil's impact on the societies in which it is mined. These impacts are outlined in the Niger Delta Today section.

In 2000, the Greater London Authority co-funded a study to assess London's ecological footprint.

London’s ecological footprint is 293 times the size of its land area. In other words, London needs a piece of the planet roughly the size of Spain to fuel its consumption and absorb its waste. Each Londoner is currently using 6.63 hectares of the planet on average. Sustainability would be achieved at about 2.18 hectares per person. In comparison, Nigeria’s per capita footprint is about 1.25 hectares.

If London is to be more sustainable, Londoners need to appreciate the impacts their lifestyles have and be inspired to create positive change. Creating a major public monument in London that symbolises the injustices of the past and the potential to create a better balance in the future can serve as an inspiration to generations of Londoners to come. This will be one of the aims of the Living Memorial.

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