Thursday last week (5 December) there was a very well attended public meeting at the LSE to discuss the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline. Here's a brief report from one person (better late than never) on a lively event.

I'll start with the most surreal bit, which was that you could hear the next door (student union?) bar from the lecture theatre, playing songs like Nirvana's Smells like Teen Spirit.

And for most of the meeting, whenever my attention wandered (hardly ever of course!!) my eyes drifted to the huge well-lit gym next door which was full of ridiculous apparatus and people mindlessly 'walking' and 'running' on machines.

So there's the ultimate irony: we're inside the next door lecture theatre talking about the effects of pipelines and oil and climate change, and they're in their gym using up oil/gas/energy on their machines which are supposed to provide them with the exercise they would normally get in their daily lives, but opportunities for which are curtailed by their insertion into consumerist wage slavery and urban living, not to mention cars.

Good speeches from an eminent panel, especially Nick Hildyard (ex-editor of the Ecologist) and people representing the interests of peoples from Kurdish to Georgian who will be displaced and threatened by the pipeline, which would extend from the Caspian sea to the Mediterranean coast and through 7 conflict zones, and would pipe hundreds of billions of oil a year to the West.

There were loads of shocking facts - such as that there would be no compensation to people displaced, people 'consulted' were not told about the risks of explosion, and that BP have struck a deal with states such as Turkey that would mean that for 40 years, no laws could be passed that would help mitigate the social and environmental effects of the pipeline - unless compensation is paid by that state to BP for lost revenue as a result of such laws. BP are looking for public funding ie. British tax payers.

A BP manager was in the audience and was given perhaps just a little too much time to give his point of view. There was a moving moment when a Peruvian campaigner, over here to seek support for a movement to oppose oil exploration in the Peruvian rainforest and other sites such as Lake Titicaca, addressed the BP man from the heart, raising issues about the destruction of lives and environments by the extraction of oil.

For more information on the pipeline and campaign see www.bakuceyhan.org.uk and  baku@gn.apc.org and also www.risingtide.org.uk and  info@risingtide.org.uk
--