Nick O'Neill
The shrieking of the young woman covered in fake blood had a visceral effect on me. She’s the same age as my daughter I thought, as the TV presenter thrust her microphone into my face. Like spectators in a Roman amphitheatre watching cowering Christians, the crowd of protesters pushed forward expectantly as if sensing more blood on the pavement outside the Burlington Hotel. It was October 2019 and I was organiser of an Oil and Gas conference in Dublin, where Extinction Rebellion had staged a sit-in in the hotel foyer and attempted to disrupt the speech by the Minister of Natural Resources. Executives from the multinational companies were becoming concerned for their safety, and when I was told the media wanted an interview outside, I stormed out to face them down.
“No comment”, I said and turned my back on the scene of bloody chaos and weeping. The reporter struggled to recover her opportunity to get a soundbite for the Six O’Clock News. She wasn’t getting one.
“No comment,” I repeated. Anger, guilt and a strange sense of loss overwhelmed me.
The shrieking and chanting of paint-splattered Extinction Rebellion protesters faded behind me as I made my way back into the hotel lobby. Shielded from the sea of outrage outside, my oil and gas colleagues were still networking, indignant that our annual conference promoting investment in petroleum exploration offshore Ireland had been disrupted. Self-righteous outrage fuelled the conversation at the next coffee break. But I was feeling uneasy and strangely detached, struggling with conflicting emotions in the face of passionate protest by clearly frightened young people.
It was my road to Damascus moment. In the months leading up to the protest, which we suspected would happen, I had studied the tactics of Extinction Rebellion and in the process my deep commitment to cheap petroleum as an economic panacea began to fracture. Memories of burning gas flares lighting up the night sky in the Persian Gulf oilfields, the oil spills, the destruction of the rain forest in Gabon to facilitate our drilling sites and access roads, one-sided negotiation with corrupt government officials, the view from thirty thousand feet of the cyclonic devastation in Northern Mozambique as I flew into Maputo on business, coalesced as an anxious knot in my stomach. The injustice of it. These youngsters had every reason to be afraid.
The creative resistance of XR using art, music and street theatre cuts through our layers of denial, anger and bargaining with our wretched market-driven empire system of living – a system that upsets the delicate balance of our human relationships with each other and with our Mother Earth and spawns injustice. I came to accept that I was in denial – or as my daughter puts it, delusional. The oil industry gave me a fantastic career of worldwide travel with bright professional colleagues. We had the best and most expensive technology available to us. But I had avoided the unsavoury parts of my career because they concealed inconvenient truths.
The habitual thoughtlessness of what we were doing bred evil actions that had disastrous consequences for our fellow human beings, particularly for the poor and oppressed of the Global South. Some of my former colleagues accept the urgency of abandoning fossil fuels. However, they believe that the slow progress of the market-driven energy transition means that short-term solutions like storing carbon dioxide underground will be necessary, so they apply their oil and gas skills to this temporary solution. For others, the lure of significant profits to be won from the exploitation and development of remaining oil and gas reserves remains irresistible. The reality is climate change is global. We are all in this together, irrespective of our standard of living, convictions, beliefs, gender, age or race. Letting “the market decide” our next actions is delusional because even the economists admit that the market doesn’t have all the answers. It is time to challenge the market-driven, wasteful consumerist economic system that drives the way we live in the Global North today.
In the words of Arundhati Roy: ‘Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe’.
Nick O’Neill retired in 2023 after 46 years worldwide experience as a petroleum geologist exploring for oil and gas. In his latter years he applied his skills to the energy transition investigating the potential to store carbon dioxide and hydrogen in deep geological formations. He is currently studying for a post graduate degree in Contextual Theology at Trinity College Dublin.
Call to action:
I appeal to geoscientists working in the oil industry. You understand Earth System Science. By all means commit your skills to energy transition solutions but accept that the hydrocarbon age is over, not for economic reasons, but because future generations have the right to live sustainably in harmony with our earth.
And writers, we need you on the barricades. Find your nearest writing centre and set up a climate writing group if there isn’t already one. A guide for action can be found on the Irish Writer Centre’s website.